Selected Projects
Here is a list of some selected projects I would like to show students as examples of meaningful digital humanities work. I am beginning this list on May 10, 2020 and don’t have much time because I have to deposit this capstone/thesis before May 15th and it ain’t finished yet!!! So these are just some thoughts. I will add more. Please send me suggestions at springle@ccny.cuny.edu or https://github.com/binipringle
Students will not have an internet connection. Therefore, projects that can be run on a local server are ideal. Websites that can be archived and taken to prison on a USB drive will also work.
Volume 2 of Torn Apart is a deep and radically new look at the territory and infrastructure of ICE’s financial regime in the USA. This data & visualization intervention peels back layers of culpability behind the humanitarian crisis of 2018.
Rikers Story Bot is a coding workshop and an algorithmic storytelling project set in and about Rikers Island correctional facility, New York city’s main jail complex. In the spring of 2015, the Center for Justice approached the Experimental Methods Group with an idea of running an “Intro to Python” workshop for the young people incarcerated at Rikers and for Columbia University students interested in digital literacy. In teaching programming through digital storytelling, it is our hope to encourage a dialog between the youth at Rikers, Columbia faculty and students, and the community at large. The RikersBot project gives all participants a chance to have their voices heard, to learn to code, and to gain real-world experience in writing, editing, and producing a project. Together, we are building a Twitter bot that will tell our story.
The East Bay Punk Digital Archive
The East Bay Punk Digital Archive (EBP-DA) is a project spearheaded by Stefano Morello and funded by the Digital Initiatives, Lost & Found, and the New Media Lab at The Graduate Center, CUNY. It aims to preserve and make available – to researchers, subcultural participants from around the world, and a general public unfamiliar with the topic – the subjugated knowledge produced by participants in the punk-rock commons that loomed in and around the San Francisco Bay Area between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s.
Wax is a minimal computing project for producing digital exhibitions focused on longevity, low costs, and flexibility. Our underlying technology is made to learn and to teach, and can produce beautifully rendered, high-quality image collections and scholarly exhibits.
Archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis
archipelagos is a born-digital, peer-reviewed publication devoted to creative exploration, debate, and critical thinking about and through digital practices in contemporary scholarly and artistic work in and on the Caribbean. Given the wide implications of the “digital turn” for our very conceptions of knowledge, our mission is to discern the ways in which the digital may enhance and transform our comprehension of the regional and diasporic Caribbean. archipelagos responds to this challenge with three distinct dimensions of critical production: scholarly essays; digital scholarship projects; and digital project reviews.
The Early Caribbean Digital Archive
The Early Caribbean Digital Archive is an open access collection of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps, and images. Texts include travel narratives, novels, poetry, natural histories, and diaries that have not been brought together before as a single collection focused on the Caribbean. Plantation slavery and settler colonialism are defining aspects of the early Caribbean—both sit at the origin of the modern capitalist world. The texts and images collected here tell the story of European imperial domination, and of the enslaved African and Indigenous American people whose lives, labor, and land shaped the culture and development of the Atlantic world. The materials in the archive are primarily authored and published by Europeans, but the ECDA aims to use digital tools to “remix” the archive and foreground the centrality and creativity of enslaved and free African, Afro-creole, and Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean world.
Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761
This animated thematic map narrates the spatial history of the greatest slave insurrection in the eighteenth century British Empire. To teachers and researchers, the presentation offers a carefully curated archive of key documentary evidence. To all viewers, the map suggests an argument about the strategies of the rebels and the tactics of counterinsurgency, about the importance of the landscape to the course of the uprising, and about the difficulty of representing such events cartographically with available sources. Although this cartographic narration cannot be taken as an exhaustive database—for instance, it does not examine major themes such as belonging and affiliation among the insurgents or the larger imperial context and interconnected Atlantic world— the map offers an illuminating interpretation of the military campaign’s spatial dynamics.
The Accessibility (A11Y) Project is a community-driven effort to make web accessibility easier. We do this by leveraging a worldwide community of developer knowledge.
The Covid Tracking Project and The Covid Racial Data Tracker
The COVID Tracking Project is a volunteer organization launched from The Atlantic and dedicated to collecting and publishing the data required to understand the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. Every day, it collects data on COVID-19 testing and patient outcomes from all 50 states, 5 territories, and the District of Columbia. Its dataset is currently in use by national and local news organizations across the US and by research projects and agencies worldwide. As of mid-April, its data API (which allows sites and apps to import our dataset automatically) receives about one million requests per day.
On April 15, The Covid Tracking Project launched the COVID Racial Data Tracker, a partnership between the COVID Tracking Project and the The Antiracist Research & Policy Center that collects, publishes, and analyzes racial data on the pandemic within the United States.