Policy Ignite - Digital Jam

August 23, 2018

On August 23rd, I attended Policy Ignite – Digital Jam a yearly event for public servants that allows the opportunity for open discussion on government and digitization. At this event, we heard two speakers talk about two separate issues and one speaker talk about how to approach problem solving when you’re faced with empirical evidence. The first two speakers used visual cues and statistics to show real Canadian problems that are ignored because of distance from the problem and minor representation in a larger whole. The first presenter talked about how to address abuse in the Northern territories and the second presenter spoke about how to make the Invisible Visible, specifically children in care.

From here, we broke off into two groups, my group looked at making the invisible visible, to discuss the underlying issues. With the 5 whys approach, we looked at what the data shows and doesn’t show us, how the surveys are problematic, and what could be done to solve the problem. We discussed the way that surveys and analysis of data often explore and show the negative side of a situation, and ignore the success. There is also the issue that it is highly difficult to measure qualitative data and that no follow up is done on children in care after the age of 18. My group also discussed the media’s influence in the matter, for example, how film and television often portray foster parents and government in a negative light and children as victims, ignoring the different forms of support in place for children and families of care and how children’s violence and trauma can be problematic in a establishing a single family home. The media plays a specific role in the way the public comes to understand the issue and shows how being uneducated affects the way we perceive the issue or misperceive the actual problem.

We finished our discussion by creating a system map. This map, a lot like a spider map, began with the original issue and webs out into different branches where we dig deeper into the underlying issue (using the 5 whys) until we felt we had established a real cause for the problem. The system map help to show how different issues were interconnected and contributed to a larger more general problem.

The event was a great way to see how the digital cannot always be taken at a first glance, the importance of data analysis, and the importance of showing the limitations of the technique. It was also a good forum to discuss what we, as public servants, can do to improve the resources and way we approach these situations, one of which was making sure that the information for children and families in these situations is available and accessible.

Digital Interfaces: A Significant Contribution to Earl Modern Theatre Studies

January 12, 2018

Dr. Christopher Schuwey of the University of Fribourg’s lecture “Digital Interfaces: A Significant Contribution to Early Modern Theatre Studies” dealt with the issue of interfaces.

He began his lecture discussing the article “The Digital-Humanities Bust” and how it fails to understand exactly how technology is used in the humanities. The biggest fail from the article is that the author thinks that the only aspect of digital humanities is computational analysis, which is in fact not the case. One important aspect of Digital Humanities is interfaces.

Schuwey discusses the importance of interfaces and their up keep. Interfaces play a fundamental role in the way we access and recognize data. It allows us to interact with data in new ways. Interfaces provide a new opportunity to interact with texts and new ways to display the data in a visually appealing way. Schuwey’s own work allows people to read with the eye of a theatre audience. Some interesting things about interfacing texts is that it prevents having to scroll through the document or to the end of the book to read footnotes or endnotes. Instead, you can hover over text to gain more information or click on hyperlinks to gain more information on a certain topic, without actually having to leave your place on the page. Not only does this offer more opportunity to learn as more information is available in one spot, but it also allows researchers to make new conclusions as data is organized in new ways.

Magical Methods: Using Topic Models in Digital Humanities’ Research

November 22, 2017

Professor Shawn Graham of Carleton University spoke about topic modeling in the field of digital humanities with a focus on archeology. First, he explained that a (large) part of digital humanities is borrowing from other disciplines and applying it to our own field of study.

The current problems, Professor Graham highlights regarding topic modeling, are whether the data is scarce or abundant, material shifting across formats, and the problem of big data. Big data can be both a blessing and/or a problem. Big data can come in many forms like 200 electronic documents (blessing) or 200 years’ worth of archeological artifacts (problem). What we need to keep in mind when using big data to topic model is that it does not provide a justification, but rather another way to understand the data in front of us. I think this statement is the most important statement that Professor Graham made during his lecture on the subject.

He then goes on to discuss that often, visualizing the data pulled from topic models is a good way to see all the data at once and to compare and contrast the results to come up with an understanding. He displayed several examples of the ways visualization can be applied to topic modeling. He also mentioned the importance of using other people code as a starting point for your own. There is no need to start from scratch, but there is opportunity to learn from others.

FWD 50: Realizing the potential of our digital future / Réaliser le potentiel de notre futur numérique

November 2, 2017

Nancy Chahwan, Deputy Commissioner of the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) spoke on Thursday November 2 about the ways the CRA has been implementing digitization to foster innovation and improve services for the public, as part of FWD 50, which is Canada’s digital government conference. She touched on:

• The tools the agency is using for service modernization
• The ways that digitizing processes has actually improved service turnaround time from 6 weeks to 24 hour
• The implementation of agile framework into government project development instead of waterfall
• The visions for programs and client services that the agency hopes to digitize in the future
• The ways they hope to improve current processes like cyber security

Nancy’s talk, though not long, discusses the way the government “no longer just encourages innovation, [but is] expecting it”.

Policy Ignite! Presents: Canada in the Digital World/Canada dans la monde numérique

November 2, 2017

Policy Ignite is an event for public servants where people come together to promote innovative ideas in policy development. The event featured about ten speakers from various areas who pitched ideas on how technology could be applied (mostly in the government sphere) to improve current processes and services for the public. The speakers discussed tools that could be used, like github and slack, to promote collaboration and sharing of ideas.

Isaac Caverhiil-Godkewitch’s speech stood out to me because he discussed the ways we can improve Digital Mental Health tools to make them more accessible, have friendly indexes, and provide services at a touch instead of having to search through a website. The application that is available on your phone, would contain all the same information as the government’s official mental health site, but would provide direct results for your specific need with only one click. This tool stands out for me, because, upon seeing the websites for information on mental health, they are convoluted and complicated. People in need of assistance do not have time to search through pages and pages of information. The application would provide the assistance needed in one touch to those who need assistance and those who are looking for assistance for someone else.

Another speaker that really interested me, whose name escapes me, discussed the challenges of digitization due to the fallibility of humans. Her talk mentioned that we need to consider the impacts of human error as well as subjectivity and bias when we digitize. Most people promote digitization without considering the limitations due to human intervention. Humans are not perfect, therefore, can we really be reassured that our technology is perfect? While the speaker was still promoting digitization, she wants us to consider every aspect of it in order to produce the best possible product.