 Okay, so it's it's almost 1101 so we can go ahead and get started. Thank you so much for everyone who's joining us both on zoom and in the room right now. I apologize that you don't get access to donuts on zoom. I'm Rebecca Cummings. I'm the interim director of digital matters and I'm pleased to welcome you to the 2022 fall digital matters research talks. I can't wait to hear about the research that's been happening in the lab from our fellows and from our interns. Because we do have six presenters today in a short amount of time. I'm going to ask that you hold your questions until the end and then we can pose those questions to all of our presenters at the same time. This is being recorded today and will be available later on the digital matters YouTube channel. Just to keep things rolling I'm going to go ahead and introduce our presenters right now. First we're going to hear from Margaret Wong, who is a professor in world languages and culture and one of our digital matters faculty fellows this semester. Next we'll hear from Luke Leiter, who is the fine arts and architecture librarian at the Marriott library, and also one of our faculty fellows this semester. Then we're going to move on to the digital matters graduate student fellows will first hear from Eliza McKinney, master's student in the department of history and john Sutter, a master's student in the department of film and media. And then we'll end with our two digital matters undergraduate interns this semester, Eliana Massey who is a double major in philosophy of science and her new major museum studies which she created all on her own. And ashton reader who is graduating this month from the multidisciplinary design program. So thanks again everyone for coming today. Since we do have six presenters and may have to do some switches and technology I appreciate your patience and advance while we do some of those things. All right, thanks for having me. I'm going to jump right in and talk about my project that focuses on serialized publication called Polsky's Chronicle. But before I get specifically into that I'm going to just briefly introduce you to the artist Felix Polsky. He was Polish, born in Poland in 1908. He grew up in Warsaw and attended the Warsaw Academy of Art, and then in 1935 he immigrated to England, which is where he lived for the rest of his life. When he was immigrating, he became an official correspondent, more artist, and traveled all over the various fronts in World War two, and gained some notoriety in there so he became a little bit famous back home in England, and was able to come back after the war, establish a studio and go on to have a really successful career as an artist. One of his many projects was what he called Polsky's Chronicle. As the name suggests, this was a visual record of everything that Polsky saw that he experienced. And he really saw it as his way to record the world around him and make it a priority to go to really important events and meet important people during his lifetime. The Chronicle was a serialized publication, put it out every two weeks for over 25 years, and is predominantly visual, mostly drawing, but there is some text, which is important, an important part of this project going forward. The style of the Chronicle, or his method for recording history was called Reportage Illustration or Reportage Drawing. A brief definition of Reportage Drawing is the artist needs to be on site, witnessing a specific event, and then recording it in whatever manner they are specialized in. And usually it's draftsmanship or drawing. Polsky considered himself part of a lineage of draftsmen and artists going all the way back into the 19th century, with artists like Talusia Trekk and Don Ye, who were Reportage Illustrators, they were on site to record the world around them. And the style of illustration really exploded in the 20th century, early 20th century, when newspapers started to recruit illustrators and hire illustrators and send them out and publish their work in newspapers and magazines. This Reportage illustration is a rabbit hole that I've gone way down into the semester. I didn't really necessarily see myself doing a lot of research in it, but it's been really interesting. This is an example of, to Polsky's Reportage Illustration, and I like to use it as an example, because it does a lot of the things that illustrators are trying to accomplish. So to be a successful illustrator, you need to be able to draw quickly, you need to be able to draw well, you need to be aware of the subjective nature of what it is that you're doing. You are deciding, you know, if you're drawing, so therefore you're thinking, and you're deciding what am I going to include in my drawing, what am I going to not, what's important, what's not important. And then also be aware of, you know, drawing conventions, so how to do, how to quickly indicate shading or hair or movement, those types of things all are in the toolkit of Reportage Illustrator. And I think that this drawing illustrates all of that really well. So this is to Polsky at the Royal Court Theatre. He was there at an event, he was notorious for carrying his pencils and paper wherever he went, I was sort of recording whatever it was that he was doing. And what's interesting about this and what this showcases is, this isn't a snapshot of the stage, right. This isn't one particular scene the way that you'd see a photograph. These are the moments, the things that Polsky found interesting. He's catching the vibe of the show, right. So different costumes, different sets, you know, certain stances, people's faces, these are the things that he is all sort of encapsulating over the course of the show and putting into one image. And that's really what sets Reportage Illustration apart from, say photography, photography, for example, because you can catch, you know, a time lapse basically and sort of capture that vibe or that feeling of place. Polsky was everywhere, he knew everybody. And he really witnessed some really major events in the 20th century so he started the Chronicle in 1954 and it went for over 25 years. And he knew people like Elvis Presley and yet nobody knows about it. Nobody knows about him, nobody knows about the Chronicle. And the reason for that is, I'm sure this is very difficult to see, but this is the record in the Mayor Libraries catalog for Polsky's Chronicle. So the only things, the way that you would ever be able to discover the Chronicle is search for Polsky's name, which not many people know, search for like caricature, which, you know, if you're looking for Elvis Presley, information on Elvis Presley, why would you ever search for caricature or the years and basically that's it. It's not discoverable. There's no information about, more information about it in the record. So even if you came across the title in the record, you never know what it actually was. So this is a problem, right? So if I'm searching for Malcolm X in the catalog, it's not going to come up. And yet, Polsky was there with Malcolm X days before he was assassinated. He did an entire series on him, met him, and you probably can't read it, but on this sheet that's in the Chronicle, he even says, you know, I was publishing this, I was printing this the day that Malcolm X was assassinated. He was really in the thick of it for a lot of different things. So what do we do about this. Well, I tried a bunch of different things one is proselytizing about Polsky which hasn't been super successful. Another thing is Justin Sorenson here in the Merritt Library and a former employee Zach Storms and I did a mapping project where we took one image from each issue that we have in the in the library and created metadata around it, we even created a control vocabulary. So you can search on that control vocabulary and kind of see everywhere that he went, or, you know, a lot of places that he went to some of the things that he did. This is great. I'm proud of this I think it works really well but its scope is not big enough. So, this project, what we've done is we've scanned every issue in the Merritt Library, oh and I should have said you subscribe, you subscribed to the Chronicle, and then he would send you an issue every other week. There's, it was not for profit, and there was no advertising so it really was just Polsky distilled down onto the page and the Merritt Library subscribed for the entirety. So what we've done is we've scanned every issue, and we have been working on doing an OCR reading of all of the text. And what we're going to do, or what we have been doing is be extracting place names, people, people's names, events, famous objects of art. I think those are the four categories of things that we're going to extract, and then we'll be able to reapply that back into the metadata for each issue. So, if you searched for in the future, Kenya, or Kenyatta, or inauguration, all of those words are getting extracted and then putting back into the record so this rally for Kenyatta would actually come up as a discoverable item, so we'll be able to go and see the series of sheets that Polsky created specifically for that event. That is the plan, we're in progress. I put a QR code here for the map, if anyone wanted to order that. Hello, my name is Eliza McKinney. I'm a master's student in the history department. And the project that I've been so fortunate to build and that I'm presenting to you today is a digital archive called Women's Worlds. And it shares the history of lesbian community in the 1990s here in Salt Lake City. So this project began with a collection of newsletters called Women's Community News. This was a local newsletter started by Kathy Worthington, you can see on the left in this photo. I created the newsletter in 1991, when she began a relationship with her lifelong partner, Sarah Hamlin, who's also in the photo. They worked on this together until 1995. This collection somewhat randomly. And as soon as I looked through them, I knew that I had a really valuable resource for so many people here. And I knew that the easiest way to do this to make this available to the public was to digitize them. But I also really wanted to flesh out this history and make a more comprehensive archive. I didn't want the newsletters to just stand on their own to only be seen by other researchers and historians. I wanted anyone interested in this history to have a way to enter that history and learn more about it. One way to do this is by including my own vignettes that contextualize and further explore issues discussed within the newsletters. While doing this research, I was really struck by how complex and dynamic the lesbian community was during this time. I think most people think that probably lesbians in the early 90s that it was a small group, but it was actually really huge. Many didn't even know each other. It was so vast. A way to show this vast community was by tracing the many groups and events within the newsletters. These included social, religious and political organizations, as well as groups that catered to hobbies like bowling, which still exists today. If you want to join the Good Time Bowling League, they bowl on Sundays, at Longwood, cycling, other crafts, music scenes, etc. Lesbians in the 90s helped fundraisers and dancers. They participated in the Gay Rodeo Association. They volunteered at places like Utah AIDS Foundation. They helped political rallies and marches and buying courtrooms and legislative sessions. They went to LGBTQ affirming churches, and they have their own music and theater scenes. To bring this large web of lesbian activities of life, I created audio tours that highlight spaces across the city, telling the vibrant history that they hold. These are spaces like Utah Stonewall Center and LGBTQ Community Center, put together by the Gay and Lesbian Community Council in Utah. Lesbian bars, we actually did have lesbian bars here, like puts and boots, businesses that cater to queer people like Lavender Moon, and churches like the Metropolitan Community Church, which is seen in the photo, it's that pink house there, which was run by LGBTQ clergy. Creating these tours felt particularly significant to honor the many spaces that no longer exist today. A big part of establishing a valuable archive for me was to speak to the women who created this history. It was one of the benefits of being a historian of the 20th century. Many of the people who created this history are still alive. And when you're doing the 1990s their memories are still sharp. It was a great value. It has been such an honor to speak to these remarkable women and to share their stories with others. And all of the oral histories that I've conducted and will continue to conducts are recorded and will be fully available to the public. The archive will be published in the spring and it will have a digital home so that people can find it. Although I suspect I'll continue to add to it in the years to come. I can't imagine this project, using my interest, it's been such an amazing experience. But I want to end today by encouraging all of you to become your own cultural stewards. These histories in Utah remain unexplored and unexamined. I'm certain that each of you in this room is part of a community whose history could easily be lost. I ask you to start collecting now and to save and preserve artifacts that bring your own communities to life. Digital tools have made this easier than ever before to preserve these histories. It's been such a gift that Kathy and Sarah gave to all of us, and I'm sure without ever knowing just how valuable those newsletters would be. It's because of their own cultural stewardship that people like me can never claim our own history with honor. And I hope that you do the same. We had planned on John going next because he has some particular AV needs, we're going to move on to Eliana. And, John, is it weird if I just go through your slides again? Okay, everyone, close your eyes. You don't want to see what's coming down the pipe. Hold on. And then tell me where to stop. Okay, cool. Thank you. So hello, everyone. My name is Eliana Massey. And today, my presentation is titled, Cultivating a Climate of Hope. Digital tools for climate change management. And I think that most people don't associate hope and climate change. I think most people are way more likely to associate climate change with something like despair or dread or numbness. And all of these emotions are not adequate motivation for behavior change, which is necessary for the kind of climate action that we need. And even though fear can be a powerful motivator for action or change in some way, even if it's just for a short term period of time, it also often leads to exhaustion and burnout, which is not conducive to the continual systemic engagement that we need to address climate change to work towards adapting to climate change and also mitigating climate change in the world. And I partnered with the Natural History Museum of Utah on this project, specifically the exhibits team, and they were lovely to work with. And I'm really excited to see how this is implemented in the museum. They are working on, well, they've been working for a few years on creating new permanent exhibit that would be in their sky gallery on the fifth floor. Tentatively titled, A Climate of Hope, about climate change and trying to give it a localized regional focus that's also hopeful and focusing on what are people doing what can you do. And focusing on systems and how systems are changing and how to be a part of that change. And it's projected to come out September next year. I should definitely check it out once I get this out. But to start, I just wanted to share quote from the poet Adrian Rich, which is relevant to the topic of climate change and hope. And she says, my heart is moved by all I cannot say so much has been destroyed. I have to cast my law with those who age after age perversely with no extraordinary power reconstitute the world. And so when I started on creating this presentation, I thought it would be good to sort of show my process for this project. So I started on doing a literature review on climate change education and engagement within museums and similar and a lot of natural learning spaces like science centers. And then I spent some time generating different ideas of what would work well with the needs of the National History Museum of Utah, and their upcoming exhibit. And then we went through a little bit of design iteration and then planning for sustainability in terms of this tool and how it's going to be maintained and how it's going to be implemented into the exhibit. So I'll just go through each of these steps briefly. So when I was conducting my literature review, I went over a lot of research literature that has been written on the topic of museums and informal learning centers in terms of climate change education and climate change community engagement. And on this slide, a couple that were really impactful, one of them is chapter from a book. This chapter is called museums that connect science and communities. And then another piece of literature was museums as agents and settings for climate hope. And I also highlighted a little bit of something I read that was just talking about how knowledge is not enough to promote behavior change, and there are specific things that research has identified that are really powerful for helping people to take action. And some of those things are giving people a sense of agency, focusing on like their local environment, focusing on their values and their ideology, place attachment, things like that. Those are all really important in terms of climate change education. Climate change education isn't like other types of science education because of the emotional component and the political component. And so we have to take specific things into consideration when we're designing. And I also looked at other work that's been done in this area as sort of part of my literature review. There's a museums and climate change network and they've documented all of the different exhibits and museums related to climate change that have been installed since around 2000. And then I was also looking at the All We Can Save project, which is a community engagement project focused on climate action. And then also I previously worked with a learning sciences curator at the Natural History Museum, Dr. Linzumo. And we have a publication coming out, hopefully soonish, titled, Am I the only one that's trying to save the environment, knowledge and social resources drawn on for engagement and collaborative and museum-based video game about climate change, which was also helpful in sort of giving me a grounding in this space. And I was working on this project. So I came up with nearly 10 different ideas. And then out of those ideas I selected one based on feedback, feasibility and foreseeing impact. This idea was related to a final interactive in the exhibit, which is this bend diagram, it's probably going to become a digital interactive with three circles. One of them is kind of focused on like what are you good at, what do you enjoy doing. Another one is like what groups are you a part of already, or what groups can you easily join. Another one is what is the climate work that needs doing in your community, what are the challenges that your community is facing what you care about. And the goal is to sort of find that middle ground in terms of what you can do to activate your community to address climate change locally. So this is hopefully a model to move away from individual action like recycling or, you know, taking shorter showers and thinking about like how can you work with others to change systems, even if those systems are small and local like that is really impactful and really needed. And kind of as an example, I sort of filled out on my project, which was this climate hope database, which I'll get to in a second. And so there's sort of communities that I own part of like digital matters and natural history museum of Utah, and then some different skills that I have or things that I enjoy doing, and then also some of the issues that I was seeing in my community around climate change, including like a lack of community for a nation fragmented climate action information and then political and corporate interference in terms of finding that information. And so I worked in the platform air table, and I created this entry form that climate organizations in Utah can use to enter in information about volunteer opportunities that they have. And then this form will automatically populate to gallery. And then within the gallery on people who are interested in taking climate action in Utah, go to that gallery and they filter and look through different volunteer opportunities. And the natural history museum of Utah will be hosting this on their website, and it will also be implemented in different ways throughout the exhibit. So figuring that out exactly how. So, I went through a lot of work in terms of identifying climate organizations in Utah, the masses spreadsheet there's actually a lot more organizations in Utah, focused on sustainability environmentalism that you might think. But they're really hard to find because they're on so many different places and so I tried to bring them all together on into this list. And then I also worked on collecting and integrating organization feedback. I reached out to a couple of the organizations that I thought on seemed most relevant to this project, and I let them fill out the form and then offer feedback on no whether or not they would use something like this and if there were any improvements that could be made to the form. Overall, their feedback was really positive and it was also helpful to be able to integrate on some of their suggestions into the design. And then I also worked on building the gallery, which you can kind of see here in terms of like the opportunities, and also you can see how you filter on based on different things like climate action area like your most passionate about improving air quality and you can search for opportunities relevant to that. You can also search based on skills, which sort of connects with that values and ideology place. And so you know, search based on what you're good at or what you're interested in what you value. And then in the museum, we tested this prototype with some museum visitors. And that was helpful on overwhelmingly people were like it was intuitive it was helpful I feel like I could find the information that I wanted and I think that a small percentage of people who come to the exhibit will, you know, utilize this resource, but it's very helpful for the percentage of people that want more information and that want to know how they can take action. And we are also able to identify some different issues and some things that we could work on. I also worked quite a bit on documenting this process. And creating some videos and management plans and stuff like that. Because I hope that you know this will be easy for the exhibit team to maintain. And I also hope that in the future anyone's interested in replicating something like this for another location maybe really want to do it in Texas or Arkansas or something that they can see the process that I went through and so it's easy to replicate. And then finally in terms of implementation. That is something that the National History Museum of Utah is going to be figuring out and all their different departments and engagement and exhibits and marketing and stuff like that. But it will definitely be integrated into their website. And it will also run on their social media. There will probably be signage at the end of the exhibit with like a QR code or something like that. There's possible integration into a digital interactive based on some future prototype test results. There's possible integration through handouts at the end of the exhibit or through gallery interpreters demonstrating how to use the website and talking with visitors. And then there's definitely also a possible integration with the community engagement programming team. So I'm really excited to see what they hope to invite some of the people who are in these organizations to come table at the exhibit. And so I'm just really excited to see how it will be implemented and I feel really lucky to have worked on this project. And I'm really grateful for the exhibit team and their generosity and expertise. It's just an acknowledgement. I just have special thanks to several different people who helped out quite a bit with this project. Mostly on the exhibit team but also digital matters and so that's it. Thank you. All right. Hello everyone. So 58.6 gigabytes. That is the amount of data that Google had on. I went through many different companies and I request my data from probably 50 to 100 of the companies on this somewhere but it was insane. It took so much time. 58.6 gigabytes is what Google had just on the alone. And that backtracked all the way to about 2013 when I was 14 years old and attract all my movements activities web activity purchases pretty much everything about me since I was 13 or 14 there. So this inspired kind of a project looking to this concept of data which is this. It's a subsector of surveillance which really is more corporate focus. It's all about corporate digital tracking. So I'm going to walk through some of my artifacts I come from a product design backward or background so I have a lot of visual artifacts as well as some product responses conceptual products that I'll talk about towards the end. This industry right here is about 450 billion dollars. It is massive and it is not likely to change very much. So the data industry simplified is it's pretty simple. It starts with like an individual existing we go out the other day and pieces of data are harvested by corporation. Those data is go from us to a corporation where they are then processed and sold to a group of companies called data brokers did brokers are companies that deal buy sell trade in data. That's all they do and they use this data to fuel predictive algorithms make financial decisions make marketing reports, but in short our data is just a resource that is being sold and shared between everybody. So what my first little experience here was I wanted to look at surveillance surveillance structure that exists in Salt Lake City. So, I was originally on just kind of a surveillance track so I began by going through and tracking and parking out every single camera that I could find the downtown Salt Lake City. And what surprised me is there wasn't as many cameras as I anticipated, but I did notice some patterns where there were very heavy group sections of surveillance presence. And that was mainly around areas of capital like this little bundle right here kind of on the right is the Federal Reserve obviously with money there's going to be a lot of cameras and it really pointed and reinforced idea that like surveillance doesn't exist to only protect us but it exists to protect property. So I wanted to go and explore that even further so we can just go through this map of downtown kind of on that main street block here. We're going to continue through to like this big database of like harvest our data. So, one of my big objectives was kind of like do a name and shame here and so I went through and I did pretty much every company that I could find that I had the finger to type out and not massive data is about 1200 different companies so on the left you'll start to see sectors appear which these sectors I kind of break them in from top to bottom and how pervasive their data harvesting practices are so we have like aerospace and fence technology, financials, telecommunication, business or media healthcare, retailing these are kind of the top sector. Then we kind of go into this middle area like household products, motor vehicles food and drugs stores, where they still track you and they still harvest data, but it isn't quite as basic. And then we can keep going down and there's some other businesses and categories but that those were the, the outliers. And it kind of prompted this question of like, what harvest our data, pretty much any digital thing you interact with on a daily basis, whether it be sweating to work or just living in your home and you have like, maybe a smart thermometer smart TV. Everything you own is tracking every single pretty much movement of what is going on. So on the left we have devices of what is like what devices we might have and then towards the right they connect to individual data points. So we have Kyle right here in the front. Kyle and I spent a lot of time assembling this data sheet right here. But yeah so we just have some like smart home devices and some of the main ones were like social media devices and just our phones track pretty much everything. But these all exist as just individual data points so I wanted to go through and like kind of map out what these look like in the typical day. So I constructed this timeline of where data data harvesting actually occurs and this is very long. This is a 24 hour period I believe is November 16, but I tracked about 3000 data points that I created I projected each one of these creates like three to five times more throughout the day so probably 15 to 20,000 individual data points. We're going to go through and just look at this for a second, but you can kind of see clusters when I'm out and about what I'm doing. And these, this is all data points that are used to interpret or assume my schedule my how I go through my day and ultimately used to profit upon and this is happening to everybody in this room constantly. So finally, this leads to a marketing report, and these data points are collected and they're boiled down through algorithm use and to create marketing reports that you're used to sell and sell us products. And I was able to get a hold of one of my marketing reports. This is from the spirit and a data broker. It was actually very difficult to go with this when I requested it from them I was denied, but when I requested it from infinity, I was accepted and they actually said my spirit. And so, what this is is pretty much a bunch of categories like likelihood to donate to charity it's likely to find new use car, and they have those categories and they give you values. What I went through is I took all those values, and I wanted to see how valuable and I found by random myself is kind of a wasn't scientific at all but if I deemed a value incorrect I couldn't X, and about 50% of these 350 values were deemed incorrect by me. They were just wrong, and whether it be in my financials or what I what my interests are, they were wrong, which is interesting because so many decisions are made on this market reports. So we're going to scroll through here. There's just so much data that I thought like having a long presentation here. And then I kind of went to this, I wanted to outline the process of obtaining data, and there's two distinct pathways. There's the process of requesting your own data which is very difficult. Over here on the left, I'll kind of walk through and show what that looks like. But there's a bunch of barriers in place it took hours even try to get my data from many of these companies, but as soon as I pose as a corporation trying to purchase consumer data. So over here on the right we have the process of bursting data as a company right over there is me on the left, you can just see like I mapped out every single step, and it just kept going and going, I was denied from all three of these companies and multiple times that last day upwards of 20 30 minutes just to be denied. I'd mails up in and just wasn't, wasn't fun. So, this final little bit is just a timeline of data privacy laws. There's a distinct lack of data privacy laws in existence in America and on the price. There have been some great strides on strides for independent states like Utah, I believe at the beginning of 23, we are going to have a pretty great log on place where we, there's more transparency but it still just goes on to about three states will be Utah, Virginia, Colorado and California. So we can scroll through. Meanwhile, in Europe, they have a great data privacy structure with laws that I think we should follow and it's wonderful there's great data transparency. So this led me to kind of my product design session where it's, I wanted to, I was angry with this process and I wanted to identify ways to disrupt the data stream. And so the data stream at its simplest level is just the individual and their data is being harvested by corporations. So I wanted to create some conceptual products that might like prompt ideas that I kind of fit into that data stream right there. And so, there were three general concepts that we could follow here and I was like, you can delete the stream completely remove yourself from the stream, not send data which puts the bottom line and might change the art create change in these processes. There's also send fake data we could create devices or apps that might send big data also subverting the corporate surveillance and then the final one is kind of overloading. What happens we just send an exuberant amount of data to the companies is it usable. Is that good. I don't know. So, yeah, I think my final statement is just like protest the system and I think we need to take back our price because we are losing our digital autonomy or digital autonomy as the technological age goes forward. So I'll quickly touch base on these few products but these just conceptual products that kind of act as the data scramblers, we have one that's kind of like to protect you on the go is a phone that has data and using tech technology so you can go and have some sort of privacy on the go. And then we have just two other ones that would exist within your home and scramble your data so they act as kind of a middle man in your devices your in home devices would connect them and they would connect your router so you will scramble and have more autonomy over your data before we send out to two companies, two companies. So, that is data balance and I'd love if anyone wants to interact with any of these I can pass around but you've got to move on. Thank you Ashton. We have to do something with the audio right now john come on up and we're going to try to figure this out. Alright. Hey everyone. My name is john Sutter, and I'm the problem person with difficult problems where I, I'm a in the film department here at the U and so that's why I have some like audio visual stuff to share with you and we'll see how it goes if it doesn't work then I can just sort of talking through it. So, I, before I came to the you, I worked for about, like, 10 or so years as a climate journalist. And over time, I, you know, like became very concerned about this idea that we're talking about before, like that that knowledge is not enough like I felt like, Okay, I'm telling these stories over and over and over again and for some reason it's not in, in a real way and like on a, on a society level like, you know, whatever storytelling we're doing collectively hasn't resulted in the whole scale like systemic changes that are needed to deal with something as big as the climate crisis. I don't think there's any one reason for that but I started reading about this idea of shifting baselines and got pretty freaked out by it and then it's sort of like motivated like a few different projects which I'm going to touch on here. And this idea is essentially like the metaphor that gets used like kind of unfairly is the frog in the boiling pot of water it's this idea that we are terrible as people at processing slow moving long term change. So climate change is kind of like the key example of this we just don't don't feel it or make sense of it in a really clear way. And so I've been trying to think about like okay how can I use media to at least like explore that if not do some things to like, maybe counteract it a little bit. And the first project. I want to show you just a little clip from is a, let's see. Are you all seeing person on screen now. Maybe I could just open the on here I'm seeing it but it's not showing up there. Is that in finder. Here we go. Okay. So this is like, like a little four minute clip from a feature length documentary that's called baseline part one that should come out next year and that I'm directing and the premise is you're dropping in like midstream this is like 20 or 30 minutes in. So the things that you would need to know to like make this make sense is the premises that it's following three kids growing up on the front lines of the climate crisis. And the conceit is that it promises to revisit them in the year 2050. So it's like a non scientific but longitudinal approach to try to get us to like feel and think about time in a in a different way. The film has a voice over you'll say you're here my like awkward voice in it. And it's written as a letter to these kids in the year 2050 so that's like when you hear me talking that's what's going on there. So it's playing that the video isn't loading. I'm just going to I'm just going to skip past that. The, oh, and now none of the images are loading in the presentation which is new. Um, let me try to play this and let's, let's see if it works if you all have trouble hearing, I can just jump forward. I probably own a farm when I get over that teach my kids what it's like to go up on a farm without the work. You get a lot of life lessons out of it. If the cat moving it does pull it so it happens less to look at me. So right here, you want to practice catching it important. So this is one of the three kids in the film he's in Utah actually the other two or other places. The drought in the West had been going on for 20 years when we met my team. That was longer than you've been alive at that point in about half of my lifetime. Neither of us had ever actually experienced whether it's normal. I don't know what to make of that. I find a little comfort in the fact that scientists are at least trying to quantify these changes that are happening all around us. So I'm going to go ahead and stop it there just because I'm going to guess that this next part might be a little bit hard to hear. But the, the, again, I can see that project is just following these three kids it's sort of personal stories but woven in there is our interludes with scientists like Ralph Keeling, who's father started measuring the buildup of co2 in the atmosphere in the 1950s. And he's his father has passed away but he's continuing those measurements now and like we're able to make sense with like data right of in a very clear way, like, you know, this is what's happening to the buildup of co2. Here's what's happening to temperature. I'm interested in like, why we don't feel it that way I don't think we feel it as an escalating line I think that the level of alarm kind of, it sort of feels the same all the time, even though, in reality, the level of alarm is going higher and higher. This is a guy named Daniel Pauley who coined the term shifting baseline in reference to like, to fishery science actually. And one of his grad students collected these photos from a dock in QS Florida they're all taken at the same, the same location and it's like, you know, people who go fishing, showing off like the giant fish that they catch. And the interesting thing about these photos are, is that because of overfishing, they're shrinking across time. Oops. And yet, like the point that the, that Daniel Pauley makes is that, like the fishermen in the photos, they're like, smiles are the same their reactions to this, you know, shrinking of the fish is sort of like the same which is like, oh, I caught these cool, these fish this is great. And like that is great I'm not trying to like make that seem depressing. I just I'm just trying to I'm just trying to say like, I'm trying to put a finger on this idea that that we have a really hard time processing long term change and that's especially troubling one that you think about climate. Like the first like area that I started thinking in, in terms of approaching this with digital matters and then like a project for the you because that film is something separate. I thought about like, okay, where do we interact with weather the most it's like on like your weather app. And a simple thing that I wish would happen is that, you know, there was some sort of like average temperature bar or like the, you know, entire range from the historic record. Like some sort of visual indication of like, is this normal or not because I think people often think like, it's really hot in the summer. Is that normal? I don't know, like, I've only lived in Utah for three years so I have a hard time gauging just in my gut, like, what is normal or not. The problem with that is that if you look at like, know as weather data what they call normal is a data set that goes back only to 1991. I started burning fossil fuels in the 1850s and the effects have been accumulating since then and so like that normal isn't actually normal it is a shifted baseline right 1991 is not like a normal climate. So, but there are like individual records for like specific days going back a long time this one's from like today December, what are we December 7. I pulled this this morning from, it's 1874. And there's this other thing that exists in like NOAA land which is like if you any of you have like a NOAA weather radio or a weather nerd, you know, they put out these daily forecasts and like a very like robot voice where they just read all the data from that particular day. So, what I'm interested in doing is and that is very not very much like not finished but is in progress is an installation that like incorporates some of these things and tries to get people to think about what we do and don't know about whether today is unusual like is it unusually hot isn't usually cold isn't usually what it's a hard thing to answer. Again, climate climate exists on like decade and century time scales. We exist minute to minute day to day like you know at lately, especially this time of the semester so it's hard to get our brains around this and so what I'm thinking is that an installation that just pokes at that in questions that might be the way to go so I'm planning to make sort of those robotic NOAA weather recordings for for the current day going like well back into time and have that kind of be this like confusing muddled soundscape, paired with, you know, data like what we have from the Keeling curve and like current and archival imagery gives you a sense of like, you know, the magnitude of the changes that are happening around us this is like I found this when I was working on that film baseline and it's it's in there it's it's from the 1890s I believe it was like a Lumiere Brothers production. It's one of the first, like, film images, and it's an oil field. And like, I don't know, to me looking at that is. It makes it feel like tangible and shocking in a way that's different from just sort of experiencing the world around us today and expecting that all of it is normal. It's kind of hard to describe an installation but that's those are the ideas that I'm playing with is using that historic record of forecasts and also that I mean you has a great library of like TV weather forecast also in trying to play with stuff from the particular where the weather would come. Just to get people to think about this idea of shifting base lines, and what we are and aren't able to perceive about the magnitude of the changes that are happening around us. Thank you so much, John. Thank you to all of our researchers for the work you've done this semester for sharing your research with us. We have some time for questions. So if anyone, do we have any in chat right now. Okay. Any in the room. Yeah. Yeah, so one of the things when it's in the fire sector, not all of our data is not for a big session. Yeah, or that could side the credit card. And the steroids part, which I left out my algorithm section. But the serious part of the other things is some of the industries or systems in place that has no. So when the company was out there, you know, sorry data on their future based on the past, and there's no way to avoid this. What is this, those decisions, and we never on the same side know what is why this is the reason, which didn't get spoiled. And they're increasingly the same way. It's like, you watch a movie or a film where they're being used for like hiring back teachers to fire teachers. And then it goes. Absolutely fascinating. I have a comment and a question for everyone. So, but the comment is whenever I think about hope, I remind that Rebecca saw this, the hope in the dark so that's going to come on radar. Everybody. The question is, I really like to have the systematic process of ideas, and rations. in second place. Especially if there was one that mostly got asked because of the feasibility, I'd love to hear just a little bit about what like the big idea might have been. It was this idea of like a scavenger hunt around Salt Lake City where there's show you something about how the climate is changing here and how people are adapting to it and that you could go to those sites and there could be like a cart or something on the wall that you could scan with an AR viewer and then like a little like an AR viewer which I think would be really cool and I also love that because I felt like it would be really cool for like families to you know go on this little scavenger hunt as a way of you know teaching your children about how their local environment is changing and how people are responding to it. It was a little challenging technically in terms of thinking about like okay using AR would be a little bit more complex than using air table and also I felt like it was a little limiting because there are so many visitors that come to the National History Museum. I can give residents something like 300,000 like a year and many of them are coming from all over the state. You know people are coming on school field trips from all over the state. People are visiting from other states or other countries and so I wanted to do something that people from U.N. can be inspired by in some way and also that was part of what somebody comes here from California and they're really inspired then maybe there's a way for that. I have a question if that's okay. Luke I'm so fascinated by your project. I think Tupolsky's Chronicles are amazing and I know that we had talked early on about doing something with tagging of the images. It's always easier in digital humanities to revert back to text because we have OCR it's more searchable. I'm wondering if there's anything you consider doing with images you weren't able to do because you came up against some kind of technical challenge or brick wall or just the time available to do these projects in the semester. Yeah so it's time so the Chronicle itself has over 3,500 images and you know there's some software out there that I looked at that basically allows you to go in and tag each image. You don't come up with a which you know you could do but it would take a really long time and I mean Tupolsky's an amazing artist but he's a little bit indecisivable sometimes what he's actually drawn you know like I keep referring back to the vibe or the stealing of place if you really give you the sense of place like tagging specifically like oh this is so-and-so you know you have to kind of go back and read a little bit and he has this amazing autobiography that's insane so you can sort of decipher what he's trying to get across in the Chronicle by reading the biography but you know it's a it's a well worthy cast and there's a lot of interesting stuff happening with AI right now and doing image analysis that I'm interested to see that progress a little bit from the software. Jeff, does you want to pull out another question? I really appreciated your presentation. I thought some of your thoughts about DH in terms of like scope switching between distant and close reading, thinking about DH as sort of what our visualizations as a kind of fine behave are really generative. I'd love to see more along those lines. My question for you is in doing this sort of broad scope to DH work did you learn any lessons about the materiality of these novels that you're reading about? Is there any connection between sort of you know broad big picture DH methods and answering questions sort of back in the world of material culture about the novels? Does that make sense to the question? In fine materiality you mean kind of history of the book edition and publications and stuff. That's, I'm still working on connecting but my previous project suggested there could be a very strong one. My previous book was on drum ballads which are a regional form from the 19th century and I found that the space that was depicted was in correlated with how widely distributed the particular text became. Now whether that's, they may be chicken legs right but it was an interesting correlation for me. So I would be very interested to see because what we know about the history of the book in China as I was saying beginning of talk is that publishing actually brought me out geographically over time. So instead of kind of the centralization that you see in Europe where everything was publicly funded right you know it went out into the Netherlands you know you had peasants who were doing woodblock printing even if they couldn't read they could cart. So you know what at this moment if I had to have a guess it looks like we have a narrowing in of space at the same time that we have a broadening out of access which is interesting you know again that all these places are dropping off the map and you know does that have to do with authorship is that just have to do with the tropes of the novel becoming developed enough that there's a certain way that you write these stories does that have to do with how integrated the Chinese empire was because this is a question that historians debate right to what extent was Beijing actually a capital or was it just a regional center right. My research suggests that to a large extent it probably was actually a capital right um but so I think that there's promise there but connecting those two dots takes an awful lot of time and so I'm going to have to really do it on a case-by-case basis and I haven't gotten far enough to be able to say anything. Thank you. It was exciting. Any other questions? Yeah I still have a few but um Ashton do you mind if I direct ones towards you because it's in my brain of legislation you were mentioning is more robust in Europe than it is here. If you had to give one example of a piece of legislation that would have like protect our privacy and our data privacy do you have one that you could think of offhand? Yeah so the best piece of data privacy legislation is called the GDPR is from Europe your community is what uh California their laws are very much allows us the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten. It allows us to access our data and literate it and opt out of our data being collected and opt out of our data being sold because of all the different options that we did which slowly are inching their way here but it's not quick enough. Yeah as soon as it does that disrupts a $4 million dollar industry and the cool thing is if they buy like the GDPR in Europe they pay up to 4% of their revenue per year in a client and that's revenue not a problem so that is massive and so they're really good about the technology. So there's hope there are things that we could do that we're not doing. Um okay we just have a couple minutes left. Any other questions? Jeff? I have a question for Eliza as well um really fascinating I also love sort of the multi-prong approach of creating an archive and personal connection that you made and it's sort of close to us as an imperative I appreciate that. In terms of your time period it sounds like you're like really on the cusp of communities becoming digitized themselves. Have you encountered any sort of like early internet or other kinds of maybe technological um that that facilitated these kinds of things that you're studying? Yeah I asked, this is a really great book that's about what stands on the internet in the early next and I kind of like the name of it it's the author. The last thing was me kidding because it's my last name it's a really great cover um transition and we do see this like new downturn in youth letters in feminist communities in general there are all women's movements both liberal and conservative and those really go by the wayside when we get early internet which is rough because a lot of that early internet is lost. But there is some scholarship about that. Maybe that's like the book you have to see or your archive follow up or something right. Is that information activism of queer history of lesbian media technologies like Kate the kitty? Yeah I think that's it. I have a question for John actually and I don't know if you'll have an answer to this because it's it's tricky. You were talking about shifting baselines and how like we're okay okay okay okay and I assume there's a point at which those fishermen's smiles would start to deteriorate you know what at what point is their researcher on the fact where the baseline is felt in a more visceral way like with climate change like do we have to be starving if you've I mean you thought about this quite a bit at what point is it not okay anymore? I don't know I know that I don't want to find out. I mean there are two big points for it to like the climate system right where like bigger ships happen more quickly. I used to think I mean I spent a lot of time over the years like in like disaster sites like math, math, turbulence, fire, and I used to think that if people like got the science in a way that they connected it to those events which do get a lot of attention and are alarming that like that somehow would like be a push and but there there I can't remember the researcher but there's been some social science on that and those sorts of climate disasters also get normalized you know I'm like they have to be bigger and bigger when they're shocked and there's not evidence that they shock into action and so I don't have an answer around it I just I think it's like it's something that I think we have to become aware of because I think there's a lot of climate movement and a lot of media that's built around assuming that's true that like that like you show the thing and it will alarm people and then that will result in action and it's not just like a form on conclusion and I don't think it's like there's one thing like if we realize that shifting face science is like a huge issue like that's going to fix all of it but I do think it's like a part of that puzzle but at first I found that really disheartening like oh okay like these massive and deadly catastrophic events like I think they do wash over people unless you're in them but they have been in this globally this first way where it's not like all it adds up in a way that you personally feel that progression I figured there was not an easy answer there but I just curious okay so we only have a minute um oh Jeff just just to be begging off that I mean one of the things that's really apparent in all your projects are about sort of like recovering stories to some extent particularly in the past or preventing you know historical stories that might happen to us in the future with data that we don't want is is there like do you see in terms of making an impact when we think about climate change like an effectiveness of I mean the video that pulled up at the century old like like is there an effectiveness that's for seeing the world as it once was in a place for a time in which like in the presence of live is that a way of like sort of recovering usable history that shows that like oh right this time to be live it's like not normal or like you know it wasn't normal then or whatever is that is that like an emotional rhetorical I I think so on the emotional rhetorical you know angle like in each of the three locations like part of the reason it shows them was because there was some sort of visual archive of the place and then you could like feel that shift even if it's not like a quantifiable one so like you know archive imagery of like a time before this current backdrop for example and then there are projects like I mean that there are films called chasing ice and chasing coral that are completely about the idea of like long history and photography and like taking time series imagery that like proves the existence of a change like if you see a coral reef disappearing that does have an emotional depth time should you see a glacier retreating and in that line of work like it is it's like photographers have gone back into archives from like the late 1800s early 1900s and gone to like painstaking lengths to like exactly replicate some of that imagery and it is really it is really powerful I guess like for me I'm less interested in like proving that change I feel like we know that and I'm interested in like trying to feel it and to feel some sort of nostalgia around it I don't know if it's motivating but it is I do think it's like a deep emotional like resonance when like at least get a glimpse of like so two quick things if you want to stay apprised of what digital matters is doing of internship and fellowship opportunities and events please do join our listserv you can sign up at the front of the room or go to digitalmatters.utah.edu to do that the other thing is that we're hosting digital humanities utah again this year not here at the university but in cedar city in february they're still accepting proposals I think until friday maybe the 15 it's coming up soon so if you are interested in presenting at digital humanities utah our seventh annual symposium uh get that in possibly as soon as the 11th and that's going to be in february again in cedar city thank you so much for being here thank you so much to our presenters if you'll join me in one last round of applause and everything else you have going on this week