<commit_before>---
title: kindness_theory
author: <NAME>, <NAME>, and <NAME> 
date: Nov. 17, 2015
bibliography: theorybib.bib
csl: MLAstuff.csl
---


#Theoretical Underpinning of KU Acts of Kindness Project
While many maps aim to reflect a priori conditions (this street exists next to this street, a bus stop exists here, etc.) that guide their users from point A to point B, the purpose of the KU Acts of Kindness map is unique. This map displays where "acts of kindness"--an incredibly subjective type of experience--occurred; drop down menus further describe this "act" and reveal how we, the researchers, received and captured this information. The map intends to get an affective response from the viewer in ways that typical topographic maps do not. By looking at something that catalogs acts of kindness in a particular space--the University of Kansas campus, in this case--the campus begins to look less like a hostile or simply neutral place, and instead more like an actively welcoming and engaged space. In other words, this map aims not just to reflect conditions but to *create* and *construct* conditions in the form of a friendlier campus community. Furthermore, anyone who wants can contribute to this project, thereby getting the community involved in this affective construction of our shared space. 

##The Subjective Nature of the Data, or Capta.
The KU Acts of Kindness project doesn't just embrace "observer co-dependent and interpretative" data--it depends on it [@drucker_humanities_2011]. First, no submitted act of kindness was turned away, as we let everyone submitting be the arbiter of what should or should not be considered "kindness." Second, experiencing an act of kindness necessarily means that instead of distancing the "researcher" from the data, the researcher is in active participant in its very creation. On another note, we wanted to highlight that the longitude and latitude points on this map are to be taken as approximate values, not exact or perfectly accurate ones. Since the goal was not a perfect, neutral rendering of the space (as if that were even possible, anyways), we decided this kind of data collection would work well for our purposes. Ultimately, we thought all of the decisions above were keeping in the spirit of "capta," a term coined by <NAME>, a visual information scholar at UCLA. Capta, as she explains in "Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display," underscores the interpretative nature of information and the information collection process; data, on the other hand, often passes for "objective" information, or a "natural representation of pre-existing fact" [@drucker_humanities_2011].

###The Importance of Affective Mapping for Our Humanistic Inquiry
In that same article, Drucker proposes a hypothetical situation: 
>"Three people are waiting for a bus, how long does it take? One is late for work and anxious, one is in desperate need of a  >bathroom, and the other does not want to go to the afterschool program. How can the variations in perception be expressed?" In this particular case, the perception of time and space is altered by feelings of frustration and anxiety. Coincidentally, many of the acts of kindness we have recorded occurred while people were waiting for the bus. In the same way, then, these acts of kindness altered perceptions of space and time in more positive ways. For example, while working on this project, we began to see the bus stop as more than just a waiting space; instead, the bus stop became a wonderfully conducive place for "people watching," where we looked for people acting altruistically. While we acknowledge that our map is not as complex as some of the ones Drucker examines in her article, we would argue that this more simplistic map at least sparks new and increasingly positive conceptions of space.

Another important text influencing our work was <NAME>'s "Creating a Landscape of Memory: The Potential of Humanities GIS." Bodenhamer identifies GIS, or geographic information systems technology, as a powerful tool for scholars interested in participating in the "spatial turn," a movement that focuses on how societies construct spaces and how spaces construct societies/subjectivities. While humanists have often been skeptical of this kind of technology for its reductive tendencies, Bodenhamer offers us another view on the subject: "the power of the map" can be used to "evoke history and memory, to prompt narrative, to define community" [@bodenhamer_creating_2007]. We found that our map did all three. Because acts of kindness usually happen in little, inconspicuous moments within the course of our goal-driven lives, we tend to forget it or at least forget to appreciate it for its worth, distracted as we are by more pressing matters. Publicizing the act on Twitter allowed us (and our community contributors) to preserve the act as a digital "memory"; pointing out the act on our map similarly allowed us to integrate acts of kindness into the communal, social, and cultural landscape of KU. 

####How KU Acts of Kindness Embraced "Minimal Computing" 
You'll find our map on a Jekyll site, a static website generator. We decided to post our research on a static site as a opposed to the more common dynamic website for several reasons, one of which was to integrate the principals of minimal computing into our project. GO::DH defines minimal computing as a "critical movement, akin to environmentalism, asking for balance between gains and costs in related areas that include social justice issues and de-manufacturing and reuse, not to mention re-thinking high-income assumptions about “e-waste” and what pople do with it" [@go::dh_about:_????] Jekyll achieves this balance "between costs and gains" by allowing us to display all of our relevant information, while cutting down on the bloat created by proprietary programs or dynamic sites. Because the lifespan of our project was an important thing to keep in mind, a static site also afforded us a better chance of preservation, since "security patches and updates are constantly required to keep [dynamically generated] websites alive" [@profhacker_how_2015]. Lastly, with an emphasis not only on sustainability, but also inclusion, Jekyll's reduced bandwith usage means that users in areas of low-bandwith can access our research more easily [@profhacker_how_2015].

#####Works Cited

Bodenhamer, <NAME>. "Creating a Landscape of Memory: The Potential of Humanities GIS." *International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing* 1.2 (2007):97-110. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.

<NAME>. "Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display." 
*Digital Humanities Quarterly* 5.1 (2011): 1-52. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.

GO::DH. "Welcome to Minimal Computing." *Minimal Computing* N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.

Profhacker. "How (and Why) to Generate a Static Website Using Jekyll, Part 1." *The Chronicle of Higher Education.* 31 Aug. 2015. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.
<commit_msg>reformatted block quote<commit_after>---
title: kindness_theory
author: <NAME>, <NAME>, and <NAME> 
date: Nov. 17, 2015
bibliography: theorybib.bib
csl: MLAstuff.csl
---


#Theoretical Underpinning of KU Acts of Kindness Project
While many maps aim to reflect a priori conditions (this street exists next to this street, a bus stop exists here, etc.) that guide their users from point A to point B, the purpose of the KU Acts of Kindness map is unique. This map displays where "acts of kindness"--an incredibly subjective type of experience--occurred; drop down menus further describe this "act" and reveal how we, the researchers, received and captured this information. The map intends to get an affective response from the viewer in ways that typical topographic maps do not. By looking at something that catalogs acts of kindness in a particular space--the University of Kansas campus, in this case--the campus begins to look less like a hostile or simply neutral place, and instead more like an actively welcoming and engaged space. In other words, this map aims not just to reflect conditions but to *create* and *construct* conditions in the form of a friendlier campus community. Furthermore, anyone who wants can contribute to this project, thereby getting the community involved in this affective construction of our shared space. 

##The Subjective Nature of the Data, or Capta.
The KU Acts of Kindness project doesn't just embrace "observer co-dependent and interpretative" data--it depends on it [@drucker_humanities_2011]. First, no submitted act of kindness was turned away, as we let everyone submitting be the arbiter of what should or should not be considered "kindness." Second, experiencing an act of kindness necessarily means that instead of distancing the "researcher" from the data, the researcher is in active participant in its very creation. On another note, we wanted to highlight that the longitude and latitude points on this map are to be taken as approximate values, not exact or perfectly accurate ones. Since the goal was not a perfect, neutral rendering of the space (as if that were even possible, anyways), we decided this kind of data collection would work well for our purposes. Ultimately, we thought all of the decisions above were keeping in the spirit of "capta," a term coined by <NAME>, a visual information scholar at UCLA. Capta, as she explains in "Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display," underscores the interpretative nature of information and the information collection process; data, on the other hand, often passes for "objective" information, or a "natural representation of pre-existing fact" [@drucker_humanities_2011].

###The Importance of Affective Mapping for Our Humanistic Inquiry
In that same article, Drucker proposes a hypothetical situation: 

>"Three people are waiting for a bus, how long does it take? One is late for work and anxious, one is in desperate need of a  >bathroom, and the other does not want to go to the afterschool program. How can the variations in perception be expressed?"

In this particular case, the perception of time and space is altered by feelings of frustration and anxiety. Coincidentally, many of the acts of kindness we have recorded occurred while people were waiting for the bus. In the same way, then, these acts of kindness altered perceptions of space and time in more positive ways. For example, while working on this project, we began to see the bus stop as more than just a waiting space; instead, the bus stop became a wonderfully conducive place for "people watching," where we looked for people acting altruistically. While we acknowledge that our map is not as complex as some of the ones Drucker examines in her article, we would argue that this more simplistic map at least sparks new and increasingly positive conceptions of space.

Another important text influencing our work was <NAME>'s "Creating a Landscape of Memory: The Potential of Humanities GIS." Bodenhamer identifies GIS, or geographic information systems technology, as a powerful tool for scholars interested in participating in the "spatial turn," a movement that focuses on how societies construct spaces and how spaces construct societies/subjectivities. While humanists have often been skeptical of this kind of technology for its reductive tendencies, Bodenhamer offers us another view on the subject: "the power of the map" can be used to "evoke history and memory, to prompt narrative, to define community" [@bodenhamer_creating_2007]. We found that our map did all three. Because acts of kindness usually happen in little, inconspicuous moments within the course of our goal-driven lives, we tend to forget it or at least forget to appreciate it for its worth, distracted as we are by more pressing matters. Publicizing the act on Twitter allowed us (and our community contributors) to preserve the act as a digital "memory"; pointing out the act on our map similarly allowed us to integrate acts of kindness into the communal, social, and cultural landscape of KU. 

####How KU Acts of Kindness Embraced "Minimal Computing" 
You'll find our map on a Jekyll site, a static website generator. We decided to post our research on a static site as a opposed to the more common dynamic website for several reasons, one of which was to integrate the principals of minimal computing into our project. GO::DH defines minimal computing as a "critical movement, akin to environmentalism, asking for balance between gains and costs in related areas that include social justice issues and de-manufacturing and reuse, not to mention re-thinking high-income assumptions about “e-waste” and what pople do with it" [@go::dh_about:_????] Jekyll achieves this balance "between costs and gains" by allowing us to display all of our relevant information, while cutting down on the bloat created by proprietary programs or dynamic sites. Because the lifespan of our project was an important thing to keep in mind, a static site also afforded us a better chance of preservation, since "security patches and updates are constantly required to keep [dynamically generated] websites alive" [@profhacker_how_2015]. Lastly, with an emphasis not only on sustainability, but also inclusion, Jekyll's reduced bandwith usage means that users in areas of low-bandwith can access our research more easily [@profhacker_how_2015].

#####Works Cited

Bodenhamer, <NAME>. "Creating a Landscape of Memory: The Potential of Humanities GIS." *International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing* 1.2 (2007):97-110. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.

<NAME>. "Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display." 
*Digital Humanities Quarterly* 5.1 (2011): 1-52. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.

GO::DH. "Welcome to Minimal Computing." *Minimal Computing* N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.

Profhacker. "How (and Why) to Generate a Static Website Using Jekyll, Part 1." *The Chronicle of Higher Education.* 31 Aug. 2015. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.

{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.04635094285303008, 'fraction_numerical': 0.011083921117028933, 'mean_word_length': 4.83088543852287, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 17, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 21, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
{'dir': 'git-commits-cleaned', 'id': '4454245', 'n_tokens_mistral': 3456, 'n_tokens_neox': 3122, 'n_words': 2156}