My name is Tony. I am a husband and father of two children. As mentioned in my blog post from October of last year. Our children are growing fast, and we are working hard to teach them all the things they are going to need for their future.
I am a PR/senior at The University of Oklahoma with only a couple of semesters left. I work full time at WWLS and ALICE FM. Recently, WWLS celebrated it’s twenty-fifth anniversary at Remington Park in Oklahoma City. I work with a former professional baseball player and some accomplished journalists.
Pictured are some of the guys I work with weekdays from 4p-7p on The Sports Animal (Al Eschbach, Jim Traber, Me, Berry Tramel and Dean Blevins).
I’ve been with the company for about 20 of those 25.
What are my PR qualifications?
I have broadcasted in the Oklahoma City radio market for twenty-three years. My PR qualifications are scant however, around 2016 I started a boutique agency with a former co-worker. We named it Red Plains Media. The agency created audio and video content while managing the advertising buys for radio and TV. We were radio guys that were trying to find a fit and make money doing it. We had no formal training. We just had the gear and great ambition to go create great content. One of our first, successful clients was a CBD manufacturer that needed a partner to manage the flow of information and content. We created brochures and video sales collateral for their sales team. Once again, we had no idea what we were doing but we jumped in and tried. Luckily, they enjoyed our work for a few years.
This was an ad I shot and created for one of the many products the client manufactured.
What do I enjoy about PR?
I have always admired the PR professional and their ability to create or manage the spin of situations. I have found that the untrained have developed an idea of what the PR professional really does and usually their assumptions are off a bit. I want to study Public Relations because of the ability to craft and maintain an image for a client while simultaneously generating revenue. It sounds like a canned response but when the client is successful, in turn, so are you.
Why am I studying PR and what motivates me regarding PR?
Ultimately the bottom line is at stake for everyone in a capitalistic environment. Revenue and the ability to nudge the direction of the company sales are what motivate my desire to know more about Public Relations. The PR professional isn’t exactly a salesperson but a voice of image, message and design.
What on-campus activities or community organizations do I volunteer with?
The schedule I keep professionally and at home inhibits my ability to participate in on campus activities. I would genuinely enjoy participating, however, most of the meetings happen during my work hours. I am not a regular or active member in the community outside of talking on the radio for hours on the radio each weekday. If I had the option, I would participate in more extracurricular activities here at the university.
Digital humanities and its ability to reveal complex relationships help create a science of behavior in a way that traditional methods never achieved due to a lack of technological innovation. The digital path uses the medium for research, cataloging, preservation and other insightful applications. It analyzes behavior and presents it through visuals and sometimes through “plug-ins.” It is a search for answers utilizing the digital platform by either those of the DH community or curious interlopers seeking knowledge about the past. Think ancestry dot com. While still in its early years of development and study, digital humanities’ definition is subjective. Digital humanities, as a study, is a personal reflection of sorts. However, the field’s description blurs across the knowledge spectrum. Www.whatisdigitalhumanities.com, presented early in the course, I found this to be especially intriguing because everyone defines digital humanities differently. According to the site, as of January 2015, the database contains 817 rows and randomly selects a quote each time the page is loaded. (2023, Heppler). Professor and chair of Digital Studies at Davidson College, Mark Sample, says in his blog, “The heart of the digital humanities is not the production of knowledge; it’s the reproduction of knowledge” (2023, Sample). Digital humanities have a place for study, if not the most important; it is a survey of who we are and where we hail.
Digital humanities can be a personal or group reflection of the past. However, the field’s definition blurs across knowledge spectrums. The results rendered may or not fascinate those outside the field of study resulting in a lack of support. It is not until those skeptics make a personal connection through historical analysis that they realize the study’s importance. In the case of The Slave Voyages – Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases (2021, Eltis), Those involved may or may not want to know the reality that the slave trade is a part of their personal story. The website offers interaction with documents that may never have been available otherwise without the cataloging and preservation of manuscripts detailing those involved in the abhorrent trade. Had this site not presented these names to the current conscious, they probably would have sat elsewhere, hidden from discovery. Preserving these documents in the digital space adds an advantage for those that do not have direct access to them. It allows anyone interested and with an internet connection to study and access from anywhere.
The site uses actual names with details of en slavers.
Digital Humanists, in some respect, act similarly to museum curators and collectors of antiquities—archiving digital items into online inventory to tell a story or express a subject theme. However, compiling all things is an impossibility due to copyright laws.
Common themes are archived and compiled in one place using metadata and classification identifiers digitally. These spaces allow interaction with items not centrally located together but in a virtual space. According to the About Us page, “The Dublin Core Metadata, or “DCMI” is an organization supporting innovation in metadata design and best practices across the metadata ecology (2022, DCMI). For those that compile this data, software like Omeka is beneficial. It is another example where the user is somewhere else but would love to visit an exhibit outside of the physical location. Proximity issues are not a hindrance for those collaborating. The museum is online. An online resource such as Omeka allows collaborations to flourish. The Preserve The Baltimore Uprising Archive Project, utilizes the features of Omeka to bring the exhibit viewer closer to the protest and unrest in Baltimore following the untimely deaths of black citizens at the hands of police. The site allows users to upload relevant photos and content with metadata to archive the unrest in online collections.
Themes of humanity and the relationships created by those involved in history can be delineated using network analysis and social networks. I found demonstrating the degrees of the relationships to be especially interesting. What I found interesting is the ability to read into the relationships better with what corpus you have. It is almost like reading between the lines to see what the participants meant. For example, those networks of relationships mapped in Voltaire’s Correspondence Network show his letter correspondence to people of different importance during that time. It is beneficial in finding patterns because it breaks down the correspondences into different attributes like gender, nationality and destination. For example, you can see that the Ferney to Paris connection was essential to the Voltaire network by the size of the circle or node. The degree of centrality is a term used in network analysis. It is the number of connections to the node or how vital each node is in the network (2011, Weingart).
Ferney Shows a high degree of centrality
The majority of Voltaire’s correspondences were dispatched mainly to male recipients in France particularly Ferney.
Weingart says that analysis should not apply to every project citing danger in methodology appropriation (2011, Weingart). Assumptions could be made after analyzing the network and could be wrong or distorted is how I interpret it. Metadata is an essential aspect of a network. These seem to be the building blocks of efficient analysis. Without these crucial details, the complex nature of human relationships will not display correctly. Not only does the data need to be in shape, but the analytical part must also appear suitable, or the attempt at analysis is in vain.
Almost Jedi-like, as is the analysis of relationships in the Evelina Gabasova blog about The Star Wars social network. It is possible to take the metadata within the scripts for the movies and reveal the relationships they create. For example, the relationship between the so-called ‘terrorist groups’ residing in Boston and the characters in the Star Wars saga is the metadata, once compiled and calculated, tells about the stuff between the lines.
Gabisova’s overview graphic of the Star Wars Network from her blog
Gabasova demonstrates, using Cytoscape (as seen above), that R2-D2 was a large part of the story arc of Star Wars. Unfortunately, without further explanation, this general overview tells us nothing unless the attributes and edges are detailed. In her blog, Gabasova explains the interactions and scene presence of each of the main characters of the story line. As a Star Wars fan, I never gave much thought to which character was present in more scenes than others until seeing her research. Cytoscape is another arrow in the quiver of digital humanists in discovering and uncovering complex relationships in social networks.
Digital humanities, at its core, embodies the human experience through art, life moments, events and relationships. Revealing emotional and complex relationships between people in complex networks through different methodologies is now a reality. Illustrating the intricate details of those relationships as technology progresses will become more interactive and complex. Digital humanists can only uncover these connections with good data. Mining that data is time-consuming and often complex. Weingart states, “Nothing worth discovering has ever been found in safe waters” (2011, Weingart). Reflecting on his quote, he talks about going deeper to discover more than the obvious. Those topics or hypotheses’ are more complicated than others in finding answers and are worth finding. As technologies like VR and AI start to develop, I think the possibilities in this field are endless. Not that there is any shortage of topics to be researched.
The underlying stories are fascinating to realize once they are uncovered by someone regards to digital humanities. Relationships and digital humanities’ ability to demonstrate them in a manner that is visually appealing and understandable to non-specialists are key takeaways of this course.
References
Eltis, D. (2021). Explore the origins and forced relocations of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic World. A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,’ Slave Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Retrieved May 7, 2023, from https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/about.
Gabasova, E. (2015, December 15). The Star Wars Social Network. Evelina Gabasova’s Blog. Retrieved May 7, 2023, from http://evelinag.com/blog/2015/12-15-star-wars-social-network/index.html#.VnAhsTZZG6A.
Heppler, J. A. (n.d.). What is Digital Humanities. Retrieved May 7, 2023, from https://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/.
Preserve the Baltimore Uprising Archive Project. Preserve The Baltimore Uprising Archive Project. (n.d.). Retrieved May 7, 2023, from https://baltimoreuprising2015.org/.
Sample, M. (2011, May 25). The digital humanities is not about building, it’s about sharing [web log]. Retrieved May 6, 2023, from https://samplereality.com/blog/.
Weingart, S. (2011, December 14). Demystifying Networks. Retrieved May 7, 2023, from https://lms.hypothes.is/app/basic-lti-launch.
