Category: museums

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Data Detox: A Journey into My Digital Past

What Strange Wonderful Things Lurk in Your Digital Footprint?

While running a Data Detox, I came across a review of my 2016 DH Week Workshop, “Pinterest as Digital Exhibition” from Pratt student, Akaya Sato. 

This was interesting. I did the detox primarily in the hopes of reducing my data footprint. I knew I might find strange and potentially, dare I say, scandalous (or at least worrisome) information about myself that I didn’t want out there. Once upon a time a boss of mine informed me that my posts to a maternity forum and at least one post I made to a video game cheat code list were easily findable in a Yahoo! search. So yeah, pretty embarrassing. I certainly wasn’t expecting to find clues to a mini Noreen Whysel fandom. At the risk of expanding my data footprint ever so slightly, here’s a peek at Akaya’s review and some background.

For the workshop, I presented a set of Pinterest boards that I have been curating for the research group, Architecture_MPS. These boards focus on conferences and journal issues published by Architecture_MPS as well as topics the group covers, such as Housing – Critical Futures and the Mediated City. Additional boards cover events, exhibitions, books, films and political issues around architecture and related design.

“By providing these Pinterest boards, AMPS emphasizes collaboration with other institutions. With their contributions, many users, including architecture firms, can recognize the significance of AMPS and raise awareness about architecture. Institutions and nonprofit organizations utilizing social media advance the public awareness by collaborating and highlighting community engagements over the same field.”

I knew some of the attendees would be from the museum community so as an exercise, we created an example set from my MetIllumination project, covering devotional art represented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We explored many ways to document and annotate art objects by pinning links to articles, provenance records and other related materials that describe the artifacts and encourage discussion and sharing.

“Since many of the attendees were staff members from institutions and museums, the ‘Fire and Light: Illumination in Religious Art‘ website demonstrates a great example for archivists and librarians to utilize Pinterest and display visual images of the institutions ephemera.”

When I did the data detox, I expected to find things that needed to be removed, deleted or forgotten. I certainly wasn’t expecting to find a review of a small talk at a digital humanities event. In any event it was nice to find someone gleaned enough from my little workshop, that they posted a review for their fellow classmates. But it also made me wonder what else might be out there that is good, but hidden among my digital footprint.

So I kept looking and found a couple other things that I found delightful, including two published books where I was mentioned in acknowledgements, one that I knew about: Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati’s book Pervasive Information Architecture, where I somehow made it above Bruce Springsteen (but below Richard Saul Wurman) in the thank yous. Quite an accomplishment. The second was Aaron Irizarry and Adam Connor’s Discussing Design, which I own and have read, but somehow missed my name being mentioned in the acknowledgements. (Thanks, Guys!)

I won’t tell you about the things I found that weren’t so delightful. I am working through the Data Detox advice to reduce the prominence of these items.

Have you done a data detox recently? What have you uncovered?

Read Akaya’s review: http://dh.prattsils.org/blog/resources/event-reviews/noreen-whysels-pinterest-as-an-exhibition-gallery-at-metropolitan-new-york-library-council-21016/

Pinterest as Digital Exhibition (DH Week slides, February 10, 2016): https://www.slideshare.net/nwhysel/dh-week-workshop-pinterest-as-exhibition

Pinterest as Digital Exhibition (IA Summit poster, May 7, 2016): https://www.slideshare.net/nwhysel/pinterest-as-digital-archive-ia-summit-2016-atlanta

Data Detox: https://myshadow.org/ckeditor_assets/attachments/189/datadetoxkit_optimized_01.pdf

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Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World

Amy Jeu and I curated a weekend exhibit, Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, on October 29-30, 2016 at the Queens Museum celebrating the map-making community. The event featured talks and demonstrations as well as a hall dedicated to paper and digital maps submitted from the private collections of members of the GISMO community. These maps represent a wide range of themes including the diverse Queens neighborhood and demographics, urban planning, environmental studies, election analysis and more.

Visitors at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY
Mezzanine Level with map exhibit and children's activity tables at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY
Mezzanine Level with map exhibit and children's activity tables at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY
Five maps with placards at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY
Table with flyers and Dr. Suess book for children's story hour at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY
Four visitors at interactive map station, one wearing 3D glasses at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY
Interactive map station with 3D glasses at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY

My Submissions

For my contribution to the exhibit, I created a cutout map of the 1964 World’s Fairgrounds to teach children how map layers work in GIS. This series of maps, printed on acrylic transparency sheeting can be stacked to show through various layers: Base Map, Parks, Buildings, Streets/Paths. We also provided additional paper and colored pencils for children to use. This activity helped younger visitors to understand the concept of map layers in GIS.

Because the event was held over Halloween weekend, I also contributed a set of themed maps with Halloween parade routes and a “Crime of the Century” story map retelling the activities from the 1934 Ice House Heist in Brooklyn and Upper West Side Manhattan. The piece included reproductions of aerial photographs from the time period.

Documentation

Each item in the exhibition included a placard indicating the name of the mapmaker, the materials used and a brief description of the subject. We used icons to indicate whether an interactive version was available at the computer stations or that the mapmaker is also a speaker in our forum.  

interactive

Interactive Map

speaker

Speaker

Amy Jeu created the flyer and copy for the exhibit which was published on the Queens Museum website and the signage used for the exhibit and presentations. I created the placards and the online exhibit catalog.

Archive

The Map Mosaic event was privately curated. Queens Museum published an announcement and the exhibit catalog and list of interactive maps are available at GISMO’s Website. The acrylic manipulative work is located in the GISMO archive. All maps produced by the NYC Office of Emergency Management were donated to the Queens Museum and all other, individual artwork was returned to the artists.

Queens Museum Website Announcement
Exhibit Catalog
Interactive Maps

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Driving the Dome

For eight weeks every Wednesday, Brett and I snuck away under darkness and rain to the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium to learn how to make a star show. We learned the ins and outs of the planetarium’s computer controls and presented shows for our family and friends on March 30th in the dome. A fellow classmate called it “playing with the biggest toy in New York City.”

Noreen and the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn
Showing the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn

Brett and the Earth's Magnetosphere
Brett and the Earth’s Magnetosphere



The program, Adult Digital Flight School, is a grown up version of a class that the museum’s education department created for school age children. The software, called Uniview Digital Universe, lets you display objects from moons and satellites to planets and galaxies to the large structure of the universe. It also has time and motion controls that allows the user to fly to selected objects and simulate the motion of the objects in space. You can examine the moon as it passes in front of the sun for a solar eclipse or watch the Cassini satellite make its initial 2004 approach of Saturn and then turn up the speed of time and watch ten years of the satellite’s orbits go by in seconds. It’s dizzying and took a lot of patience (and a little Dramamine) to feel in control of the “flight.”

The class structure included time in the classroom developing a program and time in the dome to test out the feel of the controls as your show is projected to the dome. And of course a lot of time at home researching our topic and writing our scripts. Each student selected very different study subjects. My topic as you may have guessed was the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. Brett studied aurora activity on the Earth and other planets in our solar system and the effect of the magnetosphere and nearby moons on auroras. We learned from our classmates about stellar distances, constellations, near Earth object collision risk, moon tides and life on the International Space Station. We also found out where the Borg live. [Spoiler Alert] Apparently, the S.S. Enterprise could only have traveled within the Milky Way Galaxy. Warp 8 just doesn’t get you very far.

Hayden_PlanetariumAMNH has a public version of the Uniview software that you can download from the Hayden Planetarium website. It was great fun and highly recommended if you ever get the urge to drive the dome.

If you would like to download the script from my exploration of the Cassini-Huygens mission, be my guest.

Update 06/09/2017: The Best of Cassini: 13 Years in Orbit Around Saturn, By Alan Taylor, The Atlantic, June 7, 2017.

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Fall Projects in Digital Archives

This Fall I participated in two digital archives projects, where I served on the metadata team. The first was an oral history archive for dance journalist, Barbara Newman, who had a collection of interviews from the 1970s to this past year, in which she spoke with dancers, choreographers and others affiliated in the dance community. The interviews were primary sources for Ms. Newman’s book Grace Under Pressure. The website, Dance Dialogues, is a compilation of interviews from several of her books. I participated on the metadata team, where we ensured that our classmates’ records were properly tagged with our selected schema. I also digitized interviews with Mark Morris and tagged and uploaded interviews with Katie Wade and Robert Denvers.

The second project was for the American Jewish Historical Society and the Center for Jewish History with their Jews in America project. The goal of the project is to create a gateway to Jewish heritage artifacts at institutions across the United States. My team selected the Charleston College Low Country Digital Library, which has a rich collection of oral histories and papers from American Jewry in the Charleston region. We selected collections from LCDL that best fit the Jews in America vision, harvested metadata and URLs from the collection and delivered it to AJHS for inclusion in their database. I recently ran into Susan Malbin at the 2nd Annual METRO Conference, who told me that the Charleston team was one of two of the four class projects that would likely be included in the Jews in America repository. Congrats, Team!

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Summer School

My summer involved a full set of research courses, including Museums & Library Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Researching Local Histories and the Summer Map Institute at NYPL. The workload was a bit heavy due to the fact that the MetMuseum course was not actually a two week course, as noted in the bulletin, but two weeks of seminar followed by a month of intensive research. Ultimately it was a great experience, working in three very different kinds of research: museum artifacts, local landmarks and maps.

NYC Garden Maps banner image
NYC Garden Maps, a WordPress site on community gardening in New York City

My map project on NYC Garden Maps is done. I am editing the final deliverables for presentation here, including a walking tour of the Bloomingdale neighborhood on the Upper West Side and a MetMuseum exhibition guide. Look for these shortly.

Also, I spent the summer with my linked data team refining our paper on “Linked Data for Cultural Institutions,” which has been accepted to ACM’s 2013 SIGDOC conference. This has been a challenging and extremely rewarding experience and I thank my teammates and co-authors, Julia Marden, Carolyn Li-Madeo and Jeff Edelstein of Pratt Institute. I celebrated the end of an intense summer with two weeks in the Massachusetts Berkshires.