Reflection 4- Narrowing, Narrowing, Narrowing

This week I have mainly been working on better forming my argument.  I realized that the main part of my project I was interested in conveying were the trends in the commercial synthesizer market from its conception until the present day and the sociocultural criticism that accompanies them.  Because of this, I want to put more effort into the timeline portion of my project and make it the main focus.  I have organized all the important events I want in each timeline and I am just filling in text from my research at this point.  Some timelines have a lot more information than others, however this is reflective of the varying levels of innovation and success for each type of technology.  I have been able to gather approximate success levels of each type of synthesizer for each time period from my sources.  However, it would be interesting if I could find economic data for the sales of each of the five types of popular synthesizers and make it into a line graph in some way.  I don’t know if such raw data like this is accessible, but I will try to find it after I finish the portions of my project I have already planned.  It has been very important to set deadlines for myself on which sections of the project I need to finish by a certain time.  I hoped to have the timeline and digital representations done by this Thursday, however, it looks like I will be able to have only the timeline portion finished by this Thursday and the digital representations finished by next Thursday.  Because of this, I have also decided to only work on sound samples that demonstrate the sonic character of each type of synthesizer by the end of the internship period and not full compositions.  The compositions can be easily added later by just embedding soundcloud links.  Despite not being on time to complete all the portions of the project I wanted to, I think this has helped me to narrow my focus and create more a more in-depth narrative in certain aspects.

After meeting with the research librarians, I realized that I still had a lot of groundwork to still do on my project. I think they were right when they said to not think about our research tools until we had some solid research done.

During our first meeting, I narrowed down my project even more. Now, I will be choosing three justices to perform a topic modeling analysis on their written opinions. Based on their Martin-Quinn scores and propensity for language, I’ve chosen Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Antonin Scalia. According to their scores, Sotomayor is the most liberal justice on the current Court. She usually writes her opinions in plain language. Kennedy is now known as the “swing justice,” and has a flair for drama in his writing. Scalia is the second most conservative (with Justice Clarence Thomas as the most conservative). Scalia is known as one of the founders of the originalist theories and without a doubt is known for his distinctive and biting opinion-writing style.

But, still, with all this research and the deadline for the project approaching fast, I had to seriously focus on my tools, as well. For most of the day today, I focused on getting my web scraper code to work. Right now, it works for nearly every case from 2009 on, the year Justice Sotomayor joined the Court. The opinions that don’t work can be copy and pasted off the Internet.

All in all, I think I’ve had a productive week and learned a lot, but I think the quickly approaching project deadline may make me need to simplify my project once more. It will certainly be a stressful end to the first session of the summer, but I look forward to the challenge.

This past week has been frustrating and nervewracking. With all the upcoming deadlines, I am feeling the pressure of how little time we have left. Fortunately, it has also been a very reflective week as well and I am happy to have gotten past the hurdle of narrowing down my research question. A big source of frustration has been balancing the research aspect of the project with learning how to use the digital tools. While we were reminded that the research question is more important than the tools, I still feel that there has been an underestimation of how time consuming working with these tools can be, especially given the numerous ways in which we can choose to represent our data. While it felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders when I finished collected my data points, turning this data into an actual interactive map and timeline has been a challenge, but one that I am in the long haul for.

The past week has been rough. I had spent a lot of time (nearly half of the duration of the project) researching monuments that I would not need, questions that were not essential.

However, as it turns out, my scope was far too ambitious and my question was far too broad to formulate a well-written, scholarly research paper. Therefore, I have narrowed my scope down from the entire post-Soviet Eastern Europe, to Bulgaria. At this point, I have also decided to tie the treatment of Communist monuments in Bulgaria to the governmental-imposed idea of a ”double liberation”, rooting my argument in several key components:

• The separation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire as a clever governmental tool for depicting Russia as the liberator.
• The idea of a national enemy as crucial for forming a national identity. The use of this ”first” liberation as a basis for the ”double liberation” idea: the sense of brotherhood between the Soviet and Bulgaria, enforced by strengthening the link between the Russian liberator and the Soviet liberator.
• The connection of the two occurrences has been reinforced by building Soviet monuments near by monuments commemorating the Russo-Turkish War, or by symbolic places where historical battles took place.
• The hypothesis that this “double liberation” is the reason why unlike many other post-Soviet states, the Bulgarian government has continuously worked in some ways towards protecting communist monuments, rather than destroying them. E.g. 1992 treaty of cooperation between Russia and Bulgaria, and Boyko Borissov’s encouragement of communist landmark restoration programs.
• Despite the government’s support, there are still 3 different narratives of how society perceives Communist monuments (anti-fascist, nostalgic, and commercial), wherein the double liberation plays a crucial role in the nostalgic and commercial perception.

Therefore, my main research question has (so far) shifted to:

How has the idea of a Bulgarian “double liberation” influenced the state’s treatment of Soviet monuments?

I believe this to be a much more concise idea, because it is rooted in a historical argument.  Additionally, I can still use the mapping method in order to strengthen my point, by placing both Soviet and Russo-Turkish monuments in relation to each other, layering on basis such as: funding, commemoration, state’s treatment, society’s treatment.

Overall, after brainstorming for a few hours today, I have reached peace with the way this project is headed. A part of me fears potentially meeting with Prof. Sanborn because he could discourage me from everything that I just rebuilt from scratch… But another part of me knows that even if that happens, I have already learnt that rebuilding is not that bad, after all.

This past week has been extremely chaotic and overwhelming for me with my project. I bounced all over the place on ideas, and toyed with drastically changing my topic. However, the dust has finally settled and a clear vision of how I want to proceed has emerged. The setbacks I faced the past week were due to my thesis and research question not being clear enough. I realize now that I struggled with this so much because I wanted to solve and research all the problems instead of narrowing in on a more clear and concise focus. My new research question focuses in on the specific factors listed under “threats” on the IUCN red list for each of the top 5 countries with the most endangered species. Under this category I can then evaluate which of the top 2 factors are similar within Ecuador, United States, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Mexico. I am fascinated that these countries are the top 5 countries with the highest number of endangered species but more so I am shocked that the United States is within this group. It is the only developed country within the top 5. The other countries are developing nations and therefore I am not too surprised that they are experiencing a large loss of biodiversity. But the United States allocates a lot of money towards awareness and conservation for endangered species. So why are we so high on the list? Have we already caused so much irreparable damage that the programs and laws we have enacted have not even made a dent in helping our species? I find this to be fascinating when looking at it in comparison to the other countries. Ecuador did not surprise me too much because it is home to the Galapagos which contain one of the most threatened ecosystems within the world right now. I really am excited to delve deeper into these countries culture and examine the reasons why they have so many species listed. I have found many amazing articles that I need to go through more thoroughly to pull out more information and begin to analyze it. Hooray to finally forging ahead…!

Iran’s political culture is a bottomless well, one can always delve a little deeper. The past week was spent mostly engaging with scholarly work pertaining Iranian politics. The outline for the paper finally took physical form. While drafting the detailed outline, the complexity of the issue returned with striking force. At one particular instance, when I was trying to appropriately phrase the founding concept of my thesis, I recollected, rejected and reevaluated words and concepts for about two hours. “Deep State, I think would work,” only to learn that the definition of the deep state does not entirely correspond with my conceptualization. This was only the slow beginning of a grilling two hour session, self quizzing and self critique rolled into one, wherein I struggled to denote a complex idea with one term. Eventually I succeeded. Struggle of the phrasal kind is not much trouble to me, the technological struggle is a different story however. News is not too bleak at the technological end. There seems to be one benign application that I have gotten my head around, it seems to offer almost everything to materialize my project from words into visualization.

Considering the triumphs and tribulations, I am finding the depths of the bottomless well that is Iran to be charming, and enticing.

After battling a violent sickness, I am finally returning to focusing in on my project. I have 13 or so resources, which I have read and am prepared to use to further my theoretical point. This week will be lots of catch-up for me personally for I have not had the right state of mind to handle tedious textual analysis. However, I embrace the added challenge. I think my focus is laser-sharp and my theory soundly crafted and sufficiently succinct. I have a well-crafted source to draw from and expand upon. However, I need to focus in on using the tool and crafting the project. I have half of Yeats poems prepared in a Text-edit document, which is ready to be run through Voyant. I am going to run that through Voyant and explore possible analysis that could be drawn from doing such. Furthermore, I intend to have a finished document including every poem of Eliot and Yeats by this Friday. Catch-up work is not fun and adds undue and unwanted stress on my mind.

-Joe

Reflection 3- Sound Studies

From meeting with Gettysburg college’s Digital Humanities program and discussing Digital Humanities with visiting professors, I have begun to think of how my interests fit into the larger field.  I have recently learned about the burgeoning field of “sound studies” from a few professors.   Sound Studies is an interdisciplinary field which looks at the many different ways sound has differed throughout history through two main approaches: the cultural anthropological approach and the scientific technological studies approach.  I think my project fits well into this field because it examines the progression of synthesized sounds throughout the 20th century and uses both an anthropological lens and a technological one in the presentation of its content.

One of the visiting professors mentioned a growing interest in initiatives to archive sound as cultural history, just as one would with literature or visual art.  I am going to do more research into this field to see if it could be a match for me in future years.  Learning about the field of Sound Studies has also stressed the importance of continuing with my project after the official deadline for the program by keeping it up to date as sound slowly but inevitable evolves over time.

Finally, I am content with how things are turning out.

I have compiled a list of all the books I wish to use, and I am in the process of extracting valuable information from them. Thanks to that, I have created what is, in my eyes, a well-written 6-page outline of how I see my paper and research argument to be. Sarah and Mr. Clark have emphasized the importance on narrowing down my scope, so for now I have confined my 10 case studies to 4 countries only – Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and what was once East Germany.

Taking into consideration Sarah’s suggestion of narrowing it down to only 1 country, 4 may still seem like an unaccomplishable overkill, but I have taken into consideration that monuments are not demolished or vandalized every single day. Additionally, in some cases the treatment of monuments that I am planning to analyze has been tied to the same political event – a political event that has sparked outrage internationally. Thus, in my eyes the project is not and should not be seen as an examination of the political relations of 4 countries and Russia. Rather, this project aims to show that although monuments aim to preserve a time in history, to make permanent someone or something that is fleeting, the treatment of these monuments depicts instability, rather than permanence. And this instability is based on fluctuating social and political events, which I see as a smaller scale than political relations! Monuments are undeniably tied to history – consequently, to ideology and values – and so the ways in which they are viewed and treated changes according to what lens history is seen through.  Because this lens changes due to its relationship with the political and social scene, I aim to prove that the way communist monuments are valued changes in the same way.

I have started working on narrowing down which monuments I want to use as case studies, but I will continue researching what is controversial. Additionally, my aim is to expand my total database to 300 monuments by the aim of this week. However, I need to emphasize the importance on the case studies, rather than on the supplementary database itself. That being said, I will try to choose my final case studies by the end of the week as well, and start gathering information on them. I will simultaneously be uploading this information on the WordPress platform that I started creating, and when I have gathered enough, I will start my analysis and incorporate it into the final paper, as well.

On a brighter tone, it’s Monday! The start of a new week, which will be fuelled with new energy and enthusiasm. I’ve got this!