One of my favorite workshops from this years NYCDH Week was the Helen Keller Archive: A Fully Accessible Digital Archive at Pace University Tuesday afternoon. Four of the women who have been working on the project were present to discuss their work on the site and they were proud to state that the Helen Keller Archive was once only in one place, but now the archive is everywhere!

The road map to digitizing the archive focused on accessibility, then digitization and curriculum creation. Before explaining the accessibility aspect of the site, an important point one of the speakers made was that 1 in 5 American adults have a disability. So, accessibility is important if you want visitors to be able to view and read all the content your site has to offer. Also, Section 508 was brought up due to ADA compliance applying to the internet, but this is not necessarily a bad thing since this also helps with discoverability.

An important question that was brought up was, how do you know what to write for the description of the images on the site? One of the members of the audience noticed aspects for the descriptions of the photographs to be lacking in some of the features represented in the images. The speaker informed the audience member that she had a background in fashion, so she tended to focus more on the dress of the people in the photographs more than anything else. Another aspect of the site that was brought up was the transcription of the videos. The videos have a text transcription under the video as well as text transcription over the dialogue in the video and when something important on-screen happens that is not in the dialogue a voice-over informs of what is happening.

While utilizing the site the TAB key can be easily used to traverse through the site. Menus were placed in the same place throughout the site for easy maneuverability for people using screen readers. However, at one point, the developers tried something new with the display on a page and when someone with a screen reader ran into it, they questioned the process. The developers immediately changed the page to be in unison with the rest of the website. So, a major point that was made was consistency. If you have most of your pages in a similar design, continue to use that design because someone who can’t see the page and is used to a certain set up can become disoriented if things shift from page to page. It was also brought up that popups are evil! So, avoid whenever possible.

Spurred by my enthusiasm for data visualization (thanks, Michelle McSweeney!) and an awareness of my gross underutilization of the vast resources of the New York Public Library, I opted to attend the Information Visualization Open House at the NYPL’s Center for Research in the Humanities. The event offered a lineup of speakers sharing ways that the Center’s holdings have contributed to DH pursuits. And, while I had expected to leave with ideas for ways to leverage their collection for both my graduate studies and my own classroom, I came away with something more important: an astute appreciation for the GC’s motto of “public education for the public good.” The presenters’ work really fell across a spectrum ranging from practical service to perhaps a little academic navel gazing.

Clearly benefitting a wide swath of users was a project presented by a representative of the Science Industry Business Library: a tool called Simply Analytics (SA) whose tagline is, “Analytics for Everyone.” SA provides a range of easy-to-manipulate parameters to help non-DH humans visualize data in truly pragmatic ways. The presenter demonstrated how easy it is to determine, say, where a prospective liquor store owner might find an untapped Brooklyn space ripe for business. In just a matter of clicks, he had narrowed his search to two spots. (For the academic among us, he showed how to access metadata on the data sources to boot.) The demonstration was made all the more powerful in that the example came from real life. SCORE, a group of retired and self-professed tech-nervous business people who offer free advice to small business owners, had used SA to help a client research exactly that question. So, while we may argue about whether increasing the number of liquor stores boosts the public good, the tool certainly allows greater access to the kind of data visualization tools often reserved for the tech savvy or for those with money to purchase proprietary software or hire someone to do the work. The only drawback is that it seems you have to be in one of the SA-licensed NYPL buildings, like the main branch, the Schomburg Center, or the Science Industry Business Library itself, to get the free access.

On the other side of the spectrum was the Photographers Identities Catalog (PIC), a labor of love by an NYPL photography specialist. The project is a searchable database that visualizes on a dynamic map where prominent photographers were born, did their work, and, if applicable, died. I was particularly interested in the project because my students are currently investigating figures from the Harlem Renaissance, among which are photographers James Van Der Zee and James Latimer Allen. The PIC is complicated and not terribly intuitive, though exploring certainly sparks interesting questions about the arc of a photographer’s life or about demographic or historic trends (since you can filter by, among other categories, gender, nationality, and date). My very surface exploration was ultimately unrewarding, as the data varies wildly by photographer without a particular pattern. At first, I thought there was a predilection for white, well-known photographers. For example, Dorothea Lange has 491 marked locations, while Raghu Rai and Dewoud Bey each have only 1. But, famed Ansel Adams has only 2, and Edward Weston just 1, while my students’ lesser-known research subjects James Van Der Zee and James Latimer Allen have 4 and 5 respectively. Chester Burger, whose collection rests solely at the NYPL, has 1261 locations, yet his work isn’t visible online in a quick Google search, while Mary Ellen Mark has only 2 locations, and neither is connected to the Miami image that is part of the NYPL collection. So, representation seems haphazard. (The site displays no photographs by the photographers, so copyright restriction is not likely to be the issue either.) Further, while the site does a lovely home-page job of encouraging exploration and inviting non-academics in, the interface isn’t built for the lay tech user. The PIC may have potential for helping scholars in the field of photography, but it seems in stark contrast to Simply Analytics which appears to be built with a wide range of the public in mind to allow them to dive in for pragmatic needs.

Other presentations fell somewhere in between, from how the NYPL’s historic visualizations can spark good design thinking to combining maps and pie graphs to analyze spatially the 1880 census data about Greenwich Village. All delightful. But the full array really got me thinking about the work we do at the GC. Particularly, I hope to ask myself of future projects questions such as, “How does this work directly benefit or interface with the public?”, “What does this tool or project assume about that public, its abilities, and its needs?”, and “How can we communicate the limitations of our data to avoid misleading users?”

For NYCDH Week, I went to a workshop on literary cluster analysis at NYU. Never having an opportunity to do cluster visualizations with literary texts (I only have had the opportunity to experiment with some language data from undergrad), I was rather interested in some of the projects that the workshop surveyed. Some particular standouts were: stylistic similarities between Fielding’s parodies and Richardson’s novels, language preferences across ghost writers in children’s literature, and deviations from style when James switched to dictating his novels. My curiosity was also piqued when we discussed analytic techniques to compare topic preferences of two groups against each other, as there seems an interesting possibility to incorporate the technique into the Newbery project as a stretch goal. I’m interested in seeing how topic preferences vary between those novels that feature diverse characters and those that trend towards white only characters. While we will likely not have the time to gather data from every nominee under discussion, I’m wondering if we can find the time to take a look at simply the summaries provided by the Newbery group for award winners.

Another point that came up to me upon reflection is the question of proprietary software in project design. Strangely, while the workshop presented a host of open source tools that could be used, we only practiced with proprietary software (IBM origin to be specific). While the results were fun to produce, I couldn’t get a bad taste out of my mouth regarding a need to learn these techniques all over again through a different platform for those participants that lacked reliable access. As well, I kept reflecting on how ugly some of the platforms we were using presented themselves as- in spite of their proprietary nature. It appeared as though we were working in a sphere where industry dominance leads to an immediate disregard for intuitability and design, despite such aspects being the ideal selling point over open source alternatives.