While Joshua Miele’s 20 October lecture, “Digital Accessibility and the Making of the Meta Maker Movement,” centered on his efforts to teach physical computing and open-source hardware (Arduino) to non-sighted children, it was most compelling when challenged us to reframe our own approaches to accessibility itself. Our current digital culture, Miele argued, attempts to answer the question of “how to provide” accessibility. For example, in the United States, we often think of accessibility in terms of the broad mandate of section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which Congress amended in 1998, “to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology (EIT) accessible to people with disabilities” (United States Access Board). From this mandate came standards, such as “color coding shall not be used as the only means of conveying information” and “a text equivalent for every non-text element shall be provided,” that still encourage organizations and individuals in the technology industry to approach accessibility as a “how to provide” question (United States Access Board). See the long lists of tools and guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) or International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) for examples of this approach. In other words, section 508 promotes a checklist way of thinking: we develop software or produce digital media and then comply with the accepted rules for making such software or digital media accessible.

Miele had no problem with section 508 standards but he challenged those in the audience to approach accessibility differently. In this more holistic approach, which he deemed “accessibility from first principles,” our current digital culture would attempt to answer the question of “why do people need access to technologies, materials, and spaces” in the first place. Or, put another way, Miele argued that we should think about accessibility as creating inclusive spaces that benefit all and not as an inconvenience on the road towards compliance. By emphasizing “why” instead of “how,” we might realize that, for example, non-sighted people should be involved, from the outset, in the creation of software, hardware, and makerspaces as developers, product managers, or designers. In fact, Miele suggested that “accessibility from first principles” draws much from user-centered design, which values identifying and collaborating with the users of the product during its creation. This argument seemed most striking when Miele told us of how the non-sighted children who participate in his Blind Arduino project express enthusiasm for physical computing but do not participate alongside their sighted peers in school robotics club. Accessibility from first principles would, in this case, ask how we could make such robotics clubs, and the physical computing they do, more inclusive to all.

Thinking about this reframing of accessibility alongside the digital humanities and the production of digital scholarship ultimately highlights how we often privilege the visual (what Miele, at one point, called the “lookative”). One audience member, for example, asked how she, as someone interested in data visualization, could best consider accessibility during of her projects. Miele responded by claiming that we should try to abandon the term “data visualization” and use “spatial information” instead. After all, data visualizations are just spatial representations of information. With this in mind, we could consider producing a 3D print with peaks and valleys, instead of a d3 bubble chart, to represent different quantities of data. Similarly, we could also explore sonifications alongside visualizations (sonifications should not necessarily replace visualizations, as that could, in turn, exclude deaf people). Valuing tactile and aural representations of spatial information, in other words, might be a good first step to thinking about how digital media and digital scholarship can achieve a more holistic accessibility. And it seems worthwhile to at least consider this as we produce our own work.

Works Cited

Miele, Joshua. “Digital Accessibility and the Making of the Meta Maker Movement,” GC Digital Initiatives, 20 October 2016, City University of New York Graduate Center. Lecture.

United States Access Board. “About the Section 508 Standards,” https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/communications-and-it/about-the-section-508-standards.

———. “Section 508 Standards for Electronic and Information Technology," https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/communications-and-it/about-the-section-508-standards/section-508-standards.

If you’re familiar with a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, or the myriad other options, then you’re familiar with content types and how they allow you to define and organize information. Or, in Rachel Lovinger’s definition, they describe “the various configurations of content that are distinct enough to be unique types in the system” (Lovinger). For example, WordPress users navigate between “pages” and “posts.” One CMS that I use in my professional life, meanwhile, features FAQs, calendars, and numerous other options in addition to pages and posts. In fact, most CMSs allow developers to customize content types to serve their particular needs. Regardless of specifics, however, content types illustrate not only the nature and scope of their CMS but also the nature and scope of the information contained in that CMS. They provide a taxonomic overview of information itself. Thus, a WordPress site that uses only pages and posts as content types is probably textual and blog-like. A different site with a more expansive list of content types, like the example above, might aim to anticipate and answer questions and coordinate events. Content types, in other words, allow for a glimpse of the content itself.

How does this relate to Digital Humanities Now, though? This discussion of content types, I think, serves as good point of departure because it illuminates the guest editing experience in two ways.

First, it articulates the mechanics of guest editing the site. The homepage of Digital Humanities Now features the following blocks: Editors’ Choice, Job Announcements, Announcements, Resources, CFPs & Conferences, Funding & Opportunities, and Reports. These are the site’s de facto content types (not de iure, however, since the site operates with the WordPress pages and posts model). As a guest editor, I spent much of my time scrolling through the automated PressForward feed searching for and reading items of interest, commenting on those items, and recommending select items for publication. As I did this, however, I had to determine which items fit into which blocks. For example, this set of guidelines on preserving electronic theses and dissertations would work in the Resources section while this journal article by Matthew Jockers might be something to consider for the Editors’ Choice section. Searching, sifting, reading, and ultimately categorizing content into types describes much of the guest editing experience.

Second, the idea of content types offers a useful metaphor for a better understanding of the current digital humanities environment—an environment comprised not only of scholarship but also of labor, tools, and conversation. For example, while the Editors’ Choice section of the site gives prominence to published scholarship and new projects, the Job Announcement section demonstrates the variety of labor involved in the digital humanities. Here, we see openings for various librarian, developer, and technology support positions that contribute to the production, maintenance, and archival of scholarship. Recently, it seems that scholars have attempted to illustrate the importance of this labor: see Bethany Nowviskie when she refers to the digital humanities community as one “of scholars and cultural heritage workers” or Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan when they ask if we might learn something from the female punch card operators who worked with Father Roberto Busa (Nowviskie, Terras and Nyhan). Similarly, the sections for Announcements (containing news of upcoming workshops) and CFPs and Conferences demonstrate the interpersonal connections of the current digital humanities environment. On a figurative level, then, these sections of Digital Humanities Now become attempts at categorizing the “various configurations” of digital humanities “distinct enough to be unique types in the system” of digital humanities. Guest editing, in this respect, provides an opportunity to attune yourself to the whole by navigating its parts.

Works Cited

Lovinger, Rachel. “Content Modelling: A Master Skill.” A List Apart, no. 349, 24 April 2012, http://alistapart.com/article/content-modelling-a-master-skill.

Nowviskie, Bethany. “Resistance in the Materials.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein, U of Minnesota P, 2016, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/66.

Terras, Melissa and Julianne Nyhan. “Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein, U of Minnesota P, 2016, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/57.

On October 4th, with a lot of the students attending our DH praxis seminar (and, of course, other people not attending it), I participated to the workshop “Databases Part I”, with the two digital fellows Ian Phillips and Tahir Butt.

The workshop was nice and very useful: Ian and Tahir were very nice and always available to help anybody having trouble (as me, when I was not able to launch the installation of the SQLite Studio program).

With the help of the post “Fun Times with SQLite! Or, a Beginner’s Tutorial to Data Management and Databases with SQL“, we were introduced to the world of databases by briefly discussing what a database is (a collection of data that is structured to allow for manipulation), and more specifically what is the definition of relational database (databases where the data is contained in different tables). We were then immediately introduced to SQL (Structured Query Language), the programming language for interacting with data in a relational database we will employ for the workshop, and required to download SQLiteStudio, the database manager we will be using.

At this point, Ian led us in a step-by-step process to create our first database. After creating and name it, we learned how to create the content of our databases: in other words, how to create tables and fill them with the content we need to store. For the workshop, academic programs and students were the data we need to store in different tables.

The first step was to manage and discover how the SQL language works with different kinds of data. For instance, the Primary Key is the unique identifier for each record in the table while, talking about the functions, Autoincrement is set to increment automatically for each new record added to the table, Not Null establishes that no record will be allowed in the table without a value and Varchar defines the characteristics of the data inserted (a string of characters).

After having established the structure of the table, we inserted some data such as the names of the academic programs: this allowed us to see each of the row of the table with the appropriate academic program we wanted to insert there.

We were then learned how to add a new ‘column’ to our table, which until now have only two columns: one marked by ‘id’, which listed the number of students enrolled in each program, and another by ‘program’, where the different academic programs were listed. After that, we need to populate the new column with data for each existing record, and we did this by using the Update command in the SQL code, which allowed us to modify what we previously created. We also discovered other commands, such as Where – to control and define which records will be updated (it works by relating the update of a field with the content in another field of the table, allowing us to operate simultaneously on different part of our table).

After having created a table for the academic programs, we were required to set up a new table, this time for student, and we used the same syntax that we used to create the programs table, but with one extra element: a foreign key. This is a very important function, because it allows us to establish a relationship between two different tables: the students and the programs tables (more specifically, it is linked to the Primary Key of another table). This is specified by the command References, which links one field in one table to another field in another table: this relationship requires that all records in one table point to a valid primary key in the other one.

At this point, all was able to do some queries using the command Select, which – combined with From and Where – allows to focus on specific data. For instance, we were shown all the students from the Student table; all the students which the corresponding ID is 3; all the students whose name start with a specific letter. It is also possible to coordinate data from two different tables.

During last weeks, I was reading Alan Liu’s “From Reading to Social Computing” as part of the requirement of our class and I was struck by a passage in his essay that I found very interesting to define one of the most important change the DH environment is producing into the literature field.

Alan Liu briefly sketches the shift from Web 1.0 towards Web 2.0, passing through what he defines as “Web 1.5”, and he underlines the change in the roles of author and reader (creator and receiver of the information) that this transformation has produced. The Web 1.0 was indeed very similar to the previous experience of traditional reading, employing an electronic support instead of the paper: there was a well specified author, who transmitted a well defined information to a passive audience. This was a vertical transmission of information, produced by someone who was recognized as author, a term derived by the Latin auctoritas (authority): all the readers recognize this specific role, and accept their condition of passive receiver of the information the author is providing them because they need this information (if they don’t, they will not read it). Quoting from Alan Liu’s essay,

there was no actual crossing on the early Web between the roles of author and reader, because the information delivery system partitioned those roles from each other, leaving any change in the reading act quarantined at the reader’s station. The reader was newly hyperactive, but at best such hyperactivity was authorship at one remove from what was really happening on the server. It was simulated authorship.

As I pointed out, the reader was now allowed only a minimal interaction, and the two roles of author and reader remained clearly separated. They started to interact more actively with the “Web 1.5”, a definition provided by Liu to define this intermediate level between Web 1.0 and 2.0. This intermediary step begun in 1995, after “the Internet data backbone went commercial” and companies took advantage of this to provide new instruments for money transactions. As Liu pointed out,

readers used their version of Web forms (advanced search forms, “shopping cart” pages, and so on) to transact bidirectionally with that database, reading from the database but also writing to the database. After all, online commerce sites wanted customers to write in credit card numbers, mailing addresses, product reviews, and so on. In effect, the range of the reader’s agency expanded to the server at the halfway point between author and reader.

Considering the two roles of author and reader, the revolution in their interaction and reciprocal position was brought by the so-called Web 2.0, which finally swithces form a vertical (or semi-vertical) transmission of the information to a circular one. Quoting, one more time, Alan Liu,

Why not give readers Web-input pages similar to those used by authors so that they can write more fluently into the identical database, thus effectively allowing readers to become prolific commentators and actual coauthors?

I found very interesting this idea of establishing a “co-authorship”, but I found interesting also a different point of view, expressed by the user Humanity Harrell in the comment to the passage just quoted, which I read in the electronic version of Liu’s essay (the possibility to post live comments to essay and other readings is a fundamental characteristic of the digital humanities). Indeed, this user disagrees with Liu on the base of the “ability to comment”: for Humanity Harrell,

the ability to comment does not produce co-authorship, because the role is still established. The authority of the author is still regarded above the interactive reader/user even within the website formatting. Web 2.0 just allowed a forum for discussion and increased interactivity but did not usurp the authorship role completely as he seems to suggest.

He proposes different ‘genres’ of Web-based text as more focused on this co-authorship:

A wiki however, is closer to true co-authorship because users are indistinguishable from authors from a Web-page presentation […] and because in more recent wikis, privileged users can actually edit website code itself. MLA commons, like a blog, attempts a similar process by incorporating comments into the readers experience of a text but only increases interactivity while maintaining Web 2.0’s roles. Therefore, I would distinguish Web 2.0 as the blogs or interactive sites and I would regard wiki-based platforms as the new paradigm or Web 3.0 because it allows users access to truer co-authorship by making these binary roles indistinguishable.

As a scholar of literature, I disagree here with both Liu and Humanity Harrell. I think that the digital environment is indeed producing a change not limited only to the forms of writing and reading (it is not simply a matter of wikis and posts, compared with comments and e-commerce), but to the entire paradigm of transmission of information. Alan Liu is focusing on the products of this transformation, which – in my opinion – has to be considered through an olistic point of view. New tools have been created because new ways of information transmission are required; and new ways of transmission are required because the new information system around us needs a paritarian division of roles where everyone could be at the same time author and reader, active and passive. And, in my opinion, this necessity is due to the general system whose the exchange of information is just a simple part: in a certain sense, everything – to be transmitted and consumed in a digital way – has to be considered as information. It has to be inserted in a fluid, dynamic stream, where everything has to be quickly consumed and – if considered interesting – re-inserted in the endless stream of dynamic movement. For this reason, a schematic division between authors and readers is not usefull: it would maintain strong borders between two roles that, in the new paradigm of digital contemporaneity, needs insted to be continually mixed and exchanged.

This, of course, will bring to a dramatic change in the production of ‘objects’ to be read, which will lose their ‘aura’ (to use a key term in Walter Benjamin’s considerations of modern art and literature) in order to be more accessible. If this will definitely change the status of literature is not yet known and impossible to define now.