“Technology is neither good, nor is it bad, nor is it neutral” – Melvin Cransberg
Episode 60 – Leading Lines: The future of digital literacies.
The future of nursing? This fear, of being replaced by robots, has been around for many years in the field. It is also a common theme in future themed science fiction. Now, this reality may be approaching.
The Task
I have to admit, I had a really, really hard time with this task. It requires a level of creativity that I just do not have available to me at this time.
I went through several prompts until I could find one that I thought I could work with.
Describe or narrate a scenario about an artwork found a few years into a future in which order is deliberately coordinated or imposed. Your description should address issues related to the court system and elicit feelings of awkwardness.
The museum was quiet as two men in crisp, tailored suits stood amid the large marble halls. The first man looked around and contemplated the various pieces of art on the walls. His eyes skimmed a blank space and he frowned.
“What is that blank space on the wall?” He turned to his friend in confusion, watching as the other man turned to observe the space with a disinterested hum.
“I think there was a painting there a few years ago.” The man stated in a bored manner as he looked at the obvious blank space on the otherwise packed, but orderly wall. There was even a space where the plaque would have gone, removed from sight, “They haven’t gotten around to replacing it yet. Funds.”
“What? What was wrong with the painting? Was it offensive?” The first man questioned. The second man fixed the lapels of his pristine suit and shrugged half-heartedly.
“I think it was an abstract.” He replied, eyes scanning the space absently. “It was there before the ruling came down from the Supreme Court of Canada about abstract art.”
“What’s wrong with abstract art?”
“It goes against the law of orderliness.” The second man explained, his tone becoming didactic, like a professor in a classroom. “The law states that every piece of art has to contribute to the greater good…a past leader, for example, and has to elicit a feeling of happiness or satisfaction towards the government. An abstract painting, particularly one with disparaging colours like red or blue is against this law. Hence, it was probably taken down. Nothing to be done I suppose. It was against the law”.
The curator approached the pair; a dour looking man with a pair of spectacles around his neck on a loose chain. He came to a stop next to them and stared up at the blank space; almost unseeingly. The two men looked to him in confusion as he began speaking unprompted.
“The painting was about questioning the establishment and thinking critically about what you are seeing. It wasn’t unhappy or seditious at all, and yet when the Supreme Court decides…” The man eyed the two knowingly, before his gaze shot back to the blank space. “…It must be carried through, hm?”
“I mean, we can’t have anything out of place, making us question the order of things and causing confusion for the masses. Especially art.” The curator took on an air of sad thoughtfulness, and said “what is the purpose of art, after all? Is it not there as an expression of thought or emotion?”
“How does one single entity decide on what is art and what is acceptable, after all?” He expressed passionately, gesturing wildly around him at the museum walls with their orderly paintings and statues of Prime Ministers, Heads of State and War Heroes.
The two men looked at each other and then at the gesturing man and decided to quickly take their leave. Being not inclined to debate Supreme Court law with this strange little man who was not part of their rule-bound, orderly world.
Technology is pervasive and inundates every aspect of our lives in Western Society today. Ever since Alan Turing developed the Turing Test in 1950, and Bell Laboratory’s Audrey, humans have been trying to simulate human speech. From the early days of the computer and word processing programs there has been a call for voice recognition software to help increase the flow of thought to page. Speech recognition software uses natural language uttered by humans to a machine to perform an action by a smartphone, computer, or other devices (Technologies, 2022). The technology has humble beginnings in 1773 Russia (Moskvitch, 2022), though it was not officially recognized or successful until 1952, when Audrey arrived at the phone company. She had limited success, however, until the idea caught the attention of the military. With the single-minded purpose of military invention for making war and national defence more effective, the scientists at DARPA created “Harpy”, who had a vocabulary of 1000 words equal to that of a toddler (Technologies, 2022).
The next major leap in speech recognition technology went from the military to the toy factory. In 1982, “Julie” was introduced as the world’s first ‘talking’ doll. She had a chip that recognized speech sounds and could respond to them appropriately (Technologies, 2022).
Up to this point, speech recognition software was based on the smallest unit of sounds within speech (phonemes), so was limited in what it could recognize. It had difficulties with accents, various speakers, or those who did not enunciate clearly.
As demand grew, and this manner of speech recognition was untenable, scientists began to turn to natural language processing (NLP). This system used algorithmic processing to determine what was said, using it’s best guess to determine words it did not understand, based on programmed rules for the language.
This is where speech recognition sat and waited for man’s reach to catch up to ambition. The global corporate giant, Google, introduced the first innovation in speech recognition software over a decade after Julie and Harpy were introduced. As phones became smaller and more portable, typing on them became more challenging. People wanted and needed an easier way to input data than typing it out on a tiny keyboard on their phone. Now Google offered voice-based commands for searching anything. “Google, what is this song called?” “Google, what is the weather today?” have now become common phrases heard in many households.
Interestingly, in a situation of life imitating art (or science fiction, in this case), the inspiration for Amazon’s work on Alexa came from the computer voice in Star Trek.
Speech recognition technology had now come full circle – what started as oral communication centuries ago became written communication, became electronic communication, and is now back to oral communication.
Dictation technology started simply, from a manager talking to a human assistant who took notes word for word in a shorthand language to be later transcribed into full words, to stenographers recording court proceedings by pressing a few buttons in a machine to transcribe to full words, to physicians dictating notes into a phone recording to be transcribed by a human into a written report. These humble beginnings evolved into increasingly sophisticated technologies as the need for increased efficiency, cost savings and short turnaround times increased in the faster paced world of today. “While companies differ in whether the technology is offered as a replacement of medical transcription or as a tool for assisting the process, a consistent claim across the speech recognition industry is that SRTs [speech recognition technology] can reduce costs due to faster turn-around times of medical documentation, higher efficiency, and increased accuracy (David et al., 2009, p. 926 – 927).
Voice-to-Text technologies have become much more popular, particularly for those who have difficulty with written language and writing and this technology has eliminated the need for a trained human to translate or transcribe words from shorthand notes or voice recording. But has it really eliminated this need? David et al (2009) report that human, specially trained medical transcriptionists (MT) are still required. They state: “…the work of MTs is far more complex than just typing what is spoken in voice files. Their work requires complex professionally-informed interpretive acts that in turn require sustained attention to the social order properties and content of the doctor’s dictation, knowledge of medical terms and procedures, and an understanding of interactional processes, conventions of dictating, and of producing monologic speech acts.” (David et al., 2009 p. 925). So, while speech recognition technology is advanced, easy to use, and efficient, in some cases, such as specialized dictation contexts, humans are still required to interpret and edit the produced text. “Although not designed or even conceptualized to benefit students with disabilities, this concept would definitely have an impact on the learning and access to material for students with all different types of disabilities.” (Bakken et al., 2019, p. 51).
What bearing does this have on pedagogy? In nursing and medical education, it can have significant impact.
For post-secondary institutions, technological advancements also benefit students, faculty, and staff alike. Technologies like simulation and virtual reality are used more extensively now in nursing education than ever before, and are, in some cases, replacing actual ‘hands on’ practice on real patients. This technology has become even more commonplace since the pandemic necessitated withdrawing students from clinical practice environments such as hospital units. “Note taking has remained a learning strategy in academic settings since the time of Socrates.” (Emory et al., 2021, p. 235 – 236)
Traditional classrooms, including those in nursing education have relied on students taking their own handwritten or typed notes. “Note taking is a complex cognitive task that requires students to listen, temporarily store information in the short-term memory, paraphrase, and write down the information before losing it, all while attending to incoming new information. Effective note taking requires management of these cognitive demands” (Emory et al., 2021, p. 236)
Even without medical masks in the classroom, students are still barricaded from view of the instructor behind their laptop screens. The laptop and mobile device are now used for note taking in the classroom. It is rare to see pen and paper used for taking notes in any learning environment.
The studies disagree on which is better for learning and retention between handwritten and electronic note taking (Emory et al., 2021). None of the sources reviewed mentioned using voice to text technologies for classroom use, particularly around taking notes. The rise of accommodations in nursing classrooms demonstrate that modern technologies are required to keep pace with demand. Increasingly, students are recording lectures for later transcription and closed captioning through voice recognition is used more often in Zoom and online meetings and classroom presentations. Though this use of real time written transcription during classroom activities can be distracting for some learners, it is valuable to others who may have difficulty keeping up with, understanding or hearing the speaker.
Another possibility for SRT is during the nursing student’s clinical practice. Documentation is a large part of the professional nurse’s job. While electronic health records (EHR) are now the norm in most hospitals and health centres, they vary widely in effectiveness, usability, and comprehensiveness. Currently, most health care settings, along with health care education is verbal and text based. The only time SRT is used is for closed captioning of recorded or live presentations or events and for medical dictation. The uses, however, could be applied to the day-to-day functioning of the nurse and nursing student. It is possible to, for example, record a post clinical meeting (with all participants’ permission) for later review by students. The learning that happens during post clinical meetings is invaluable, with often rich discussions and reflection around actual patient and clinical situations, with guidance from the clinical instructor. These are ample opportunities for consolidation of knowledge, though unlike a lecture or classroom discussion there usually aren’t structured conversations or opportunities for note taking. A transcribed recording of a discussion of a complex patient scenario could serve as study tools for practical exams, such as the nursing graduation exams.
Another scenario where SRT could be utilized is for documentation during a clinical shift. Often, in hospital environments, a student will have multiple patients to provide care for and little time to document that care in between patients. Most often, nurses must save up their data (usually on a piece of paper in their pocket, a ‘cheat sheet’) and enter it into the electronic chart at the end of the shift. While documentation is supposed to be done in ‘real time’, as soon as the event occurs, this is often not possible with the heavy workload demands of nurses and nursing students on a busy hospital unit. If they could carry a hospital tablet or device with them, instead of a piece of paper, they could dictate their notes right away and enter it into the system. Most voice-to-text applications will allow the user to edit on the fly, and depending on the app, will punctuate and edit as well. This could save time, as the nurse would only have to check the already documented notes. This would also help prevent events going undocumented before a major crisis, which can happen as things change quickly in acute situations. A patient can deteriorate before the nurse has had a chance to document, and must record events after the fact, rather than as it is unfolding.
Bringing voice to text technology back to the classroom, it is becoming more prevalent and useful for not just students who are other abled, but all nursing students in a complex and ever-expanding field. “As technology has changed over the last decade, some students report increased preference and usage of electronic devices to augment their learning.” (Emory et al., 2021, p. 243).
In nursing, as with other fields of education, the use of technology is unavoidable and encouraged. “Nurse educators should consider the positive advantages of these devices to actively engage students in the classroom, as many strategies using the latest advances in technology have been implemented with success. Engaging students with these devices can keep them attracted to the classroom activities. The use of advances in technology is critical to nursing program to prepare students in the uses of technology for the jobs of the future.” (Emory et al., 2021, p. 243).
References
Bakken, J. P., Uskov, V. L., Rayala, N., Syamala, J., Shah, A., Aluri, L., & Sharma, K. (2019). Smart
education and e-learning 2018. In The Quality of Text-to-Voice and Voice-to-Text Software Systems for Smart Universities: Perceptions of College Students with Disabilities (Vol. 99). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92363-5_5
Brian Roemmele. (2017, January 8). The 1987 Voice First Doll: Julie by Worlds of Wonder
David, G. C., Garcia, A. C., Rawls, A. W., & Chand, D. (2009). Listening to what is said – transcribing what
is heard: the impact of speech recognition technology (SRT) on the practice of medical transcription (MT). Sociology of Health &Amp; Illness, 31(6), 924–938. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01186.x
Emory, J., Teal, T., & Holloway, G. (2021). Electronic note taking technology and academic performance in
I chose to curate this list of links to other’s works in one page, rather than separate posts. I’m not sure whether this is good or poor, but this is the way I structure things in my brain.
I chose Amy’s page as this is one of the tasks that I didn’t complete, though I was very interested in the topic of the task, that of language shaping the way we think.
I resonated with what she was saying in terms of language and gender – some languages, such as French and German, use gender to identify objects in the sentence, and her post really made me think about this phenomenon. I grew up in Montreal, and (used to) speak French fairly fluently. I hadn’t thought about the use of gender in language in many years, and this post brought back my questions about why the choice of gender was assigned to various objects. For example, in French, why is a beach feminine (la plage) and a city centre masculine (le centre-ville)? As an animist (someone who believes that all things have a spirit, including inanimate objects), this resonates with me as I hadn’t thought about this use of language for a very long time.
Amy used WordPress to publish her blog, which is a free (for UBC students) and easy to use platform for blog posts. Is this platform identified as feminine or masculine in French? I don’t know. 🙂
I also used WordPress, for the same reasons, and found her site easy to use to find what I wanted to – her menu is clear, and it is easy to find the task I was looking for as navigation is direct and well laid out. One thing I do find difficult with WordPress formatting is that the text comes out as one long scrolling text, which can be intimidating for someone who has lower English literacy. I like the way she interspersed quotations to break up the long paragraphs, as otherwise, it can be visually discouraging.
I enjoyed the description of her personal experiences with language and how they impact her teaching including her musings on her own pedagogy when teaching social studies. Ultimately, we try to teach critical thinking in our subjects, and viewing subject matter from various perspectives is part of that process. She makes an intriguing point about the use of gender being embedded in a language in this way, and how this will be impacted in societies where the identification of gender is becoming more fluid.
I chose Petro’s Voice to Text task because it was quite different from mine, though similar in some ways as well. As I did, he discovered that written speech is more easily understood from others perspectives. He notes that if this was a written, rather than verbal text, he could take the time to better craft the story, with proper punctuation and grammar conventions. I really like the way he notes that he doesn’t “have a dictionary” in his mind as he’s writing. He concludes that he did get his story across, though the execution left much to be desired.
The format used is Padlet, which is a little more visually appealing to me. The navigation is similar to WordPress, though the layout seems simpler and less intimidating to look at from an accessibility point of view. I also like that the comments section is very visually different from the main blog, and has a nice background graphic that, again, makes it more visually appealing. I also liked that the initial page you land on is a distinct home page with some info about him.
While he did discuss his post in terms of the course material, he didn’t clearly link it to pedagogy. Some of this can be implied in that he speaks of the difficulty of presenting things orally vs written formats and he is an ESL teacher. One conclusion that could be made from this post is that he thinks very carefully about how he is presenting language in both oral and written formats.
I enjoyed reading this post as it is very personable and easy to read, having a more conversational tone than formal academic posting.
I really connected with Lubna’s post. While I did a rap, her aural presentation of her bag objects was much more unique and personal.
While I had to go back to look at her original photo to see what some of the objects were, I did already have a sense by listening to the ‘soundtrack’ that went with them before I checked with the original picture. The fact that the recordings were made by her (curating her own soundtrack) also lended a much more personal aspect to the post. She states this was a more visceral experience, and I would agree with this sentiment. I really liked how each sound was carefully chosen to signify a much broader and deeper context than her written words could convey.
She also identified a personal assumption that was challenged in this task, about the idea that all academic work was in English, which demonstrates her deep thinking about how language shapes the way we think and interact with the world.
Lubna also used WordPress, though hers looks much better than mine. She has included a more robust menu navigation than mine, including archived files by month, and her picture affixed to each page/post. This is much more visually appealing than a block of paragraphs like mine.
I can see that her ideas about pedagogy are multimodal and flexible, and that she is willing to challenge her own assumptions and beliefs through the learning process. It is also clear that she can translate the visceral experience to a metacognitive process, contextualizing meaning-making in a new and different way.
This was a very personal and intimate view into her world, and I really enjoyed interacting with this post, understanding the context, if not the actual words spoken in her sound clips.
This post struck me at a very deep level and presented a viewpoint that I am working on challenging. This post really made me consider my own thinking about viewpoints and context. This is a really thoughtful post about de-colonizing the curated list by excluding Western European composers in a deliberate manner.
I am very involved with de-colonizing the nursing program I work in, though surprisingly, I didn’t think of this as I worked on this task. Chris’s post struck right at the heart of decolonization and spoke about the systematic erasure of Indigenous culture. There is a bias that was evident in the original list, as it was curated by White, European men. That Chris was able to recognize this bias and counteract it with his list is impressive and speaks to his ability to look at biases and challenge assumptions that many may not realize.
He also used WordPress, as it is free and easy to use. The formatting was simple, straightforward and easy to read. The menu navigation was humble and unassuming, with no distractors. Is this indicative of a straightforward and unassuming style of teaching, while being aware of biases and encouragement of critical thinking to challenge personal assumptions?
This post was most striking for me, as it very much challenged my own biases and caused me to recognize the biases that exist in my own thinking. This was very thought provoking and I enjoyed looking at the challenge that this post presented to my own assumptions.
I connected with this assignment as it rang true to my own struggles with the assignment and using the palladio app. She, like me, fought to understand the basic tenets of the assignment and the app, having little experience with data visualization.
She also came to the same conclusions I did: That without more information than was provided, we were unable to determine why those particular tracks were chosen. This data visualization only showed the statistical information of what songs were chosen, rather than the reasons why the data (songs) were chosen in the first place. It also didn’t tell us what was missing from the song list. She included some probing questions in her reflections and strong insights in her Implications section. Which I didn’t include in my post.
Kristine used Padlet, I believe, for her posts. I only assume this because of the layout of the home page in tiles, rather than lists of links like, for example, WordPress would use. I like the creativity of this format in the home page, with it’s less structured visuals and colourful background graphic. The post itself is black on white print – high contrast, which makes it easier to read in terms of accessibility.
I also enjoyed and commented on her personal story of how she and her husband choose selections for their DJ business, according to the demographic of the event they are working on. This requires pre-knowledge of the event and who would be attending, and meeting with the organizers themselves to get a feel for what is wanted. I think this reflects her own teaching style, wanting to make a personal connection with the intended audience, getting to know them to be able to tailor an approach specifically for that particular audience.
The thoughts about implications of what this type of data curation can have in the ‘real world’ are insightful and very thought provoking.
I chose this post because it was one that I did not do as I chose the other option. I was interested in seeing how this option was manifested by others.
Though this post is short, this person did present some probing questions about the use of AI technology. It would have been nice to see what their answers were for the situations (what did they choose for the situation), or perhaps a summary of what they decided. They did summarize the overall experience and what was considered in making the decision. They also had some great discussion about how AI is used and how it’s use is flawed. With AI not being able to contextualize important decisions, they suggest that it should explain how it came to the decision, and that these decisions are based purely on historical data, which contains biases.
I believe Google sites was chosen as a platform here, though this was not easy information to find on the page. I also had a hard time finding what this person’s name was, so went by what was listed in the student’s websites list the professor had uploaded. From an accessibility point of view, the text was a little difficult to read, as it was very small and not high contrast. The background graphic was very nice, and added to the visual appeal, though it was difficult to read the small black print against the pink background.
Due to the short piece, it is difficult to determine how this task is influenced by their pedagogy, though there is some great critical questions posed about the use of AI technology in life changing decisions and how we should be using it.
I chose this option as I’ve always been fascinated by science fiction and the ways in which life imitates art through venues like sci-fi.
I’ve seen AI generated art before, and saw that human faces were the most difficult thing for the programs to ‘draw’.
When I went to Craiyon, I input two prompts.
The first prompt was “Horse playing a piano”
This image is not at all what I expected. I pictured a horse, sitting on a piano stool, literally with a hoof on the keyboard. What I got was horses and pianos, put into the same picture, superimposed on each other. Some of the images, like the first one in the upper left corner, are partly there with the image I wanted, but the others are not really depicting the topic of the picture I wanted.
I tried a Boolean search, “horse+playing+piano” to see if I would get something closer to what I wanted.
Using this search term, I got a little closer, particularly the bottom left picture of the two horses licking the piano keyboard. This could be a picture of grazing horses superimposed on a piano keyboard, as they’d have to be standing on top of the piano from that angle…But it is closer to the image I had in mind. Even the middle one on the right is much closer, though seems a bit distorted. It is at least a painting, rather than images put into the same picture.
The next prompt was “Beautiful flowers in a field”. I was curious to see what the computer would interpret as ‘beautiful’.
This image is basically a Google search of colourful wildflowers in a field. I wonder if the term ‘beautiful’ was pulled from many of the titles on the internet of pictures of flowers. So the computer took this as an interpretation of the keyword beautiful. This just seems like a Google Image search that I could have done myself. Which I did below.
I did a Google Image search using the same prompt and got very similar images:
I then looked at different AI generated art programs using the same prompt as ‘horse playing piano’, in Night Cafe and Hot Pot.ai. These seem to be just images, gathered from the web, of the keywords I used, like “horse” and “piano”, or “flowers” and “field”, just superimposing the images in the same frame in some way. This seems like the same process that Craiyon used.
Night Cafe resulted in this:
Definitely more of a painting/drawing than previous composite images in Craiyon, but no piano at all.
This is from Hot Pot.ai. More of a horse and a piano painting, but not really the horse playing a piano. The piano is even turned away from the horse, like in the other pictures, so it’s basically just sitting there, and not making a lot of sense in the context of the picture. This is one huge difference about human vs machine thinking – contextual factors and inference based on those factors.
I’ve been thinking about this topic of AI generated ‘art’ and the podcasts speaking about AI being more about detecting patterns from large amounts of data (mostly historical data) and collating it into something like a graph, percentage or rate.
Why does a computer want to paint/make a picture? It doesn’t. It was told to. The only motivation is from the user.
Why does an elephant want to paint a picture? We don’t really know why, but there has to be a motivation to do so (through training, whether positive or negatively enforced, or just wanting to please their handler), or the elephant wouldn’t do it. You can see that all three elephants in this video painted different pictures. Maybe because they were trained to do so from different handlers, but the question remains – is this the same as human learning or more akin to machine learning?
Training/education vs machine learning is food for debate, certainly. It also got me thinking about art and music and how these, like other forms of art, both express and evoke emotion. I looked at whether music could be generated through AI and what the difference might be. I did find two videos that demonstrate the contrast. The first one is a computer generated piece of music based on Chopin (the video creator didn’t want his video embedded, so I just have the link). https://youtu.be/iDFQ4EyxErk
Then you can listen at this video from a (very talented) person, about their take on several classical musicians at a birthday party fighting over the last piece of cake. Both are interpreting various styles of classical composers. So, what would the difference be?
Can you hear the difference between the computer generated piece and the musician generated piece? What are your thoughts?
What does this have to do with algorithms? As Dr. O’Neil reiterates over and over, the algorithm is only as good as the data that is input into it. How was the algorithm designed? Why? What is it supposed to do? These, and many other questions about use, motivation and consequences of the algorithm must be asked to have them truly work the way we want them to.
This was probably the most frustrating, annoying thing I’ve ever worked with! While there are apps out there that could compete with this one, it did make the point – with a sledgehammer. In an article about usability, Woolgar (1990, p. 60), states:
“It should be clear by now that technology, and information technology (IT) in particular, is just the latest excuse for doing social science.”
I was not able to get past the first page, despite discovering how to get around the deceptions – “send to bottom” and the “close” button hidden in the corner of the nag screen for the timer. I also had to select and de-select the agreement box many times, an obvious ploy to make you agree to their terms despite the double negative in the sentence. You can’t proceed unless you do not agree to the privacy terms – so your information is available for them to use any way they want. A subtle and deceptive manipulation to get around privacy laws.
This exercise, to me, is akin to the whole subversive subliminal advertising controversy in the ’60’s and ’70’s. This debate was around advertising companies using subtle images or words embedded in advertising to increase sales, usually around sexual content. More recently, Gherasim & Gherasim (2020) discuss the use of neuromarketing. This is the use of neuroscience to influence the consumer public: “…the subliminal suggestions it contains can be compared to the hypnotic ones. Such advertising messages are therefore intended to influence a consumer’s intention to buy, without the consumer being aware of the true source of motivation.” (p. 41).
“…the subliminal suggestions it contains can be compared to the hypnotic ones. Such advertising messages are therefore intended to influence a consumer’s intention to buy, without the consumer being aware of the true source of motivation.” (p. 41).
This is similar to the issues of the attention economy – marketers, businesses and developers wanting to force users into paying attention to what they want them to pay attention to. This is clear in this case of the game. This ‘game’ is trying to configure the user, as Woolgar (1990) puts it by dictating what is deemed important by the people designing it.
Could this phenomenon of the attention economy, and perhaps also neuromarketing, be compared to the use of ‘clickbait’ to increase views in social media platforms? Particularly for those content creators who are monetized or trying to get monetized?
The visualization can certainly give you the links and connections between curators and their choices, however, it does not indicate why those particular tracks were chosen. For instance, for my own, I reordered the tracks in a specific way to match the evolutionary progress of the planet that was presented in the first part of the record. Each person has their own personal reasons for choosing what they did, including the original NASA curators of the Golden Record.
Without going through each person’s website, there is no way to understand the reasons behind their choices, unless we make some grand assumptions about the culture and biases of the people curating the lists. For example, while they are from all different backgrounds and places in the world, they all have an interest in education/technology, all are in a Master’s program at a Canadian University and have a high degree of literacy. Other than these commonalities, however, you cannot make assumptions about why people chose the tracks they did and why others were rejected.
For example, Amy and I have 4 tracks in common. These tracks were chosen for very different reasons – mine as above, Amy’s for how the piece made her feel, generally hopeful and positive. For Chris and I and Amy, there are only two tracks that all three of us have in common. The reasons are very different, mine for evolutionary progress, Amy for personal feelings and Chris for the de-colonizing aspect of each of the song on the list, excluding white, European settlers.
one data visualisation
The most popular choice was Track 6: El Cascabel (though I didn’t chose this one). The least popular was Track 12: Tchakrulo. There is no explanation through this tool why these choices were the most popular or least popular, we just get the data. To understand why these were chosen or discarded, one has to go to the source to discover the reasons. While two tracks were tied with 20 out of 20 choosing them, there were only 4 nodes in common between these two. Again, there are no explanations as to why this was the case.
Overall, one conclusion that can be drawn is that the person curating the list/selection has innate biases that will influence what makes the list and what doesn’t. The original list itself was selected by humans with their own biases, with no explanation of why, in the vast collection of worldwide music and song, these particular pieces were chosen over others. In the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz (Voyager Golden Record, 2019) about the Golden Record collection, the curator(s) discuss their reasoning for choosing the 21 songs they did to represent humanity as a whole.
While it is very difficult to be completely without bias, one needs to recognize and understand the reasoning behind the bias. Setting clear parameters as to why the pieces were chosen in the first place can contribute to understanding the selection. For example, many people chose the pieces they did because of the way the piece of music makes them feel – this experience may be very different for each individual. Others were more logical about choices, though even the logical choices were biased. It would be interesting to set the list of a representation of humanity to a true computer intelligence and see what it comes up with. In her book “Atlas of AI”, Kate Crawford (2021) says there is no true artificial intelligence. All computer data is dependant upon many human factors – the computational power available, parameters input, what data is chosen to input in the first place, and so on (Crawford, 2021).
A quick Google search of “what music best represents humanity” reveals a huge variety of opinions and lists as varied as the population itself. This list, from Beethoven to Bob Marley to Frank Sinatra, is representative of mostly Western/North American culture, who make up a huge percentage of Reddit users. An example of inherent unconscious cultural bias.
It would be intriguing to see what a farm worker from Nepal would list, or someone from a Muslim or Communist community would list as representative of humanity as a whole.
Any list, curated by human beings, is going to inherently include choices made from personal context and exclude those from personal context, regardless of how logically the parameters are applied. This is particularly true for collections that are more emotive in nature, such as art.
Francisco, F. A. M. O. S. (2021, May 5). Kate Crawford on “Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence” [Video]. YouTube: Virtual Wednesdays. https://www.youtube.com/live/KcefG-0InLE?feature=share
Smith Rumsey, A. (2017, February 7). Why Digitize?. CLIR. https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub80-smith/pub80-2/
The thing that I noticed, listening to the podcast, was the progression or order that the music was listed. They started with the evolution of the planet, from big bang to humans using tools to modern transportation and launch of a space craft. Then the music started in seemingly random order.
In the podcast, Tim Ferris states that the order was chosen to represent various states of being, as well as human values (Voyager Golden Record, 2019, 09:13). As well, they wanted “music from all around the world, not just from the culture that created the craft” (Voyager Golden Record, 2019,12:35). I wonder, though, while the intergalactic society may understand the music, would they understand the context? Like listening to a mystery sound, it is difficult to identify without any context. For this task, I decided to match the progression of the music with the progression of man and civilization though it’s music within an evolutionary frame.
Here, then, is my list, in evolutionary order.
Peru, Wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
Senegal, Percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
Peru, Panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52
Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
Holborne, Paueans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs, “The Fairie Round,” performed by David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. 1:17
Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40
Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera,
“Dark Was the Night,” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15
“Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05
“Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
The Music
Peru “Wedding song” (John Cohen)
I chose this one first as the foundational piece, representing the beginnings of musical performance. This haunting melody and acapella voice is simple and expressive. This aligns with the idea of “hauntingly beautiful” as Tim Ferris wanted, though it also represents one of the earliest forms of music.
2. Second is from Senegal “Percussion” (Charles Duvelle)
This is the natural progression from the voice is percussion, and this piece sounds like original percussion of people banging on things within their environment and using wind instruments like reeds and hollow tubes/flutes that are naturally found in their environment.
3. Peru, Panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima
From simple voice to percussion with natural instruments found in the environment, we move to more constructed instruments like panpipes. Rhythms and melody become more complex and layered as musical literacy progresses in a natural manner.
4. Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes
For the fourth selection, I chose to go with the Navajo piece, representing sophisticated tribal societies and the inclusion of spiritual themes with complex rhythm structures on top of simple instruments.
5. Holborne, Paueans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs, “The Fairie Round,” performed by David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London.
Now we get into the development of larger city centres and expanded trade. The ‘Fairie Round” demonstrates increasing complexity in melody and rhythm and layers in terms of instruments and composition. Equating to the expansion of economic and societal intricacies in a burgeoning technological world.
6. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor.
In the podcast, Golden Record producer and astronomer Tim Ferris noted that one of the pieces should represent strong mathematical foundations (08:21), in case mathematics is a language that a future intergalactic being would understand.
7. Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera,
Continuing with the theme of mathematically constructed music as humans progressed into greater technological advancement, we are presented with Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute. The opera can be an example of how musical literacy was becoming more common and more accessible to the general public. This move towards more accessible performances to the general public is similar to how the printing press opened up a more literate world to the common person.
8. “Dark Was the Night,” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson
In a big leap over whole periods of musical development, we arrive at one of the grandfathers of blues. With it’s roots in folk traditions of the African culture, the Blues was the springboard for a wide variety of music in genres to come, so makes sense to include in such a foundational list of human achievements.
9. “Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven
With the popularity of blues in the 1900’s, it enabled more and more black artists to become popular (in Western Society) and jazz was introduced. Jazz was a stepping stone for many of the forms of popular music we see in Western society today. So the next song in our musical evolutionary journey is the jazz inclusion from the late, great Louis Armstrong.
10. “Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry
And for the final track, I chose the most current song from the collection, popular rock & roll from the 1950’s. As the only rock and roll selection on the album, this had to be the last thought to bring us to the end of our very brief travel through the evolution of music on earth. While not all inclusive from a music of the world perspective, this list does provide a brief overview or snap shot of musical development on our planet.
Final Thoughts
It is amazingly difficult to put together any selection of music to represent the world. So many distinct cultural and societal influences happen to produce the music and sound that exists that it would be impossible to to chose just a few pieces and then to provide context for each one would be nigh impossible. There is an endless way to decide which songs go into such a collection, and endless ways of combining them. Would future intergalactic races understand mash-ups? In the decisions of what to keep, like Dr. Smith Rumsey (2017) states, what do we also lose? This will depend, of course, on the bias, whether conscious or not, of the person or people making the decisions, amoung other things that Dr. Smith Rumsey mentions around this subject.
For this task, I was struck by the current emphasis in education around multi-modal presentation of content. The increased focus on accessibility and diversity within learners has necessitated a change of venue from the traditional classroom lecture style teaching. There is more focus on concept based teaching, flipped classrooms and various forms of literacy (prose literacy, numerical literacy, digital literacy, health literacy, and many others) as mentioned in the New London Group (1996) work.
In the re-design of this task, I wanted to present a completely different form of presentation. In his article, Gee (2005) discusses musical notation and rap and it’s relationship to literacy:
What do we want to say of someone, for instance, who can understand and even compose rap songs (words and music), but cannot read or write language or musical notation? Of course, in traditional terms, this person is illiterate in terms of both language and musical notation. But yet he or she is able to understand and compose in a language style that is distinctively different from everyday language and in a musical form that is distinctively different from other forms of music. We might want to say that the person is literate in the domain of rap songs (as a distinctive domain combining language and music in certain characteristic ways), though the person is not print literate or musical-notation Literate.
Gee, 2005, p. 17
This resonates with me, as there is a theme of multimodality that can appeal to different styles of learner and hits different parts of the brain. I have no musical background at all, so really had to use a different type of creativity that I’m not used to using. I did enlist the help of my young adult daughter to help match the words to the cadence of the song.
To start, I had to decide on the background rhythm tone – bright and happy or heavier and dark? I also had to consider copyright, so looked through YouTube’s free library of music in the Hip Hop/Rap genre.
Once the music was established came the task of making the words fit into the cadence of the music, which was a huge challenge. This required a much different idea of literacy and structure that demanded thinking very differently about the structure of a sentence. This was very difficult for someone with very structured ideas of writing and grammar. This for sure requires a different type of literacy that challenged me to push my boundaries.
References
Anno Domini Beats. (2022). Culture. YouTube Audio Library.
The biggest challenge for this task was finding the appropriate emojis. Even when entered into my post, this platform does not want to support them and all I got at the end was lines of question marks. I finally had to screenshot the word document to create a .png and upload it onto the page as an image (is this an example of the breakout of the visual?).
The challenge of trying to find the symbols (emojis) for what I wanted to convey was the first hurdle to get over, as there wasn’t the exact emoji for what I wanted to represent, so I had to search all over the place to find what I wanted. I also found that, just like a library literature search, you had to carefully define your terms, as many of the things I wanted to find didn’t seem to exist. This process is, I think, similar to the challenges in making graphics or visuals on a page accessible by providing alternate descriptions in written form, like Ekphrasis that Boltor (2001) notes. Trying to summarize a picture, image or symbol into written words is a challenge in itself, and part of the reason why we use graphics and symbols to convey concepts or ideas. To then have to summarize in words the image being presented is an extra layer of complexity and challenge that needs to be accounted for in our more visual culture.
I found that what Gretchen McCullough stated in The Allusionist podcast (Zaltzman, 2019) about needing emojis to provide context for tone when communicating by writing are used extensively in our digital culture, in emails and texts. Bolter (2001) reiterated this thought in his chapter discussing graphics, text and ASCII (p. 72). However, when trying to convey a complete story in pictograph format, things get lost in translation, and are also grounded in the culture in which you are communicating. Engelbart (1963) discusses symbology to represent concepts and the difficulties in doing so in the absence of written word symbols. As Engelbart (1963) writes, “a lack of words for some types of concepts makes it difficult to express those concepts…” (p. 13).
This visual outbreak has influenced culture in many ways. For example, I use PowerPoint a great deal in my work. Some of the principles in effective powerpoint presentations are to limit the number of words on a “slide” and use images more (Phillips, 2014). This is yet another demonstration of how visual representation has overtaken media, pedagogy and business.
I also found that I ordered my visual representation in the same way that I would a written text, from left to right in a line, then back to the left for the beginning of the next line and so on (Kress, 2005). I was looking at representing ideas and concepts rather than individual syllables or words. Even starting with the title, as like a chapter heading, is an example of trying to translate the written format conventions into graphic representations.
References
Bolter, J. D. (2000). The breakout of the visual [E-book]. In Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed., pp. 47–76). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410600110
I haven’t physically written anything in a very long time, as most of my written communication is done digitally. E-mails, texting, writing reports, evaluating student assignments, and all other written communication is done via laptop or smartphone. I have found that I can type faster than I can write (on a laptop/desktop, rather than on a phone), so getting my thoughts on paper tends to flow faster by typing rather than manually writing.
I found this task quite difficult. Because I usually don’t write anything by hand, it took me a long time, as my ‘writing muscles’ are stiff. I also found the word count challenging. Because I don’t write by hand, I had no idea how long a 500-word written paragraph should be. Doing this in a word processing program like MS Word is easy. I found I was manually counting the words as I went.
Using digital word production is my preference over manual writing due to the ease of use, ease of correction, ease of editing and speed of production. For someone who is not particularly eloquent and socially awkward, it is good to be able to take the time to type something out and easily correct it to ensure my message comes across the way I mean it to.
Even this post has been edited several times before posting.
