For this week’s assignment on the theme of Digital Pedagogy and annotations I wanted to share with the other students my annotations on two particular topics that I found very engaging and open for further discussion in the introduction of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (2015). My annotations would like to prompt the students to contextualize, debate and connect their own personal experiences with the statements presented by the author around isolation; as well as dig deeper into how the ‘four dimension’ of the digital not only affects our present but actually transforms our perception of the past, particularly, when the author explains that nowadays a moment that is not shared on social media is “flat” or “boxed in”.

Isolation

• In this section the author states that our idea of personhood ( in western philosophy) has been dominated by our feelings of isolation. He then cites examples from Descartes, Don Quixote, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens and others. Nonetheless, I would like to contextualize this idea with literature from other authors that have prompted us to look at ourselves not as individuals in constant search for ‘independence’ but rather as bodies in basic need of each other. Philosophers like Judith Butler, Toni Morrison or Gloria Anzaldúa have shared another vision of personhood by highlighting the ways in which beings are vulnerable or stand in between frontiers of contested meanings and identities. Could we be “fundamentally isolated” if, as vulnerable bodies, we depend on living with others in shared spaces to satisfy mutual needs? Could we think of ourselves as isolated if we live in complex webs of interdependency. Could the concept of vulnerability add another layer to our current and past ideas of personhood as experienced in this “fourth dimension” world? Do you think isolation and vulnerability opposed each other in our society or in your own life?

A Flat Moment?

• If we follow the idea that the four-dimension has affected our perception of the past and now the moments or experiences that we had might feel flat, if they were not shared on our networks, how does our evaluation of the past changes? how is this new dimension transforming our perception of time, attention and selfhood? How is this need to constantly share on social media or other networks connected to our ideas of productivity? Finally, here’s a video from artist Jenny Odell, about her book “How to Do Nothing”; how do you think “doing nothing” in our current world relates to this idea of the “flat moment”?

My annotation to Scott’s first chapter of The Four-Dimensional Human is related to the following passage:

I turned back to see the tame, daytime guise of that narrow little passageway, so inconvenient and improvised. My mind retraced the journey back through the passage, into the office and out into the landing, where the locked door protected its secrets. I smiled at my idiocy, for it was suddenly clear that, all along, it had been me inside the forbidden room. 
The desk's disarray, my papers and his papers, the computer and the rows of books, even the white sky outside, became vivid with realisation. I had been chasing myself. During those evening hours I had been simultaneously inside and outside the room. In art instant, all of my theories about its contents fell in on themselves, and the blankness was imprinted with a sudden picture, a selfie before its time.

Prompts to the students: in 1917, Pirandello, a Sicilian writer also known for being a precursor of the later existentialist Theatre of the Absurd, wrote a short novel called “La Carriola” (which translates into the wheelbarrow) where he describes the life of a professor and attorney who suddenly starts to see himself from the outside, consequently acknowledging his own misery and unhappiness. The epiphany is the product of the realisation that his job and daily activities are simply masks that prevent him for living an authentic life. His conclusion is that his real self has changed so profoundly, and possibly irreversibly, purely as a consequence of being unconsciously molded by other people’s expectations and perceptions. What’s your view on this?

Do you see a parallel between this century-old novel and Scott’s narration? If so, how can you extend it to the contemporary use of social media? Similarly, how can this awareness be a stimulus to an eyes-wide-open usage of digital tools? Would you say that Scott’s concerns around the fourth dimension somehow represent the acknowledgment of how media platforms constantly remind us of an increasing social pressure that stays with us even in the dark and solitude of our own private spaces?

For this assignment, I chose to annotate two similar but somewhat oppositional concepts presented in The Fourth Dimensional Human‘s “Introduction” chapter. My first annotation tackles the following excerpt from the text.

…our daily lives are a series of nets, any of which could be scored and bent at the perpendicular, and thus extended into this other dimension. Increasingly, the moments of our lives audition for digitisation [sic]. A view from the window, a meeting with friends, a thought, an instance of leisure or exasperation — they are all candidates, contestants, even for a dimensional upgrade.

xv

My annotation is somewhat of an instructional design prompt aiming to create discussion.

• Thinking about our analog existence (i.e., the hobbies, chores, routines, and activities in our lives that are not part of the digital existence), what are experiences that could be effectively improved by digitization that have not yet transcended to the “fourth dimension”? Conversely, what aspects of our current analog existence could never be digitized for improvement?

I chose this annotation because I think this is a somewhat crucial part of the text. As readers, we leave the situational narrative and are introduced into the concept of our current-day lives being upended by this concept of the fourth dimension through digitization. The quote I chose to remark on orients the reader and provides examples of how digitization can enter any slice of life. I felt this was a proper point to provide some context into what the author is driving at and to allow the reader to ponder the questions asked in the annotation.

The next part of the text that I annotated was somewhat necessary as a huge Seinfeld fan. The reference to the reverse peephole and that analogy of how it aligns with our current “fourth dimension” living situations was extremely on point to me. So I wanted to orient the student readers to this concept.

The reverse peephole is, in this sense, visionary in its anticipation of the digital revolution, a definitive anxiety of which is that our peepholes have been reversed without our knowing.

xvii

• In today’s world, there are fourth dimensional peepholes spread out across the modern home. In a sense, our homes are reversed much like Kramer’s. What are some examples of a way modern homes have been “reversed” from their analog past? What are the pros and cons to these reversals?

I wanted to get the student reader thinking about the benefits and downfalls of the digital invasion with homes. I want them to think about the benefits of having cameras on devices, “always on” audio assistants (e.g., Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa) and to tackle whether these are overall assets versus intrusions into our lives. I think this plays off my other annotation well. First, students will consider what they can and cannot digitize effectively. Then, they are asked to consider whether the already-digitized aspects of their lives are mostly positive or negative. This, I think, promotes some of the concepts the author is tackling.

After reading this week’s texts, the need for scaffolding and the importance of weaving assignment goals into overall course goals really stuck with me. (The readings have made me re-evaluate some of the assignments I use in my teaching.)

Consequently, I think that knowing more about the class’s overall context and learning goals would influence what annotations I would prioritize. 

One thing I would strongly consider annotating is the word “selfie” in the last sentence or, alternatively, this sentence on page xvi: “Today, we live with the sense that un-tweeted, un-instagrammed moments might feel somehow cubic, as·in boxed in, just these four walls, unless the walls can be contorted along invisible lines and a message smuggled out.”

This sentence could serve as a point of departure for developing a preparation/framing exercise on our existence in another/new-ish dimension. The following questions could be discussed with students before they re/read the text. 

• What is your definition of “selfie”? 
• What do you pay attention to when you take a selfie (if you do)? 
• Are there rules for taking a good/share-worthy selfie? 
• When/where do people often take selfies? & What else (other than the self) is often in the picture? 
• When people share selfies, what kind of verbal context might be typical?” 
• How does the selfie transform the experience?”

Since the text is about existing/living online, these electronic proofs of 4-dimensional existence are worthy of deconstruction. I hope students would close-read and develop a deeper and more critical understanding of the selfie genre, its deceptions, limits, and possibilities.

***

Another passage on page xvi: “[They] decide to reverse the peepholes in their apartment doors so as ‘to· prevent an ambush’. The idea is that, on returning home, they can check if an assailant is waiting inside to ‘clock them with a sock full of pennies’.” 

In the annotation, I would pose the following questions: 

• Where in the text do you see other distinctions (or separations) between inside/s and outside/s? 
• And related: what are separations or “walls” between these inside/s and outside/s? 

These questions would foreground the 4th dimension’s transgression of our assumed understanding of physical space. They would let students track how Scott plays with this transgression by repeatedly creating and dismantling spaces and spatial experiences. The tension between different insides and outsides was the most prevalent tension I noticed. 

***

And, for context, I might share these audio and image files that illustrate the classic dial-up modem related to the passage on page xiv: “The first household modems enforced this separation by acting as though they were grinding up against something hard,. squealing and whirring like a drill hitting rock.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO Either listen to the link and/or look at the pictures below. The first picture needs 20-25 seconds and the next one requires 5-10 seconds of patience, and the last one truly captures the celebratory feeling of landing online. Voila – you’re connected. (Maybe.)

I would annotate the following two sections in the introduction to Laurence Scott’s The Four Dimensional Human: Ways of being in the Digital World:

Today, we live with the sense that un-tweeted, un-instagrammed moments might feel somehow cubic, as in boxed in, just these four walls, unless the walls can be contorted along invisible lines and a message smuggled out. Few people have trouble finding such a smuggler now; it’s a mass industry, this smuggling of life into four dimensions (xvi).

Prompt for students: Consider your personal experience documenting and sharing moments from your life on social media. When you share text, an image or a video online, do you feel that you are sharing or creating an authentic representation of yourself? Does sharing representations of your life experiences in digital form make those experiences feel more “real,” or do you feel differently? 

A crucial tension of our times is that, although we can luxuriate in this gained dimension, stretching our lives into the world like never before, we are simultaneously asked to ignore, deny, accept, strategise or rail against the hypothesis that our physical planet is diminishing (xxi).

Prompt for students: How do you interpret this tension? Does the digital dimension serve more strongly as a catalyst for action, or as an escapist distraction from the social and environmental challenges facing our world?

I had real trouble with finding the right text to annotate and instead chose a different text to annotate and understand how this digital annotations work. I came to this with little understanding of digital humanities as a field, because I am trained in computer science field humanities part sound like a different language to me. I do come from a generation of forum nerds and I do see the usefulness of digital annotations akin to what forums did in mid 2010s before the mass advent of social media. Forums kind of died out under the weight of minute to minute updates and fast shifting social meta. I chose the text The making of the atomic bomb to annotate as it is of great interest to me and it is easy to find on CUNY manifold. All you have to do is to type it up in the search button but I could not find the text required by assignment for the life of me and spent close to an hour trying to find it. I guess that speaks of manifolds limitations in regards to efficiency of its search engine.

My annotation was:

“Pollonium- its interesting how each country gets to name each discovered element with its namesake. US got the name almost bottom half of the periodic table.”

It is a tongue in check annotation in regards to naming convention of periodic elements and how each country races to name the most. US named the most radioactive bunch on the bottom of periodic table since it was the leader in atomic research thus discovering unstable elements needed to produce an atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons are hot topic again since the end of cold war, and it is important to know their history and with history comes the context of what we are talking about. I guess that is one of missions of digital humanities to spread the gospel of humanities through digital means and to stir up conversations in the general populace, and if we do not that we are at the precipice to be relegated to the dreadful academic elite which became an insult in this day and age.

With pedagogical considerations in mind, this week’s readings highlight opportunities and strategies for undergraduate students to critically engage texts in meaningful ways using digital platforms, with special attention to student-led annotation. Strategies for fostering student engagement with learning content are discussed in both “Postcolonial Digital Pedagogy” by Roopika Risam as well as “Social Annotation and an Inclusive Praxis for Open Pedagogy in the College Classroom” by Monica Brown and Benjamin Croft. Both texts emphasize digital tools (from text analysis to textual annotation) as means to foster students’ interrogation of the political and cultural structures at work in different texts, to encourage student recognition of their own roles as producers and contributors of knowledge, and to raise consciousness of the power dynamics presumed to be at play (whether implicitly or explicitly) among students in their communal engagement with texts. There is a certain complementarity to reading these articles together, based on where the ‘diverse emphasis’ (for want of a less clumsy expression) falls in each article. Risam’s chapter hones in on diverse learning content–in this case, postcolonial literature produced in the global south in the latter half of the twentieth century–and ways to leverage digital strategies to make that content critically comprehensible to students predominantly steeped in a northern-hemispheric, usually Anglocentric, cultural and literary milieu. Brown and Croft, on the other hand, emphasize a social justice-oriented praxis centered on diverse students, or “the practice of centering the contributions of historically marginalized populations” in student annotation of publicly visible text files (p. 4). The authors pay special attention to the role of the instructor as a sometimes-necessary ‘disruptor’ of ‘power asymmetries’ in instances where such students might feel culturally isolated marking up a text—the example given being “materials that overrepresent whiteness,” which the authors contend “can create an environment” where “students of color may experience harm, lack of safety, erasure, or tokenization” (p. 5). I would have liked the authors to have provided examples to demonstrate such instances where this becomes necessary. 

One of the more salient points made by Cordell in “How Not to Teach the Digital Humanities” is the persistent myth of the digital native–the assumption that new students, whose whole lives experiences are immersed in the digital, are necessarily more adept or competent users than their “digital immigrant” instructors (when in fact, as touched on by Brown and Croft, many students are denied opportunities to develop digital skills by socioeconomic disparities). When I went to Pratt Institute to study library science in 2012, the digital native / digital immigrant dichotomy was still being taught in the core curriculum, its assumptions generally taken as fact. My earliest experiences working in urban public libraries from 2015 onward proved just how fallacious this notion was: it was not uncommon for library patrons in the 20s-to-30s age range to ask help with basic functions that we tend to  take for granted as common knowledge (logging into one’s email on a desktop rather than a smartphone, resetting one’s password, downloading files and uploading attachments, toggling basic printer settings, etc.).

My first annotation is – 

“A view from the window, a meeting with friends, a thought, an instance of leisure or exasperation – they are all candidates, contestants even, for a dimensional upgrade.”

The author implies that there’s no choice – that we are already living in a fourth digital dimension. I want the students to question that. I want them to know that they can decide what it means to be a four-dimensional human. There’s a sense of inevitability in the quote that all aspects of our lives will be uploaded at some point. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The challenge is how you do it in a way that’s good for you. 

So the question I ask with the annotation is – 

What does it mean to digitize a thought? Or is it even possible to digitize what’s going on in our heads?

Second annotation:

“That being an individual entails a sort of exile from others may be a story that we tell ourselves, but it is no less solid for that. Of course the irony here is that we also can’t seem to get enough of the pack. We gather our lonesome selves together in groups by day, clinging together in warm, mealy huddles by night. Yet no matter how tight the clinch, we’re still flung to different corners of the dream- scape.”

My note is – Do you have to isolate yourself from others to be an ‘individual’, or how can you be your true self in a ‘pack?’

There’s a mildly depressing vibe throughout the piece. It’s like we are all destined to be lonely in this fourth dimension. I want the students to create their own healthy digital fourth dimension where they don’t ultimately feel isolated. 

This article would be a good addition to help through the concepts or ideas. 

As a data scientist, I have done many NLP projects at work. I mostly work in a Jupyter Notebook python environment and leveraged common NLP libraries like NLKT and Spacy. My usual NLP project mostly consisted of cleaning and structuring data (lemmatization, stop words, n-grams, tokenization, etc.) and running clustering models on them (usually LDA – Latent Dirichlet Allocation).

I have not heard of these tools and am excited to try them out as this is very different than my regular workflow. I have explored a few tools but will share my experience with two in particular below. 

Voyant

Back in 2019, I started a personal NLP (Natural Language Processing) project but never finished it. As a quick recap, I was just looking to explore a lyrics data set. I picked Lana del Rey because I had been listening to her frequently back then. I tested gathering lyrics by web scraping and API (with AZ Lyrics and MusicMatch respectively). I was able to query lyrics from MusicMatch’s API after many trials but only to find out the “Free API” version only offers 30% (or the first 30 lines?) of lyrics per song. For this praxis, I was hoping to use this old dataset that I have gathered to explore tools mentioned in the guidelines. Unfortunately, I didn’t save the text anywhere and the code I wrote is outdated so it will require plenty of effort to refactor the code.  

In the end, I have decided to use Taylor Swift’s latest album, Midnight (3 am version), instead. I have been listening to this album recently and so am familiar with the lyrics. I ended up just copying and pasting the lyrics from a site manually as it is the most straightforward.  

I pasted the lyrics into the web interface and explored the web took quite a bit. I don’t find the output particularly helpful. I believe it is due to both lack of processing (e.g., data cleaning) as well as the nature of this text corpora. Here’s a screenshot of what I am seeing. I was unable to draw any insights. However, I was impressed by how easy it was to just paste in text, and all these features are automatically generated. 

Google Books Ngram Viewer 

I have never heard of this tool before. From the name “n-gram”, I had the wrong assumption about what this tool does. It appears to be like a google trend product but related to google books content, which I thought is helpful. I have always been interested in gender disparity in many aspects of life, so I explored different keywords. Sharing two comparisons below: