Machine Reading the Primeros Libros / Hannah Alpert-Adams

By delving into the material processes of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), as well as the history of OCR tools, this article shows how the statistical models used for automatic transcription can embed cultural biases into the output. This article is particularly relevant to multilingual projects, as it unpacks the effects of OCR software that generally assumes monolingual and orhthographically simple documents.

“Early modern printed books pose particular challenges for automatic transcription: uneven inking, irregular orthographies, radically multilingual texts. As a result, modern efforts to transcribe these documents tend to produce the textual gibberish commonly known as “dirty OCR” (Optical Character Recognition). This noisy output is most frequently seen as a barrier to access for scholars interested in the computational analysis or digital display of transcribed documents. This article, however, proposes that a closer analysis of dirty OCR can reveal both historical and cultural factors at play in the practice of automatic transcription. To make this argument, it focuses on tools developed for the automatic transcription of the Primeros Libros collection of sixteenth century Mexican printed books. By bringing together the history of the collection with that of the OCR tool, it illustrates how the colonial history of these documents is embedded in, and transformed by, the statistical models used for automatic transcription. It argues that automatic transcription, itself a mechanical and practical tool, also has an interpretive effect on transcribed texts that can have practical consequences for scholarly work.”

Alpert-Abrams, Hannah. 2016. “Machine Reading the Primeros Libros.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10 (4). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/4/000268/000268.html.

“To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives

This article reports on interviews conducted with South Asian American educators regarding their responses to the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), an independent, nonprofit, community-based organization that operates the websites www.saada.org and www.firstdaysproject.org. The article reports on several emergent themes: the absence of or difficulty in accessing historical materials related to South Asian Americans before the emergence of SAADA; the affective and ontological impacts of discovering SAADA for the first time; the affective impact of SAADA on respondents’ South Asian American students; and SAADA’s ability to promote feelings of inclusion both within the South Asian American ethnic community and in the larger society. Together, these responses suggest the ways in which one community archives counters the symbolic annihilation of the community it serves and instead produces feelings of what the authors term “representational belonging.” The article concludes by exploring the epistemological, ontological, and social levels of representational belonging.

Caswell, M., Cifor, M., & Ramirez, M. H. (2016). “To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives. The American Archivist, 79(1), 56–81. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.79.1.56

Using Static Sites Technology for Increased Access: The Case of the Shelley-Godwin Archive / Raffaele Viglianti

This case study discusses the key decisions in adopting standards and technologies for a digitization project, in dialogue with ongoing scholarship around minimal computing and minimal editions. It has a specific focus on choices that affect long-term preservation and access, including efforts to enable offline use of the archive in order to increase its availability to a larger number of communities with variable access to the Internet.
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Participation, Design, Empathy, Justice: The User Experience with Underrepresented Populations (UXUP) Project / Scott Young

This case study discusses a Participatory Design pilot project at Montana State University: User Experience with Underrepresented Populations (UXUP), in which Native American students and a librarian co-created a new community outreach tool. It provides an in-depth view into the UXUP design process, with further discussion of outcomes, limitations, assessments, and recommendations for implementing Participatory Design practices with Indigenous communities.

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Challenging the Algorithms of Oppression

In this video, Noble discusses Google’s harmful and dangerous search engine results –especially when searching terms such as “girls” and “Black girls” – and how these searches reify oppressive narratives about identity markers. She describes her methodology for collecting and analyzing these search engine results, which are dealing with advertisement algorithms and what narratives are seen as “profitable.”
Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2016. “Challenging the Algorithms of Oppression.” Presented at the Personal Democracy Forum 2016, New York City. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRVZozEEWlE.