Record Life
Overview
My group members and I collaborated in doing a research project on books in Special Collections at the University of Leeds, which is a part of our coursework Digital Practices. We combined historical records and new media to uncover Leeds’s past during the Second Industrial Revolution, demonstrating our critical thinking towards digital media. Our outcomes are made up of two parts, a video and a portfolio.
Info
- Timeline: March- April 2023 (2 months)
- Team: Iris Sun (team leader), Jingxuan Zhao, Tong Cai, Jie Zheng
- My Role: Organize weekly discussions, research historical materials, collect data, edit videos, and code the portfolio
① Video
Preparation - Addressing Research Difficulties
We need to produce a video creatively that responds to the selected research collection, and to demonstrate how our data help understand the current condition. So firstly, we did a field trip to Special Collections. And we found that things were much more difficult than we imagined:
Problems
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6 different historical books were presented, which one to choose?
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How to connect historical data with digital media and what kinds of reflection can we make?
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How to form a story to make a creative video?
After a week's discussion and thinking, we came up with —
Solutions
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Settle the book first, and then research the selected records
- Find their similarities and differences to form a topic.
- Finally, think about the organization of the materials.
Research - Figuring out the research topic
Data organization
The book we chose is Quarry Hill unhealthy area, 1900: book of reference, which focuses on the area in Leeds that used to be considered a slum during the Industrial Revolution, and documents the housing conditions of the poor in the community. The main reason we chose it is that its data is printed rather than scrawled handwriting. There are four volumes of this book, each of which has more than three hundred pages, so we divided our work to conduct a sample survey. I tabulated the sample to filter out the available characters in hundreds of data, that is, characters that can be traced back to personal experiences.
Quarry Hill Unhealthy areaText part of Quarry HillOther available archive in Special Collections
Research topic- From Quarry Hill to present times, what has changed?
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What has social media brought to people?
The topic came out naturally when researching. All the people with trackable records are the owners of the houses, while we did not find any useful information about the people who lived in the unhealthy area. The rich and the poor, what a class division!
As for the connection with digital media, I put forward the comparison of the records of now and then. In the past, only the rich had the privilege of being recorded, but thanks to social media, everyone has the right to freely record their lives. At the same time, we also reflected on the limitations of social media — there are still many refugees who are unable to use social networks because of political issues such as identity security.
Presentation - Producing the video
To make the video more creative, we focused on a rich man and a poor woman, tracing the trajectory of their daily lives and drawing out the conversation with the characters' first-person narratives.
Also, we added more supportive data visualization to the narrative, combined with my group member’s own material to make the whole work more unique and interesting. Here is our final video:
② Portfolio
Research - Finding literature and data support
The portfolio also responds to our research collection, which is a further academic study based on the video. As for the technical part, we were supposed to do the programming and data visualization, which I was in charge of.
Research Questions
- Who is remembered in history?
- Why being remembered is important?
We answered these questions by researching literature and statistics deeply, connecting the historical data with nowadays Leeds and digital media. We explained the revolutionary role of digital media in our lives, while presenting 'digital exclusion', the barriers to the use of digital media (with a more logical argument than video).
Presentation
For data presentation, I found old maps of Leeds from 1900, labeled where the sample characters lived, and compared them to modern maps.
In addition, I coded an interactive design using Processing. Various names of people floating in the window, that is, poor people who once lived in Quarry Hill. The exact address of where they lived appears when the mouse touches it. I marked the distinction of those with and without online records, highlighting the fact that most people have silently faded away in the course of history.
I worked with my group members to agree on this simple but intuitive web layout, which I then coded.
Html/cssWeb appearance
Portfolio Link
(Note that the interface may take some time to load for technical reasons)
③ Reflection
In the whole process, it was the technical part that was the trickiest challenge for me as I only had a couple of shallow attempts at programming.
Finally, I did it. Despite there are still limitations on the representation of creative data visualization and the portfolio looks simple compared to the fantastic templates online, this practice was immensely meaningful to me, both in terms of giving me a fresh perspective at digital media and inspiring me to continue learning more about interactive technology.
Nevertheless, even though history can be remembered by building digital bridges, it still need help from algorithm to be perceived by the netizens, otherwise a website has no difference from the archives in Special Collections. I wrote a reflective essay on media inequality, which is reflected in data security and algorithmic bias. Read Here
In addition, is the modern lifestyle—recording things via social media—really better than in the past? It’s already a trend that some people post vlogs just to show off or build an “ideal” characteristic, which is against the original function of recording life. Inversely, ‘oldness’ equals authenticity and allows genuine experiences as many people think. The impact of new and old media is a question that can be considered further.