This week we focused on looking at ways which we can retrieve data from online for our projects. Looking at a number of different sites and ways that we can create graphs using that data also. It was really interesting to see number of different ways to display the data so it was easier to read for the viewer and also for yourself so you could find out little pieces of information from within that and use it in researching. It was also good to learn a number of ways that data can be retrieved it would be very useful to know that for my project, I also found it interesting that it was so simple to retrieve the data from a website like we did with the house of representatives during class, especially knowing that you can not only get the information but an image which will then link up to that persons page, certainly something that would be useful.
Month: September 2016
Week 3 Reflection
The first task this week was to do a Google search on the “professional vs. unprofessional hairstyles for work” experiment. Just for fun I then proceeded then tried the search on DuckDuckGo which gives you search results without tracking previous preferences. The DuckDuckGo results were slightly more unbiased than the Google searches although in both the first results when searching “unprofessional hairstyles for work” were articles about the phenomenon and not the original results themselves. At the very least it is always interesting to see how automatically filtered results can affect what you see as your top results.
The most challenging part for this week was exploring how to create GIFs. I’d used image editors before but never for animation, so using it to make GIFs was a new experience. I’ve put in the GIF that I eventually managed to make although the image actually has to be clicked to activate the movement. Over all a fun week this week and taught me new skills I’d never thought I’d have.
Week Four: What Data
This week we looked at the myriad of options concerning data and metadata, where to find it, what to do with it and what it is. I think that the Posner article really set the tone this week for me from doing the reading prior to the class, when he drew an analogy of what you would feel like if someone called your photo album a data set. I though that summarised his article well, illustrating the difference between humanities data and scientific data. Humanities data is most prominently linked intrinsically to people, culture, religion and real lives. This makes context and interpretation even trickier, but more interesting, to deal with, and I think that that was addressed well in acitivites and discussion during the class.
The class really opened up to me how much data there is, not how many records because obviously there’s lots of records of things especially in Western culture, but how many categories of ‘stuff’ is out there. Colonists bank records, water qualities, I even found how a dataset of average fruit intake for an Indigenous Australian primary school student. This class highlighted the importance of digital heritage, in particular in unlocking, fixing, and making sense of historic data to then churn it out in accessible format. What is the point of data otherwise? All of the things we found are super important and interesting to a plethora of people, cultures, organisations and have so many uses whether research, predictive or even personal. As I mentioned before because this is humanities data that stakes are so much higher as they are more actualised in the real world. However there’s no point if data is not in context, can not be categorised, understand or even read properly if there is mistake. The tools we used in the class fixed all these problems, plotly developed visual representations of data to be interacted and understood, openrefine to fix and categorise. Not only did we learn to use these tools, we understood in a broader sense what data is, how it can be used and finally how we can utilised in our own research contexts in cultural heritage.
One thing that I find really interesting was one of the graphs on plotly someone else had made, a pie chart illustrating the most used colours in Van Gogh’s artworks. What a cool use of data as well as graphing to portray something so organically creative and artistic and well non-mathmatical into a tangible piece of data – a good balance between the scientific data and humanities data Posner was discussing.
Here is my graph for male and females in 1901 – silly outlier Adelaide 🙂
Who Am I and What Am I Doing Here?
Hello, Hello, Hello,
My name is Amanda; I am a third year Cultural Heritage and Conservation student. Sorry for being a little late to the party. I was originally enrolled in 8945: Museums and the Anthropology of Collecting however since that subject is no longer available I was withdrawn and the email sent to my clutter box, I then had to find another subject instead, jump some late enrolment hurdles and here I am.
In hindsight everything happens for a reason and I am so excited (literally jumping up and down) to be doing this unit. So it was a good thing that my original option is no longer available as now I can learn all the awesome digital ‘things’.
I spend two days on campus working on a research project in the forensics department where I have my own office, which is very cool, and I can get lots of work done. At home I have a little toddler so the peace and quite on campus is great but also leaves me completing my final subjects (including this one) via the flexible option.
I look forward to virtually meeting you all.
Cheers,
Amanda
Week 2 Reflection
Something that stood out for me this week was the introduction of crowd-sourcing platforms, particularly sites like Zooniverse. I’d been exposed to crowd-sourcing sites before, such as Trove but hadn’t realised that the genre had its own name. Learning about the opportunities available through crowd-sourcing has given me something that I feel I could continue do in my down time while still being productive.
The most important thing that happened this week was the launch of the Exploring Digital Heritage blog. Thankfully it is supported through WordPress which is a blog builder that I had used a few times before in my writing of a llama based journal. Through that I had become familiar with importing images into my text, mostly featuring Llamas (like the one below). 
The blog had been something that had slipped my mind until we brought up WordPress in the unit. I feel like that prior knowledge will help in writing these weekly reflections.
The twitter bots I found fascinating although Twitter is not a medium that I use very often, if at all. However I think these bots are a tool I’d like to explore more at a future date and possibly see how it could be adapted to other uses.
