In Task 9, we are analyzing a network (graph) database generated from the previous Task 8 – Golden Record Curation Quiz.

The initial graph I was presented with, after loading the data file:

As you can see, without interpretation, analysis, or manipulation, the graph is of little use. The visualization might be interesting in the sense that you can tell how interconnected everyone’s choices are, but beyond that surface thought, there is little of use you can tell from a zoomed out view without manipulation. I think this is a good insight into most graphs and datasets. Their usefulness depends on manipulation, interpretation, and analysis – all things that both create meaning and change meaning. One then must know the motivations and intentions behind the analysis, interpretation, or manipulation to fully contextualize the resulting conclusions. It is also important to note that this graph itself is not “raw” data. The data has already been manipulated by forming links between each song selection, and then creating groups based on the strength of each song selection. By default when I loaded the data, the individuals were also highlighted and the songs were not, giving initial implicit assumption that the individuals and their connections are what is important versus the song choices.

Looking at the group I was placed in, group 1, I pulled the graph apart to see connections more clearly:

In this group of four individuals, you can see that I have one song that is not directly connected to the group, two of the others each have two, and one has three unconnected songs. We all share four songs, and there are several songs connected by three and two connections. One interpretation of this is that I am more similar to the others in this group than they are to me, and I could extrapolate from this that I am the “center” of this group. I don’t think this would be an accurate interpretation, however. You could also count the number of secondary connections, in which case Daniella would be seen as the “center”. This all implies that there is a “center”, and that it is important, which would be an assumption and decision made by whoever is interpreting the data.

I also looked at the one song that I did not share with the rest of this group, “Morning Star Devil Bird”. I looked at all of the connections that existed to that song, seen at the top right of this graph:

If it isn’t completely clear, the line of people in the top right are all directly connected to that song, and there is also a line from that song all the way to the bottom left where my node is. I pulled the nodes apart and organized them to see the links from my other song choices as well. What I find fascinating about this is that there are so many connections between people who are connected to non-“Morning Star Devil Bird” songs I chose, and people who also chose “Morning Star Devil Bird”. Perhaps this is just a result of a relatively limited set of songs to choose from, and secondary or tertiary connections are inevitable in such a small sample size. It does seem to imply that this one song choice connects me to a completely different set of people than the rest of my song choices, but those people are also fairly similar to people who are connected to my other song choices. If this were a graph of political opinions, this would be the one outlier belief where someone diverges with their political party of choice.

What does it mean to group people at all? Considering the group I was sorted into, we all only have four songs in common. How much of a group are we when we all collectively only share 40% of our choices? There is also no strength of preference taken into account. What if my very favorite song was the one that is not directly connected to any of these group members? Should I still be in this group? Alternatively, all non-choices are considered the same, but I could have several songs that I specifically dislike, and perhaps they should be included by the algorithm to make sure people are not linked by songs they specifically dislike. This graph also assumes that all song choices are intentional and complete. Each individual was required to select 10 songs, no more, no less. There could be some (I am one) who only wanted to select 4 or 5 songs, and the rest were relatively meaningless. How can people be grouped upon choices they did not want to make? Conversely, there could be some who wanted to select additional songs which would have changed their groupings, but were unable to by the limits of the data collection method.

When people are grouped by algorithms, there is no choice. The assumptions of importance by the algorithm creator are rarely questioned, and are taken as unbiased fact. What does this do to people who are grouped in a way that they would strongly disagree with if they knew why they were grouped in the way they were? Grouping by algorithm also tends to subtly reinforce sameness over time. If your life is shaped by algorithms that push people with similar likes, interests, thoughts, and opinions together, an important part of society is changed. Opinions are reinforced and made more extreme, instead of tempered and reexamined. Exposure to new experiences, cultures, and contexts are slowly limited. A large part of this issue is that most people do not understand how algorithms work, even if they are aware that they are at play in the daily technologies and systems they interact with. Algorithms also tend to be proprietary and secret – they are often used to generate vast wealth, and so are well-guarded intellectual property. If we do not want to cede control of our lives to the unknown motives and biases of those who create and utilize these algorithms, they must be made public and open-source.

The following are 10 of the pieces of music included on the Golden Record that was included on the Voyager spacecraft. I have chosen 10 of the 27 as a curated collection:

1. “Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05
2. “Dark Was the Night,” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15
3. Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14
4. China, ch’in, “Flowing Streams,” performed by Kuan P’ing-hu. 7:37
5. India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30
6. Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
7. Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
8. Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo,” collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
9. Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26
10. Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56

I chose these 10 based first on music that I personally enjoy and would choose to listen to, which oddly ended up being only the first 3 of my selections. Most of the pieces included on the Golden Record are not songs that I would personally ever choose to listen to! The rest I picked somewhat haphazardly to try to get some semblance of geographic and racial diversity represented in my curation. With the limited selection on the Golden Record, and being limited to a total of 10 pieces, this proved challenging to determine what to include. The Golden Record did attempt to do this, but was compiled from a very white, American, euro-centric perspective, that seems to have limited if any input from other cultures. The heavy inclusion of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart and their belief that they are superior pieces of music due to their supposed mathematical perfection shows some of the bias of the original compilers. The lack of more modern popular music also displays a bias against it and dampens the ability of the record to be representative of a greater diversity of cultures and time periods of humanity. It is also unclear if the other countries and cultures would choose the same music to represent them if they had been given a voice. Ultimately, my selection after the first 3 pieces is an attempt at a somewhat random distribution of different continents, cultures, and countries, with an attempt made at not over-representing any one continent.

Task 7 asks us to change the semiotic mode of Task 1. Task 1 was a picture representation of a common bag that we carry along with its contents, that are meant to be representative in some way of who we are. I have changed the semiotic mode to an aural one, and provided a description of my bag and its contents by recording the sounds they make when in use. Please have a listen:

Are you able to guess at all what the bag is, what any of the contents are, or what its purpose is? Does this recording give you any sense of who I am or anything about me? Listening to it myself, knowing what everything is, I think largely I would be unable to identify most of the objects, but there are a few that have very specific sounds that should give away the bag itself and its purpose if you recognize them.

The audio serves to help create an entirely different mental picture of the bag and its contents. I think on its own, it is not as useful at identifying the items than the picture was, but certain sounds seem to generate a more visceral emotional response when you hear and recognize them than a spoken description or image can. There are some other advantages to the audio versus the picture – compared to an image, if one were to only have the audio of the bag and its contents, you might be able to get a better sense of the materials that the items are made from. The fasteners also make distinctive noises that may not be clear on an image. I think the most powerful semiotic mode is a combination of modes embracing the multiliteracies (The New London Group, 1996) that we all posses – if I had combined the audio and the image along with a verbal description, you would get a much better sense of the contents. Even listening, then looking at the photo, and then listening again, you can likely identify most of the sounds, even if you didn’t get them at first. I think the most powerful aspect of modern text technologies is the ability to combine them with other semiotic modes and literacies – visual, audio, tactile, etc.

Here is a link to the original task if you would like to know what you listened to: Task 1: What’s in your bag?

How does your narrative about me and my bag change now that you know what it is?

Here is the title and brief synopsis of the plot of the last movie, TV show, or book I watched/read, in emoji form:

edit: I lost my emojis when I published this post, apparently WordPress doesn’t like them, so I had to redo it and post it as a picture:

I found this oddly challenging! I relied more on trying to find emoji representations of words, but that often didn’t seem possible, so in some cases tried to capture an idea more than a singular word. It does seem like emojis are much better able to portray concepts or ideas rather than singular words, with some exceptions. I did start with the title, because that seemed like the place to start. I think this is because that is how I am used to things working. I always know the title of something before I begin reading or watching it – it is how most media is structured, and so becomes the default starting point for me. There wasn’t a thought process about it, as it is so ingrained in me.

I didn’t choose the work based on how easy it would be, and actually found it rather difficult! Perhaps I would have been better off choosing something more straightforward with an easier to convey plot.

I’m not completely comfortable with emojis. I do use them in normal day-to-day texting, but to a rather small degree – generally just to convey straightforward emotion. I resisted using emojis for a very long time, due to a feeling like they were a lesser form of communication. This bias eventually gave way to practicality and convenience – emojis are much faster to use, and can provide emotional and contextual content to a message very easily. For example, they can convey when something is meant to be humorous, which is not always easy to capture in a short text message – sarcasm especially does not translate well to short texts. I now have no issue using emojis in casual conversation, and find them quite helpful and useful, but do not have the same fluency that I see in some people who can utilize them for more than just emotion and tone representation. I think this made this task a bit more difficult – if I was a regular user of more than just the variations of the smiley-face, I think I could have better represented the plot of the media that I chose. I think this is a really clear representation that this is a new form of language in many ways – it requires new skills to become adept and fluent at both understanding and using it.

Here is my first attempt at a Twine game, which I have titled “Pandemic Haircut!”:

PANDEMIC HAIRCUT!

Creating this game and using Twine was actually quite easy and fairly fun to do. The layout and functionality mimics both basic html programming, which I have some basic knowledge in, as well as the general structure of word processors and layout processors. The layout of a Twine game is essentially a concept map or flowchart, and anyone with basic experience with that should understand it. Some quick Googling gave answers to allow some slightly more involved Twine mechanics like revealing text on the same page when clicking on other text. The linking system between pages of the game is also essentially the same as what many blogs use (including WordPress that this blog uses).

I found that the ability to branch and link the story naturally leads to a kind of ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ type of game, although one could easily make a more linear and traditional ‘turn-the-page’ type of story. The ability to link back to previous pages, and link several outcomes to the same page leads one to make certain types of decisions and structure the story in a certain way – I found it leading me towards a certain type of humor. It makes me wonder what the structure of a traditional book, or older non-computerized games, does to the type of stories being written and told? How much of our writing and it’s inherent structure is dependent on the medium and the assumptions it causes?

For Task 4, I wrote a diary entry:

I almost exclusively type when I write, and almost never write by hand. I think this may be obvious from the neatness and legibility (or lack thereof) in my writing. I did find this task somewhat difficult, as I haven’t written this much by hand in a very long time. I found that it took longer, as I can type much faster. My hand also started to hurt a bit by the end! I actually used to have very beautiful cursive, as I was required in elementary school to write everything in cursive, and was required to practice regularly. Once I got to high school, however, it was no longer required, and I decided to switch to printing for some reason. By university, typing was standard, and my skill at writing by hand deteriorated steadily from then on.

When I made a mistake, I either crossed or scribbled it out, or tried to go back and write over it and squeeze in missing letters, for example. I essentially did not edit my work, and had to think a bit more about it before putting it to the page, but it does also limit the editing that I could do. If I wanted to do more than extremely minor word changes, I would need to rewrite the entire document. Writing by hand decreased the amount of editing that I normally do substantially.

The two most significant differences that I found between typing and writing by hand are speed and ease of editing. I could have typed this same thing in half the time, and I also would have been able to edit it and improve the grammar, structure, and overall flow. I certainly prefer typing, as I feel that it produces a better end product faster. The fact that I am much better at it than writing by hand plays a big part in that, as it is much easier to read what I type than what I write by hand due to my poor handwriting skills!

For this task I used the built-in voice-to-text feature of an iPhone, using the Notes app. Here is the result:

so we have a second bedroom in our apartment that we have been using as a TV room I mean your room I guess it has a nice couch and mounted the TV on the wall and has speakers and a stereo also why everything wired through the wall so it all looks nice but now we need to change it back from a TV room into a bedroom to use it for someone to be sleeping in the future in the near future so I have to move the TV and put it somewhere else and she decided to put it into our main bedroom which isn’t exactly what we had more but that originally but that’s OK so at first it was pretty straightforward to take it off the wall move everything and put it into the other bedroom but then I realized we now have about six fairly large holes in the wall that I’m going to have to catch up before were able to use the room in the bedroom again normally it’s not a big deal just go to the store and get what I need if I was missing anything and then start on it I did actually need to get a few things but right now course there’s a pandemic so it’s a little hard to or makes it a bit harder to go to the store bit of more of an adventure now to go to the store and buy whatever you need I’ve ended up having to go about four or five separate times now I have to go and put a mask on and lineup outside the store luck with the weather‘s been nice so it hasn’t been a huge deal but it is still make it a bit more interesting and a bit more frustrating every time I realize that missing something that I need to get it done and then I just patching the holes and send it down and patching again it’s taking quite a bit longer than expected luckily there’s not a huge time crunch involved to have lots of time to do it but still a little frustrating so now I have a a while that is mostly patched but not quite completely finished and a TV in the bedroom which I never really wanted before but we don’t have anywhere else to put it can’t even really get rid of it or give it to a friend either sell it at this point because of the pandemic makes that kind of thing a little bit more challenging as well. I’m also gonna have to go in and buy some paint to repaint the wall Home Depot of course didn’t have the what I needed so I have to go to some other paint store which is only open till 4 PM because they have reduced hours which also makes it harder to go and get what we need.I’m also a little more conscious of the noise that my home renovations make since everyone else is also at home most the day or most people are not going to work at this point so I’m trying to limit the amount of noise I make while I’m doing this which normally isn’t as big of an issue. I am almost done though which is nice so we should soon have a wall that hopefully looks almost like new like there was never any hole holes punched into it and will have a functioning second bedroom once again.

How does the text deviate from written English?

Besides making me sound insane, it deviates quite a bit! I only realized at the very end that the app doesn’t punctuate at all automatically, but that I can add a period by saying “period”. It also oddly didn’t capitalize the very first word. Beyond the complete lack of punctuation, including no commas, there are also no separate paragraphs, so it ends up being almost entirely one long rambling incoherent sentence. I googled iphone dictation commands after I completed this, and realized there are ways to add these missing things:

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT208343

• Quote/end quote: begin and end a quote
• New paragraph: start a new paragraph
• New line: begin a new line
• Cap: capitalize the next word
• Caps on/caps off: capitalize the first character of each word

Obviously that is something I should have looked into before recording!

The text also reads like it is someone speaking instead of something that is written. By this I mean it has more casual language, and lots of interjections mid-sentence or mid-thought. There are also errors in the choice of words, but also likely some errors that were made when I was speaking that technically the app recorded correctly – it’s just that I misspoke (repeated words for example). It also correctly translated very casual word usage such as ‘gonna’ which I wouldn’t normally use in written communication. I think some of the mistakes in the text were the app trying to interpret “hmms”, “ummms”, and “ahs”, which interestingly it didn’t record verbatim but instead appears to have tried to translate into words at times, and ignored completely at others. It has many cases of missed words as well, which cause grammatical errors in some of the sentences, an example being “most the day” instead of “most of the day”.

An example of an error in the text that is also commonly missed by spellchecker software is the use of “lineup” when it should be the verb form “line up”. It made some mistakes that may be due to the way I pronounce words, such as “luck” where it should be “lucky”, “catch” instead of “patch”, or “make” where it should be “made”. It seemed to miss or misinterpret the start or end of many words.

Many of the mistakes in the text I believe are due to the way that I speak, I may start to say something, pause, rethink what I am saying and then either interject with some new thought, or continue but in a different way. If this were written first rather than spoken, that would all be edited out and the text would flow much more coherently and with more purpose. It would also make much more sense with commas where there should be pauses or interjections.

The lack of punctuation is the biggest mistake, and it is definitely a mistake, as it changes the meaning of several sections, as well as makes the story much harder to read. The lack of punctuation actually makes it incredibly tiring to try to read.

Oral storytelling allows for more variation – parts can be added on the fly and the story can be changed to suit the audience, as examples. It does suffer from a lack of coherence and intention. It is much more difficult to stay on point, as you can easily become distracted and lose your place in the story or your line of thought. I found myself at a lack for words at a few points, and had large pauses which would have been very awkward had anyone been listening. I think if I had known the main punctuation commands before starting the story would have turned out much better, and the stopping at the end of each sentence or paragraph to say the punctuation command may have allowed me to better organize my thoughts on the story and stay on point. I assumed that this app would attempt to automatically punctuate, as I have used other software in the past that did so. If I had scripted the story, I think ultimately it would have been more interesting. It would have had a clear beginning, middle, and end, and had some purpose to it. This ended up being a rambling story without a real purpose or clear end to it, I more or less just stopped speaking at some point. Recording a story seemed to be more difficult than telling a story to people. When I am actually speaking to people, my expressions and gestures add to the story, and I am able to interact with the audience. Recording a story with no script or audience proved a real challenge.