This section showcases our collaborative group work throughout the workshops, where we combined our individual strengths in design, coding, and analysis. Here, you'll find highlights of our team projects, reflections on group dynamics, and examples of how we co-created meaningful digital experiences.
The week2 workshop focused on creating personal websites and connecting them to servers. This topic isn't entirely new to me, as I have previously engaged with web design and data visualization during my undergraduate studies, which I find very interesting. I want to mention a website I frequently visit: Archive of Our Own (AO3). This is an open-source platform for fanworks, such as fanfiction and fanart, known for its supportive community and diverse content. However, I believe there are some issues with the website design.
The week 2 workshop on web scraping highlighted how algorithms collect and organize data. What i want to share this week is “#宝宝辅食#” (baby food) trend on Chinese social media, where women use the tag to avoid male audiences, harnessing algorithms to shape their digital space. This illustrates the power of algorithms in organizing content and influencing interactions.
In this week, I explore my experience with web scraping, using tools like Web Scraper to gather data from public websites such as the BBC iPlayer homepage and the challenges I encountered with the Stream@Leeds website. This hands-on practice offered insights into the efficiency and limitations of web scraping, especially when dealing with complex or protected sites. Additionally, I reflect on the metrics presented on Stream@Leeds, questioning how engagement is measured and classified, and considering the broader implications of simplifying student interactions into hierarchical data representations.
This workshop focused on the ideological work of data visualization, and *The Pudding*'s piece "Who Gets Shipped and Why?" provided an inspiring example. The article explores fandom trends, revealing how media archetypes and fan preferences create a feedback loop that reinforces dominant representations. Reflecting on these insights, I considered the importance of transparency and critical design in visualizations, as emphasized by Kennedy and Hill, reaffirming their potential to challenge power structures and advocate for social justice.
In my experiment using Teachable Machine, I trained a model to classify images into two categories: my photos (Class 1) and photos of the Japanese artist Hoshino Gen (Class 2). The model performed well for most typical cases, correctly classifying my photos with 100% confidence. However, it misclassified Hoshino Gen wearing a long-haired wig as belonging to Class 1. This indicates that the model relied heavily on specific visual features, such as hair length, which influenced its classification. Despite this limitation, the model successfully identified Hoshino Gen in other contexts, such as with exaggerated facial expressions, showing its ability to generalize to some extent.
This week, I explored how algorithms and categorization influence identities and digital representation. I learned about Sumpter's model for analyzing social media posts and Cheney-Lippold's concept of "algorithmic identity." Through hands-on activities, like categorizing Instagram data and creating heatmaps, I realized the complexity of such processes and how rigid classifications often fail to capture the nuances of human behavior. This experience deepened my understanding of how algorithms simplify identities while inspiring me to think critically about improving such systems.
This week’s digital ethnography workshop gave me the chance to dive deep into the r/BaldursGate3 subreddit. It’s amazing how much you can learn about a community by observing its dynamics and reflecting on its culture, values, and communication methods. The process felt like stepping into a vibrant, self-contained social world—just as Pink et al. (2015) describe in their work on social worlds.
This week’s digital ethThis workshop was a delightful deep dive into interactive storytelling, blending the theory of cybertext with hands-on practice using Twine. As someone familiar with the gameplay of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and a fan of @Baldur's Gate 3, the concept of creating branching narratives felt like stepping into familiar, yet exciting, territory.