My attempts to create with the medium of digital history
Hasta la vista, DALL-E.
The Terminator 2: Judgment Day has been on my mind a lot lately for two reasons. One, I am planning my annual post-semester winter-holiday decorating, gingerbread baking movie watch-list. Two, SkyNet’s sentience and destruction of humanity is feeling more and more real these days. Well, perhaps not SkyNet exactly. But it certainly seems like technology is hurdling us towards something, and it ain’t good. Was?!? Andy Baio’s critique of art created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, “Opening the Pandora’s Box of AI Art,” touched on a visceral unease with the pace, acceptance, and championing of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and data…
Visualizing Data from The Money Chair
The Money Chair I loved to tip-toe into my grandfather’s den and sit in the world’s most opulent seat- The Money Chair. Overstuffed and a deep green, this chair earned such an esteemed nickname not because of its hue but because of the earthy smell of leather. “You smell that? That’s the smell of money!” my grandfather told me when he first brought it home, his retirement present to himself. I would sit in The Money Chair and stare at his endless shelves of magazines that stood taller than me. Time. National Geographic. Life. Issue after issue lined up neatly….
Dinosaurs eat data, humanists inherit the Earth
Apparently dinosaurs, data, and the digital is a thing around here, dear readers. If that is not your jam, the helicopter is still running. You can hop off this island right now. But for the rest of you? Hop in, buckle up, and welcome to Cassie’s Park. From “A-ha” to “Aaaaahhhhhhh!” My foray into digital history and digital humanities (which for the remainder of this blog, I will collectively refer to as “DH” for simplicity) started with wonder. Creating digital things had seemed entirely untouchable, especially for a (proud) community college alum who (at the time) aspired to be a…
Place, Time, Maps
Made of Stars The stars and city lights melted together. At the top of the stairs, the lights looked like an urban model of spacetime, with the million twinkling spots bending and warping with the gravitational pull of life. The soft lights bent, rolled, and traveled across the contours of hillsides, valleys, and canyons that San Diego State University looked across. There were many beautiful buildings on the campus to take in the views, but the top of the stairs leading up from Parking Lot 16 remained my favorite vantage point. I had many evening conversations here, overlooking Mission Valley….
Oh, the Spaces You’ll Go!
Thomas is my Co-Pilot At 12pm on a hot August day I took my driving test, parallel parked like a champ, and earned my California Driver License. At 2pm that same day, my grandfather gifted me a Thomas Guide to San Diego county. For much longer than I care to admit, I flipped through the spiral bound pages while pulled over to the side of a dark road, trying to get my bearings on the map and making questionable U-Turns in my 1990’s-era Toyota 4-Runner to get to places. The maps bound in that Thomas Guide on the almost laminated…
How I Met Your MU/TH/UR: Playing with text
MU/TH/UR Issues Alien is my favorite movie. Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece of cinema hooked me immediately when I first watched it at maybe 10-years-old. The suspense! The action! The badassery! The acid! It had everything a kid could want, and then some. But I came to appreciate it in new ways as both my view-count of Alien and my age grew. The “badass-ness” of Ripley as a person, a woman, and an alien-kicking survivalist took on new textures and inspiration. The creepiness of MU/TH/UR, the ship’s operating system, deepened, echoing that of HAL 9000, cautioning against unfettered technocratic capitalism. via…
Around the World in 80 CTRL+Fs
Footnotes I have strong opinions about footnotes. I do not care if you judge my nerdiness, but I love a footnote. I especially love a footnote in a monograph. Endnotes are…fine, but too much work. When I come across an especially interesting detail or am reading an author prone to including banter or anecdotes, I want to instantly satisfy that curiosity on the bottom of the page rather than use a finger to keep my place and awkwardly flip to the back.[1] But not too long ago, I found myself racing to the back of a book in search of…
Data-saurus
Cabaz-ssic Park I’m not sure what was bigger- the size of my eyes or the decibel reading of my eight-year-old squeal. It shimmered in the distance. The oasis in the desert. We were almost there. My grandfather hardly pulled off the road when I tumbled across the back-bench seat of his hulking 1980-something GMC crew cab, threw the heavy door open, and ran through the settling dust cloud to stand rapturously in the shadow of oasis. I was here, standing amongst history. Basking in the connection to lives lived before me. And it was even more glorious than it seemed…
Digital History, medium
Them’s fightin’ words Want to see academics get into a verbal brawl? Ask a group of humanists in your most affected naivete Elle Woods voices, “So, like, what is the definition of digital humanities?”. And to really get them going, follow up with: via GIPHY Defining digital humanities, including digital history, is notoriously divisive. So much so that Jason Heppler created a “What is Digital Humanities?” definition generator based upon #DayofDH tweets from 2009-2014. My favorite and oft-quoted definition from this is, “My lawyer advised against me answering this.” This gives incredible Marshawn Lynch energy (which, honestly, I respect and…
