Bamboo DiRT Site: Exploration of DH tools to make and present

Greetings!

To begin, I am so excited to learn of this platform and these resources. I got kind of lost in playing and had to remember what I was doing for my blog because some of these resources are seriously cool. It was hard to pick two.

I thought about the presenting resource first. I wanted to think visually about how I wanted my project to look in regards to my topic. I'll be looking at visual rhetoric and composing in SMS spaces by first generation students as well as students of minorities. In framing this population, Mark had a wonderful idea of focusing on the CLASP students at WSU, and this is the population I've decided to analyze for my project for this course. In thinking critically about my project, I wanted to choose a resource that stayed consistent in my focus on the visual. I didn't want a bunch of numbers on my screen as I discussed my findings, I wanting the information to be clean and simple. While looking for the right source, I wanted to be mindful of the types of questions I would be addressing in SMS platforms themselves. This refers to issues of access and that these SMS spaces require access to technology. With that being said, I wanted to choose a resource that was free to access, and one that also was compatible with the technology I did have, which is a Macbook Air.

After choosing my search parameters, my results began to filter into a much more manageable lens to begin viewing the platforms. Rather than 10+ pages of resources, my search was narrowed to 2 pages,  which made it easier to select my tool: Viewshare. Due to its emphasis on cultural representations of data and the focus of simplicity in presentation, it really seemed the most pragmatic. According to the site, the description is as follows:

"Viewshare is a free web application for creating interfaces and visualizations of cultural heritage collections. It can create interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds, histograms, and image galleries. The intended users of Viewshare are individuals managing and creating access to digital collections of cultural heritage materials."

The description of the tool interested me primarily in the passages that I've bolded. Since I'm looking at the ways in which different cultures use visual rhetoric in emojis, stickers, and other visual composing tools, it's important to me to mirror that framework in my representation of my results. In addition, my main focus is to bring these findings into the composition classroom, helping to ground rhetorical analysis in cultural practice while also highlighting the different conceptions of literacy and composing in the 21st century. 

Upon reviewing the resource, I found that you needed to request a free account in order to have full access. I have requested one and already heard back within the hour, which was very convenient. I really like the visual representation of data, while also providing a textual key indicating what the data means numerically. In addition, I think the organization of the information is well done, with the visual display of data not only being the largest component, but also the component with the most prominent color display. I believe that this tool will allow me to categorize my project in regard to both SMS platform, and also participants in a way that is cohesive and organized. Navigating this tool has pushed me to think more about access, and how I am going to consider access in the SMS platforms I choose to utilize. It was important to me to find a free resource for composing, and platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are SMS platforms that are free and allow for a visual composing through their (newly) added features of stickers and emoticons. This tool is also highly framed around the notion of embedded and sharing, which to me really resonates a true DH tool of collaboration and inclusivity. I would encourage everyone to play around with this resource. 

In order to find the perfect tool for the "doing" part of my project, I framed my search around the data collection category. Again I revised my search parameters to be both free and compatible with a Macbook Air. Once refining my search I was left with simply one page and 14 choices. After playing around a bit, I came to the conclusion of choosing "R" which is described as the following:

R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. R can be run from the command line, or using any of the many graphical user interfaces available on a variety of platforms; these are listed as separate tools.

In looking more closely at R, I was able to see that it not only computes data numerically, but also does so in a way that offers a visual representation of that data. As someone who learns visually, it's important for me to have a tool that displays data in diverse ways. In considering the presentation of my data, the user was not in the forefront of my mind, it was the audience. However, in the actual "doing" of my project I'm considered how this information needs to be presented to me, in order to make sense of it all. In surveying my participants, I'll be collecting numeric data based on several facets: race, access, platform, first-gen, etc. I like that R allows you to create different tools based on the type of data you're analyzing. Navigating this tool has allowed me to see that my project will be so much more then just surveying students, but also surveying teachers to see how they integrate these SMS platforms into their composition classroom. We not only need to see that there are in fact different cultural interpretations of visual rhetoric, but also that they have some place in the composition classroom, which plays into what teachers are doing with the information (and whether or not they're doing it well/correctly). I've learned that this project is going to be much more invested then I had initially thought. But this is a project that I'm considered for my dissertation, so big questions are a good thing at this point. 

So you can see, R has different visual representations of data, which I think considering that there's different components to my project, is a wonderful feature for my topic specifically. I'm not a number person, and turning numbers into visual representations that I can actually see is incredibly valuable. R also breaks things down in a way that is easy to make sense of in regards to beginning to plug in numbers and work with the tool itself. 

It was hard to choose from so many awesome resources. I'll definitely be exploring this platform more as my scholarship continues in both DH and Rhet/Comp.