Embracing the messiness
By Winston Pei, University of Alberta
In the fall of 2023, I started my latest course for my Master of Library and Information Studies, my first and only from outside the School of Library and Information Studies here at the University of Alberta — Data, Power, Feminism, cross-listed as Digital Humanities 530 and Gender & Social Justice 525. Little did I realize the impact it would have on me. Taught by Professor Deb Verhoeven, inaugural Director of the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) project, GSJ 525 accomplished a rare and wonderful thing… it disrupted my world view.
On top of all the new concepts and ideas around digital humanities research, such as Social Network Analysis techniques and feminist approaches to studying relational data, the opportunity to work with the HuNI platform forced me to revisit, and unlearn, some of the ways I personally had been approaching the organization of information.
Or put another way, it allowed me to rediscover and embrace the messiness of… well… everything.
Coming from a background in graphic design, web development, and relational databases, I first encountered HuNI with a reaction that became the first theme of the course for me: that it was remarkably familiar and yet utterly new. In terms of familiarity, it was not simply the mind-map style data visualization but also the underlying idea of connecting different types of data points together in coherent systems. ‘Collections as data’ made perfect sense to me.
But there was something distinctly new in how this software allowed me to make those connections. Unlike most other data systems I’d worked with, in particular donor management software and library cataloguing systems, the complete lack of ‘controlled vocabularies’ or ‘relationship tables’ in HuNI was downright upsetting to what turned out to be a deeply ingrained and previously unconscious bias for seeing the world through a librarian’s lens. This second theme became the biggest theme of the course for me.
The result of all this reflection came together in my final project for GSJ 525, which I named The Serendipity Project, and in the middle of which I jokingly interject a parenthetical section description that reads “in which I pin nothing down and mostly continue to flail with ideas that keep fighting back…”
Reflecting back now, I think that phrase aptly captures my experience with HuNI overall — wrestling with the messiness of data and the realities they represent — and I am delighted by the continuing struggle.
You are invited to explore The Serendipity Project further at https://www.butterfliesandaliens.com/the-serendipity-project
We invite you to combine, collect, connect and collaborate with HuNI!
