Command Line and the Uncool Aspects of the Matrix - DiMe Piece #6

Some of my friends don't agree, but I think The Matrix Trilogy is probably one of the best trilogies made in the last twenty years. I understand that Neo was a digital version of Jesus Christ, and so I wasn't disappointed by the way the last movie ended. Cypher isn't the most loved character of "The Matrix," but I can relate to his position. The world he knew was traded with one decision, and he didn't like the harshness of the reality that he got in return. He became the movie's second villain, all because he preferred to live in the code and renounce all memory of the truth.

Let's put all the cool stuff about the movies, like being able to learn things instantly or defy gravity, aside and think about the weirdness of having to see buildings, people, cars and everything you have visual knowledge and understandings of in code. Think about every aspect of the way you engage with your surroundings being reduced to something two-dimensional that can be written by a 8-year-old, given enough practice. I don't think this paragraph even conveys the strangeness of how weird that is to me. But nobody ever talks about that; the code that makes up The Matrix just because that vehicle that makes what we call reality bendable and manipulable. And it's that thing that makes Keanu Reeves fly.

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So the point of all this is that, to me, command line feels the same way. I'm not exactly a stranger to command line. I was one of those kids lucky enough to be in a school program that exposed me to computers before the advent of Windows 95. As I typed "cd:\games" to access the Jeopardy game that was uploaded with one of those big, actually-floppy disks, I didn't really understand the significance of typing those things. I saw them as simply directions that needed to be followed to get to an objective.

But that was a long, LONG time ago. By the time I really began to understand how computers worked, everything was visual and interactive. Seeing a folder called "Games" and clicking on it to get to a game made more sense to me. Manipulating program operations with mouse-clicks and dialogue boxes is easier to wrap my head around. Watching the visual progress of downloads through colored bars is more comforting to me. Now, our digital methods assignment require that I go back to using command line to some degree.

There's something scary about that black or blue screen with nothing but words. Putting what feels like cold input in and getting cold input back. Errors in command line are scarier than a pop-up box with a harsh-sounding tone; command line errors tend to be longer, and if there's more than one, they seem like they blend together. Doing complicated tasks with command line demands that you make textual pictures of your location and actions rather than rely on the convenience of being able to see things and click on them. I know that command line is a different way of interacting with the same operating systems; I know that it gives me powers to do things that a graphical interface doesn't. I feel like Cypher though; "Yeah, that's cool, but my dinky yellow folders are comforting to me." "It's true that I prefer keyboard shortcuts to leaving the keyboard to move a mouse, but the key word there is 'shortcuts.'" Shortly, I'll begin to engage with data and text using programs that depend on command line. I'll literally be stumbling around in the black, or the blue, trying to figure out what I'm doing. I don't look forward to it with any relish. Maybe with enough practice, I'll become like the heroes of Zion and develop a comfort with seeing my computing world in harsher, less visual terms.

The Dreamweaver Attempt - DiMe Piece #5

(originally composed 11/15/14)

I'm using my shift at the weekend boot camp to start building my own webpage. I have Adobe Dreamweaver, which I've never used. I think rather than letting someone else's imagination determine what my page what should look like, I'd rather try to build something that matches the vision I have.

The Dream

Ideally, I'd like to start with some animation. What I'd like to do is have about three black and white images scrolling behind my full name in a bright color on an invisible banner, Carlyn Pinkins, written in large, lowercase letters. At some point, the "arlyn" of my first name will change a different color than the rest of the text and swing down like an arm under the "c" at a 90-degree angle. The "c" will then join "pinkins" and a ".net" will suddenly appear to make the name of the URL - "cpinkins.net" The letters of "arlyn" will rotate to upright positions and become the first letters of links that are written out in a different font. For example, the "a" (in a large fat arial font) will be my "About" link. I imagine the "bout" part will be written in a cursive script.

The Reality

Opening the program for the first time is intimidating. I thought I'd be opening something that would let me build my page as simply as a Microsoft Powerpoint slide, turning my creation into code with little to no effort on my part. It gives me options to build new pages, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are among them. I should probably start with Java, but the two introduction videos I watched before have pretty much confirmed that I will need to have a good bit of knowledge of code to be able to do the things that I want to do. But I don't know how to do that. Any of it. So I thought I'd just try to work backwards and build the page that shows up after all the animation is done.

After stumbling around with what I barely remember about coding, I manage to figure how to change the background color to gray with their Page Properties menu and put some pink text on the page, but the positioning is all wrong, and despite the heading being H1, the size of the text is wrong too.

The Trouble with Margins...

...is that I don't understand how they work. Even in Codecademy, the positioning of lines is nebulous. I feel like even when I created my own CV from raw code, I was randomly plugging values into a line until I got what I wanted. If there was a way to understand webpage margins beyond random numbers of pixels, I could probably get this moving a lot faster.

The bones of Dr. Gibbs' webpage is sort of the way I'd like mine to be. I've looked at his CSS code before and I still can't make sense of it, but maybe I can play with moving my elements around using his margins.

Decided to try to find fonts that might work with my vision. Time sure flies when you're frustrated.

Now what?

Having secured the code for the fonts I will want to use, I went back to Dr. Gibbs' CSS code to figure out which part sets up the margins for his home page. I also created a CSS sheet in Dreamweaver. I really don't know where to go next. I don't remember what a container is or why one would even be necessary as its own separate thing.

Downloaded Notepad++ onto this laptop and started a new index html sheet called "new_index." Checking out tutorials again to get some idea of how to start this thing.

The W3 website has convinced me that I'm thinking of "margins" in the wrong way. I'm confused about how I should think about them.

Text vs Images - How to Make the Links?

Now it's Sunday, and while I should shift my focus to the other projects that I need to do for the class, I'm still stuck on how I should go about trying to set up the page. One of the issues I'm thinking about is how to make the links that I want to make. Should I make buttons that combine the two fonts I want, or should I just use spans to make the first letter of the text different from the rest? If I do that, could I move the cursive text close enough to the block to make a single link or would have to make two. The writing I'm doing now, I realize, is just based on ideas and not actually trying things to see. I'm scared. Might as well just suck it up and try.

I didn't bring my big laptop back to camp. What I'm realizing is that Dreamweaver was never meant for beginners with only a design idea. Being able to use it requires that the user has a good understanding of coding. It may create a lot of shortcuts, but not sure that would be worth it for me.

By the end of the day, I've managed to figure out how to make a static vision of what I want (minus the background). I think I'll leave the flashier stuff for later. I had to reteach myself some things, but just using Notepad ++ and Xampp, I was able to create the vision I wanted without some fancy program doing it for me.

Reclaiming Space Through Google Maps - DiMe Piece #4

The renaming of space as part of settler colonialism is a hot topic in native scholarship. Tonawanda Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman made representations of space through the perspectives of native women in literature the focus of her book, "Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations." She argued that even though settler mapmaking changed the names of places and features and imposed boundaries where none previously existed, native people have preserved the names and meanings of places significant to them. Native women serve as keepers of that knowledge. Jason Farman's article also discusses traditional mapmaking as a tool of empire. While digital maps, like those created in Google Earth, don't eradicate the problems of misrepresentation and renaming space according to knowledges of the dominant culture (in fact, they create new problems in that regard), they give users the ability to define their spaces and create maps that have meaning for them.

Farman's main goal is to show that the interactivity of Google Earth has the potential to map a digital empire. He writes, "Though the World Wide Web continues to be a mostly unmapped territory for most Internet users, there is still a desire to locate oneself spatially within cyberspace."¹ That's cool, I guess. The important thing I took away was that the nature of Google Earth's interactivity opens doors for users with different spatial conceptualizations to represent their worlds, to some extent, and essentially allows them to "claim" their spaces. For indigenous users, the use of overlays in Google Earth offers the possibility to "reclaim" spaces from settler colonialist understandings. Places and features could have traditional meanings and significance reattached and borders could be redrawn or even erased in these altered representations. Tribes have the option of creating digital representations of traditional cartographies to pass on to future generations, preserving some aspects of their cultural knowledge. That possibility is exciting for scholars of native history, like me; they could increase our understandings of how indigenous peoples create and conceptualize their spaces.

As awesome as that possibility is, Farman reminds of us of the limitations in creating such overlays. Firstly, Google controls how the overlays work which limits how users create and interact with them. That constricts users to working with maps solely in the ways that Google Earth's developer imagine users would.² Secondly, not all of Google Earth's potential users have access to broadband or even the internet, which is required to access the program and add information.³ According to Farman, what that adds up to is that Google Earth's developers only had one type of user in mind - one with broadband internet access.⁴ Though he posits that we're forced read that Google Earth as reiterating "Western dominance over information distribution and adhering to centralized power over user interactions," it seems like he leaves out one thing about Google's prospective user: one who has Western European understandings of space.⁵ Those of us who have grown up with Mercator maps and road atlases that use English pronunciations of names and words see state and international lines as absolutes. The possibility that others may see the same geographical spaces differently and that their representations are just as valid as our doesn't occur to most of us. If those who have differing perceptions of spaces we all inhabit are given the opportunity to share their views, it could lead to a cultural awakening for many of us.

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¹Jason Farman, “Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography,” New Media & Society 12, no. 6 (2010): 16.
²Ibid., 23.
³Ibid.
⁴Ibid., 24.
⁵Ibid.

My MapMaking Hell (And they're not even points I care about) - DiMe Piece #3

These are reflections that I made on the last day of Weekend Writing Camp (formerly and more appropriately known as the "Weekend Boot Camp") on Sunday, September 28th. I just never posted them because I thought I wanted them to look differently when I actually did. Oh well, here they are:

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Thinking about catching up on your Digital Methods assignments shouldn't:
a) give you stress pains, or,
b) Make you debate which machine you should use as if you're picking shoes for an outfit. (Thereby, distracting you from choosing an actual outfit you'll actually need to leave the house for work on time.)
it seems, however, that the machine does matter in my case and I don't know why. A little insight as to what I'm working with:

Machine 1: Gateway Netbook running Windows 8
Machine 2: Samsung Galaxy Tab S tablet running Android 4.4.2

Friday: Though I'm light years behind my classmates on doing the assignments, I persevered anyway and attempted to make a Google Map using the ProgrammingHistorian tutorial on Google Maps Engine Lite and a link to CSV data on Albuquerque's Public Art locations. I did this on Machine 1 and the Opera browser.

• The link for the public art data is a direct download link for a CSV file that I opened with no problems.
• Using the link in the tutorial doesn't produce a tour that looks anything like the version they have. Following the tutorial's directions is impossible, because no tour has popped up through which I can accurately follow directions.
• The site map instantly starts me somewhere in California. Inputting "Albuquerque, NM" has to be done each time to put the map over Albuquerque, and from there, I can do nothing else. Hovering over the streamlined buttons doesn't produce anything helpful.
• I give up on the tutorial and use Google to find another which has directions that mention nothing about a tour, but still has options and buttons that I don't see in my browser.
• I learn that my classmates had no problems with producing the map, and I begin to feel like God hates me.
• They're stuck on something harder which I already know will probably kick my tail later down the road.
• Out of curiosity, I open Firefox and I'm able to see the buttons in the new tutorial. The glimmer of hope I gained was snuffed out when I uploaded the CSV file and nothing happened except it told me that I was missing other files.
• Stumbling around the buttons on the site, not only can I not find helpful buttons to make the data show up, but I can't even delete the failed project I started to begin again.
• A kind classmate informs me that he could do nothing with the CSV file either and instead used the KMZ file that he downloaded from the city's GIS site. I start to feel a little better but still frustrated. The kind professor also tells me that CSV values are hard to work with.
• Class time ends and it's all I can do to avoid running away screaming.

Sunday: For the sake of my shoulders and time constraints, I decide not to swap out Machine 1 for a third machine, which is bigger, heavier, and runs an older, but still reliable version of Windows. Since I spent my Saturday of writing camp work reading for another class, I've decided to spend a good deal of facing the demon of getting this damned map to work.

• Machine 1, in typical fashion, has difficulty connecting to the internet. This adds to my frustration because Machine 2 always seems to connect to the internet easily.
• Out of curiosity, I decide to see whether I will have issues making this map on an Android tablet. Even though it's a Google OS, I still believe it's a valid concern; the web doesn't see mobile devices the way it does devices running traditional desktop operating systems. I'm also getting used to using an Android device in the way that I use Windows; accessing files is a bit more frustrating.
• Remembering the kind classmate's advice, I download the public art KMZ file from the city's GIS Date website with the Chrome browser. Opening it shows me the information in Google Earth (pretty cool)
• Surfing directly to the Maps Engine website doesn't produce a webpage, although I can surf to other places with no problem. (odd.)
• Going back to the ProgrammingHistorian's link to Maps Engine Lite, the site comes up with a different layout that gives the options of creating or opening a map and pop-ups to direct you on where to upload data.
• I upload the KMZ file I downloaded, only to discover that this site actually wants CSV files! * I download the CSV file onto Machine 2 and try again. The upload is successful, but it wants me to choose columns to determine the placemarkers (not sure why the artist's name would affect this). I check the boxes for all of the available information and move on. The next screen wants me to pick something else, but all of the options are gray; I can neither pick anything or move on. I hit the back button so many times that I'm at Step 1 in uploading the information all over again. I stop to write this information for my blog.

After leaving one category open for the placemarkers and using the leftover category for "the other thing," I was finally able to produce my map. Would I have had these issues if I used Chrome to begin with? Why should that even matter? Onto the next frustrating thing...

Really, Windows? What's the .dll here?? - DiMe Piece #2

Behold! The latest roadblock in trying to get my homework done...I think. Is it really stopping me? I don't know. When it comes to installing things or even doing complex things on my computers, nothing ever goes well or simply. What the hell is Bitnami anyway?

The trouble started when I tried to install WAMP on my computer Sunday. I thought it was would be too simple to just go to some website, download the program and have it install with no problems. After all, my grade depended on it. Boy, was I right! The program couldn't start because of a missing MSVCR110.dll file. No, Visual C++ Redistributable package I could install or repair fixed the problem. I even uninstalled and reinstalled WAMP to no avail.

Thankfully, I saw Justin Larsen's tweet to Dr. Gibbs requesting to use XAMPP. It's turning out to be my last, very desperate resort. The site recommended that I install something called Bitnami. I don't know exactly why, but I think it's for WordPress, which I'm clearly not using. Anyway, it asked me for an existing MySQL password for XAMPP as if it came in an unmarked envelope in my mail today. The web isn't yielding much information about where to find it. If I can go on without it, I will.

Since I've been engaged in blog therapy over this, XAMPP has finished installing and launched a control panel. I'm not quite sure what to do with it yet, but it's past my bedtime, and quite frankly, I think I'm too sleepy to find out tonight. Maybe I'll figure something out soon or get a little help with it. In the meantime, keep your fingers crossed for me. *sigh*

Impressions - DiMe Piece #1

I took a class last fall which involved some fairly intense reading for someone with no theory background. One of the questions the professor asked throughout the semester was essentially "How do we get these ideas out to a general public?" She, like me, is someone interested in making significant social change to better the lives of other people. My honest answer was, "Make them more accessible to the Average Joe."

It's not like the Average Joe couldn't buy the titles we were reading on Amazon like I did; anyone certainly could. It was just that the arguments in some of the books were articulated in such a complicated way, the average non-academic would struggle getting past the second page, which would even make it hard to give the books away for free. It also didn't help that the books were mainly written for a close-knit group of scholars, who exchanged ideas with each other rather regularly. People need to be able to have relatively easy access to understandable information if they're, at least, going to read it. I believe digitization offers several options to do that. If I can post or publish one thing that will challenge a person's perceptions of native issues in this country, I'll feel like my career won't be wasted.

I saw the digital methods class as a way to learn how to do it or at least how other scholars are doing it. It seems that in a lot of humanities fields, especially history, tradition and progress seem to be at odds sometimes. Julia Flanders and Chuck Tryon argued in their pieces that scholars in the humanities aren't strangers to using technology to get their ideas out in the open. However, the need to put future scholars through a "hazing" ritual of the same trials and measurements that their advisors and mentors did seems to stand in the way of incorporating the digital with creating new Ph.Ds or tenured faculty.

William Cronon and Mark Sample seem to have pretty progressive views about how the digital can add to scholarship. In an article titled "Getting Ready to Do History," Cronon proposed that doctoral candidates post their research and findings to websites as supposed to writing 500 pages of a dissertation that very few people will read. Larry Cebula was able to use his successful blog to get tenure. I know everybody doesn't agree that getting a doctoral degree or getting tenure should "appear" to be so simple. I can understand why.

If digitization will work for historians and others in the humanities, it needs to match the standards of the work we produce. While Chuck Tryon acknowledges how helpful blogging can be to scholars, he also says that the ability to publish material immediately leads to "the production of unreflective, spontaneous material that doesn't reflect thought or analysis." As long and tedious as the peer or blind review process is and may be, it helps to ensure that high standards of scholarship are followed in publishing. This is merely one example of the hurdles that humanities will have to overcome if it is to adapt to an increasingly digital world, and adapt it must.

Whereas some scholars wouldn't value the input of non-academics regarding their work, having such input would be valuable to mine. What better way is there to judge if your research or analysis is relevant to the people you mean to reach? But then, I want to reach the ordinary citizen; other scholars are only interested in writing for other scholars.

Thought I'd blow the dust off this thing.

The last time I wrote any blogs for this thing, I was a graduate student at Georgia Southern. Now I'm a fourth-year grad student at the University of New Mexico. It's amazing to think of how much has happened in my life since I last posted. I've lost both of my parents, my sister, and a aister-in-law. I have a master's degree and all the joys and pains that come with writing a thesis. I have a real social life for the first time that has challenged me, and still is, in balancing work and life.

Living in Albuquerque has posed its own set of unique experiences for me, too. It's amazing how much more nuanced the world can feel when your social environment isn't literally black and white. In New Mexico, I'm truly a minority, seeing very few other black people in my daily life. I'm also not part of the most disadvantaged racial minority in the region either. No amount of reading could help me understand the discrimination that native peoples have to go through. It's also been interesting to hear about the racial struggles of Mexicans and Chicanos who live here and come from elsewhere. So many similarities, so many differences. I'm a six hour drive from either of the nearest large cities. I've been to Denver three times and have yet to have fun and hang out there. I've not been to Phoenix, but I have seen the Grand Canyon with my own eyes. There really are no words to describe such beauty.

On the national stage, I'm writing this in the middle of the turmoil going down in Ferguson, MO. Darren Wilson, a police officer in Ferguson, shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black kid, who was unarmed and had his hands up to surrender. Brown's death is the latest in a series of nationally-publicized murders of black people either at the hands of the police or of white vigilantes. This also coincides with rampant police violence here in Albuquerque that's gone international. It doesn't surprise, but it still amazes me how much the right wing media is still allowed to fabricate events of Brown's death and promote racism through defaming his character. What is even sadder is how many people I thought were not racist are so willing to go along with these narratives and not challenge them. To be fair, there have been so many lies told on both sides of the story that it's hard to know what is true and what isn't. What I do know is that there is no evidence that Brown did anything to deserve being killed. It doesn't feel like society or the justice system will seriously attempt to make sure this doesn't happen again.

It's been an interesting year on the sports front, too. Just before the summer, my nephew was drafted by the Seattle Seahawks. He has yet to play for them yet, due to injury, but I will be buying his jersey relatively soon. The World Cup in Brazil was amazingly entertaining, despite all the worries over the justified protests from Brazilian citizens. Instead of studying for comps, I watched or listened to nearly every game that was played. Luis Suarez caused another big stir when he bit Giorgio Chiellini during Uruguay's game with Italy. That made the third time the idiot has bitten another player, despite being suspended for it before. I was shocked by how many Liverpool supporters still wanted to defend and support him after learning he wouldn't be able to suit up for the Reds until well into the season. I'm personally glad that he's gone. The guy put fans like me in an awkward position when he used racist language toward Patrice Evra. How am I supposed to feel when the manager and owner of the club isn't condemning the words, but supporting the player who said them? When he bit Branislav Ivanovic during a game against Chelsea, they supported him then too. I don't want a player like that playing for my team. If we win games, they should be won fairly. Players should have enough integrity and respect for their club not to do stupid things that will get them suspended. Losing to Crystal Palace, thus losing the league, last season hurt more than I can say. Suarez's supporters point to his 30 goals last season and say, "We would've never gotten that close if it weren't for him. Plus, he got us into Champions League." What they don't think about is, "How far could we have gotten if he had been able to play the whole season?" Our defense issues aside, I think it's fair to say that Suarez's countless suspensions cost us a league title, too. Thankfully, he's Barcelona's problem now, but it seems that Liverpool may have signed another potential problem. Here comes Mario Balotelli! Let's see what comes of this.