This was my first term working as the Accessibility Intern for the Digital Scholarship team at Carleton. After getting introduced to the field of Digital Humanities I began exploring accessibility in the web and investigating the similarities and differences between some of the most popular mediums in the Digital Humanities space.

Accessibility in the Web

Learning about web accessibility is something I worked on throughout the term. I started the term knowing very little about the subject and after 10 weeks I can confidently say that I l have a much better understanding and a greater appreciation for its importance. This process began with me learning how to use accessibility tools like WAVE and Colorblind Webpage Checker. Once I understood how to leverage these tools, I used them to evaluate some of the most common Content Management Systems (CMS) Digital Scholars use to serve content on the web (More information on how this process can be found here). Towards the end of the term I began creating a thorough an understandable guide for how to develop web content using knowledge I gained from the CMS investigation as well as reading through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The project is still in its initial stages and is something I plan to continue building throughout the year.

World Usability Day

On November 8th the other interns and I attended World Usability Day at the University of Minnesota. As a novice to conferences of any kind, I felt that this was a great introduction. Presentations covered a wide variety of topics that ranged from web accessibility to data privacy and protection to a talk on how to conduct ethical user testing. On of the interesting aspects of this conference was the lack of academic speakers and the plethora of speakers that worked in industry. The most informative talk I heard discussed the most common forms of disability, what aspects of web design negatively affect those people, and how to solve them. As a senior computer science major who is currently job hunting, hearing from people that work in the usability industry provided valuable information that I am sure will be helpful as a search for full time opportunities. All in all, this conference was a great first step into world of computer science conferences and I am excited to go to more in the future!

One of the things I’ve learned this term is to slow down and really think problems through. Last term I would try to just dive into a project and try different things until they’ve worked. This term, I’ve taken more time to really wrap the problem around in my brain before starting to code, which has helped my ability to complete things such as the DisplayPrivateExhibits plugin. During that project I was trying to figure out a way to access all the databases, since the built-in Omeka functions I was trying to use were only appearing when you were logged. However, instead of just diving deeper into the many functions that the were being called to generate the exhibits, I thought of a way to do what the functions were doing manually–by calling the database so that I could retrieve all of the exhibits based on their tags that were linked to them.

By attending world usability day, I learned about the issues dealing with augmented reality and the issues of how it intrudes on everyday life and the responsibility that designers have when creating these augmented worlds. For instance, Pokemon go led to hundreds of deaths because pedestrians playing Pokemon Go and not paying attention were hit by cars, or drivers were playing it as they drove. Another issue is by how distracting and targeted augmented worlds can be such as in the video [HYPER-REALITY] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs&ab_channel=KeiichiMatsuda). Additionally, I learned about different ways that companies can be “creepy” and intrude on people’s lives.

Another things I’ve learned is about different types of conferences and the types of presentations that are given at them. For instance, when looking for a talk about a particular topic, it is wise to find one given by an individual who works in the field, rather than one who has little experience in it. presentations can be very hands-on and targeted at individuals in industry or discuss a larger vaguer topic. I’ve also learned that by attending a liberal arts college and gaining skills at structuring ideas so that they are digestible will come in handy when I need to give a presentation.

In addition, by working on the platform comparison criteria I learned about my work as a back-end web developer in a larger context. For instance, while it has a degree of accessibility, it is not on the same scale as Wordpress and Drupal. In addition, it has very low flexibility of its permissions when compared with a platform such as Mukurtu. However, Omeka is very good at what it does by focusing on its one particular job and doesn’t need to be configured very much as if it were a platform like Drupal. Additionally, I learned about how the history of web development, from static site generator to content management systems, and why static site generators are coming back. Their impact on the world of web development may be significant in certain contexts, such as blogging platforms, but their requirement of technical knowledge is fairly high. Moreover, the platform criteria exercise has given me a good opportunity to collaborate with others.

In addition, my work at this internship has changed some of the ways I’ve been doing work outside of my job. For instance, when designing a program that models the growth of a tumor for my software design class, I had two different types of cells. Initially I had them as red and green because those colors have high contrast, but then I realized that that could be an issue for colorblind individuals using my program, so instead I used red and blue.

Overall I feel that I have grown in terms of my ability to tackle coding problems, understand the larger context of my work, collaborate with others and think about ethical issues in technology.

2018-2019 Cohort

My name is Chris Padilla, I am a junior computer science and philosophy double major from the Boston area. I am excited to be working as the ethics intern for this year’s cohort. I look forward to learning about the technological aspects of digital scholarship and accessibility on campus, and applying my problem solving skills to new domains such as project management and data analysis. (2018-2019)

Hi! My name is Chris Tordi, a senior computer science major interested in full-stack development with an emphasis on user experience. As the Accessibility Intern on the team I will be working with front-end and back-end development interns as well as the digital ethics intern to promote good accessible design principles in our projects. (2018-2019)

Hi! My name is Alec Wang. I am a prospective math major with a major interest in computer science. I’m thrilled to continue being part of the digital scholarship internship program for another year as the back-end web developer on the team. I’m looking to make good use of my experience from last year by applying it to new plugin development projects. Digital humanities excites me because we can take large quantities of data already at our disposal and draw fascinating conclusions from it. (2018-2019)

My name is Steph Herbers and I am a Computer Science major in the class of 2020. I am excited to join the team as the Front-End Web Developer and share my passion for learning new technologies and methods for web design! Beyond my interest in technology, I enjoy learning more about other departments, and I am especially interested in learning more about digital scholarship. (2018-2019)

2017-18 Cohort

Hi! I’m Alec Wang and I’m thrilled to be part of the digital scholarship internship program as a back end web developer. After rediscovering how fun programming can be last term, I’m looking to gain experience in web development and additional coding languages. Furthermore, I’m also excited to be part of a group project, learn about digital scholarship and develop professional skills in areas such as project management, self-scheduling and teamwork. (2017-18)

Hello, I am Tenzin Dophen.I am a junior Computer Science major. I will be working as a front end developer for the internship. I am excited to learn the ways to view Digital Scholarship projects critically and be able to design such projects on the web. Designing my own work time and adding checklists improves my organization and time management skills. The readings and website editing tools also inspires me to be more creative and build new things. I am ready to learn new skills to enhance my interest in web designing. (2017-18)

My name is Bea Crow, and I’m excited to be a digital scholarship intern, dealing with the ethics of digital scholarship. I am a prospective art history and CAMS double major, so I am a little new to the more technological side of the projects, but I’m very excited to learn. Similarly to Tenzin, I’m excited to create my own schedule and work through problems both with the support of the Digital Humanities staff and on my own, developing self-sufficiency in a professional dimension. (2017-2018)

Hi! I’m Miaoye Que, a junior Computer Science major/Spanish minor interested in creating enjoyable user experience and promoting inclusive design principles. As the accessibility intern on the team, I will be responsible for ensuring that everyone can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with our Digital Scholarship projects. (2017-2018)

Mentors

Austin Mason

Celeste Sharpe

Sarah Calhoun

This term was my first term working as the Digital Scholarship Ethics intern at Carleton. After learning the ropes, I was able to dive into research in fascinating and applicable fields. This term I learned how the web works, which was an important piece of groundwork for my research into digital ethics. As part of that research, I explored topics including web accessibility, personal/consumer data privacy, and large-scale algorithmic bias.

Web Development

My primary technical focus this term was to learn, broadly speaking, how websites work. I wanted to learn how a website is constructed and displayed in browsers, how it is accessed and used by the public, and what infrastructure is involved in hosting websites of various levels of complexity. After ten weeks, I can say that I have built four websites from the ground up: a database driven web application, a third-party hosted static site, a Drupal site, and a dynamic LAPP stack site. Through these projects, I feel as though I have gained a thorough understanding of the different methods and layers of web development, although there is always more to learn. I created the following diagrams to illustrate the technological processes behind what I perceive to be the two prominent models of web development.

Dynamic Web Server

Static Site Generator

Digital Ethics

My research into digital ethics this term focused on two primary areas: potentially unethical behavior unintentionally baked into popular software, and data privacy and ownership. As part of a project with the other interns, I conducted a survey of four popular content management systems, and attempted to establish standards for ethical comparison amongst them. We learned that depending on which aspect of ethics a particular organization focused on, their software would manifest itself with different advantages and disadvantages. For instance, WordPress, whose mission is to make web publishing available to as many people as possible, is incredibly widespread, and user-friendly. However, while there are options available to make Wordpress accessible and secure, it takes a more advanced user to implement these changes. As such, for a more novice user, Wordpress sites can be more vulnerable to security breaches and may not be as accessible out-of-the-box as Drupal. Drupal, on the other hand, whose focus is explicitly on high quality software, routinely rolls out patches to fix bugs and security vulnerabilities. Mukurtu is concerned with the ethical sharing and publicizing of heritage objects, and as a result, they have a very sophisticated permissions management system that regulates exactly which visitors to the site can view and edit particular items. The strengths of any software turn out to be directly related to the values and priorities of the organization that creates it. The negative end of this spectrum is what happens when companies are most concerned with developing and distributing cutting-edge technology quickly. Fake news being surfaced by the search algorithms of Google and Facebook, algorithmic bias in machine learning, and racist computer vision are all results of development teams rushing to deploy features without thinking deeply enough about the ethical potentials of their software. Of at least equal concern to the ethical grey areas being coded into our software is the collection and use of personal data. This term I have researched the intersection between corporations, individuals, and governments. Some corporations view personal data as a kind of currency; Individuals view it, at best, as a bargaining chip that can be exchanged for convenience, and at worst, as an aspect of our lives that we are rapidly losing control over. Governments are playing catch-up, trying to understand the best approach to business regulation that both ensures a certain level of individual privacy (which also needs to be determined) and is actually enforceable. It is fascinating to read about this conflict playing out in real time, as corporations try to self-regulate, governments try to figure out what to do, and individuals are all over the place in their beliefs about what should be the standards for privacy and government regulation.

Usability Conference

The other interns and I all attended World Usability Day on November 8th at the University of Minnesota. Presentation topics ranged from the fundamentals of accessible web design, to analyses of algorithmic bias, to the ethics of corporate data collection. It was my first time attending a conference of this kind, and it was a great experience. Many of the presentations and discussions motivated me to continue thinking and learning about the responsibilities corporations have (or should have) to their customers in terms of privacy, data protection, and social engineering. In addition to these questions about the future of our digital world, I also left the conference with a concrete set of guidelines for designing websites with accessibility in mind. One thing that all of us interns noticed about the conference was the difference in style from a more academic conference, or a college course. The conference was much more industry focused than we were expecting, which rendered some of the information in the talks not very useful to us for the next few years. For example, one of the talks I attended was about how to conduct user testing in the most effective way. It was interesting to hear the ethical side of this discussion, (how to avoid abusing user data) but since I will not be conducting a focus group in the immediate future, that aspect of the talk was not very relevant to me. Knowing this about professional conferences will certainly help me in the future to decide which talks to attend at my next conference.

This term has been a wonderful introduction to Digital Humanities. I enjoyed becoming more familiar with the various content management systems and exploring the advantages and disadvantages between them. As the front-end web developer, I started learning Bootstrap and PHP to be able to create customized themes for the sites. I loved learning these new languages and using them combined with HTML and CSS to modify themes in WordPress and Omeka. It was amazing to be able to apply the new knowledge right away into something that can be seen (and shown off).

World Usability Day was an incredible opportunity to experience the difference between an academic centered versus a more industry-focused conference. I loved the exposure to a variety of people and backgrounds, but all with a shared interest in thinking about the ethics in technology. One of my favorite talks at the conference discussed our “data exhaust” which she defined as the data that we are constantly creating, most of it subconsciously. While I was aware of some of the ways, such as cellphone location, she presented so many new ways in which that happened, and then presented the question: who owns this data? Overall, this term has been a great experience and I look forward to the rest of the year.