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Digital Scholarship

    Stitching the Curve: An Update

    by Hanne Pearce July 28, 2020
    written by Hanne Pearce

    It has now been well over five months since a group of us University of Alberta Library staff began a data physicalization project to stitch Covid-19 data in Canada. It’s a project that we called “Stitching the Curve”. This is a little update on this data physicalization project’s progress. 

    Quebec Covid-19 Swatch by Peter Binkley

    To quickly recap the project, members of our team have all selected provinces to either knit or crochet. Our colleague and fellow knitter, Peter Binkley, created a code that produces a spreadsheet that is automatically updated with COVID-19 case numbers for each province, via Health Canada data. We are knitting a row each day (back and forth) in a specific colour that is determined by the number of cases that day. The plan is to join our swatches as a blanket that will eventually manifest the full Canadian experience of COVID-19. To read more about data physicalization, read this earlier post by my colleague Abbie Shenk. 

    As the pandemic has continued, and even as various aspects of society have reopened, the university has remained predominantly closed. The library has since opened curbside pick up so some of our colleagues are working shifts on campus again but most library staff are still working from home. We are busy each day answering chat questions, providing information consults, and many of us are prepping for a fall term that will historically different, with most courses being offered online. 

    The months have seen our swatches grow longer. Looking at my own swatch, there are days it feels unnaturally long. One time I was sure I knitted a month twice by accident — surely March wasn’t that long ago? Then, there are other days where the length of the swatch feels unfortunately accurate, especially when the separation from colleagues and that sweet hum of the library feels like a distant memory. 

    Now that our swatches are getting longer we are also able to see some real trends in case-numbers from province to province. Some provinces such as Ontario and Quebec have unfortunately had high case numbers, so those knitting these swatches have had predominately been stitching in the lightest colours for months. You will see in the images that Christine (Ontario) and Peter (Quebec) are using annotative marks on their swatches for days with extremely high numbers of cases. In other provinces like Manitoba, New Brunswick and the Northern Territories, the case numbers have been very low. As you can see in Connie’s (New Brunswick) photo, her swatch is almost entirely dark in colour. She sent me these thoughts:

    New Brunswick Covid-19 Swatch, Connie Winther

    “New Brunswick continues to experience very low rates of Covid-19 as you can see from my mostly black swatch (March 1 – June 27). I added a small ribbon on June 4, the day of the province’s first death from Covid-19. I felt that it was important to mark this day as it was such a sad milestone for the province, and also sad as the death was within a long term care facility which has been the tragedy of the Canadian Covid-19 story.  As the days and weeks have now turned to months, I have thought a lot about when we will mark the end of our knitting. Will we pick an arbitrary date like one year since starting (March 1), or will there be an official declaration that the pandemic is over? 

    I am so grateful that I started with this project as it sparked a renewed interest in knitting and crocheting.  The past three months have been very challenging and emotionally difficult. 

    I have spent my spare time crocheting as it was a welcome break from screens and have appreciated the quiet, meditative space it provided for me.”

    Newfoundland and Labrador Covid-19 Swatch by Kara Blizzard

    The continuation of the pandemic has also raised the question among the group as to when we will end the project and what we will do with the blanket once it is finished. Thus far we plan to continue stitching, however, eventually, we will have to call a cut off date. One possibility could be the end of February of 2021, thus making each swatch a year long. We have already started to consider what we might do with the final product of our work. We learned in late June that the Royal Alberta Museum is looking for pandemic related artifacts from Albertans. I reached out to their curators and heard that they would be interested in our blanket, when complete. I think it has been a pretty unanimous decision that we want the final work to go somewhere where it can be preserved and enjoyed by future generations, and the Royal Alberta Museum would be the ideal way for that to happen. 

    Because we know the project is likely to be preserved, one thing we have been trying to do more consciously is to journal and document our progress. I recently put together a video journal about the project which I am happy to share with you here as a conclusion. My small wish is that the next time I do an update on the project, we might all be working on campus again, stitching our swatches together. Here’s hoping!

    Ontario Covid-19 Swatch by Christine Brown. That one stripe of dark blue is Canada Day, so no cases were reported.

    July 28, 2020 0 comment
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  • Physical Computing

    by Guest Author June 8, 2020
    by Guest Author June 8, 2020

    By Abbie Schenk Imagine a programming workshop: students sitting behind monitors and laptops, quietly  typing line after line of code to make their computers spit out words, solve math problems, and manipulate pixels on those same screens. Their education is almost entirely contained to the virtual realm.  But a different form of computer science education has emerged in the last few years: physical computing. “A recent growth area in computer science education…

  • Data Physicalization

    by Guest Author May 13, 2020
    by Guest Author May 13, 2020

    Written By Abbie Schenk When we think of data visualizations, we often think of charts, maps and other forms of expressing data in digital ways. But humans have visualized data for thousands of years, long before computer screens were invented. Some of the earliest data visualizations go back to 5500 BC when Mesopotamians used clay tokens to visualize data. Today, representing data in a physical manner is called data physicalization. The Digital…

  • LET US INTRODUCE YOU TO… ERIN O’NEIL, OUR WIKIPEDIAN IN RESIDENCE!

    by Kate Cawthorn May 11, 2020
    by Kate Cawthorn May 11, 2020

    Staff profiles tell the story of an organization. Here at the University of Alberta Library, this is ours… In early March I had the opportunity to interview Erin O’Neil about her role as the University of Alberta Library’s first Wikipedian in Residence from February until August of 2020. This interview was recorded prior to University of Alberta Library closing our physical locations temporarily due to COVID-19. Because of the temporary closures, Erin…

  • Stitching the Curve: A UAlberta Library Data-driven Making Project

    by Hanne Pearce April 23, 2020
    by Hanne Pearce April 23, 2020

    University of Alberta Library staff share a great passion for information and we are always looking for new ways we can engage with it and make it more approachable for ourselves and our community. In March, when the COVID-19 crisis brought a sudden change to all our lives, some library staff with yarncraft inclinations had an idea to start a unique making project. The “Stitching the Curve” project seeks to capture the…

  • Gender and Sexuality in Primary Sources

    by Emily Zheng April 9, 2020
    by Emily Zheng April 9, 2020

    Last month, in honour of Pride Week 2020, we got together at the Digital Scholarship Centre to talk about Gender & Sexuality Primary Resource collections. Now that most of us are hunkering down to do research at home, we wanted to share those collections online! In the last few decades, research into LGBTQ2S+ studies have grown exponentially. As a result, there are growing numbers of projects which aim to collect materials that…

  • New in the Internet Archive: UAlberta’s Growing Digital Collection

    by Emily Zheng January 27, 2020
    by Emily Zheng January 27, 2020

    Written by Sarah Severson Did you know that the University of Alberta Library has a huge collection of digitized items, many of them dating back a century or more? 2019 has been a busy year for the University of Alberta Library’s digitization program and has seen us add almost 22,000 new items to our Internet Archive collection. For several years, we have partnered with Internet Archive as our digitization partner, and this…

  • Let us introduce you to… Sean!

    by Eva Romanick November 7, 2019
    by Eva Romanick November 7, 2019

    Staff profiles tell the story of an organization. Here at the University of Alberta Library, this is ours… Meet Sean Luyk!Sean Luyk is our Digital Projects Librarian, working on the 2nd floor of Cameron Library. You have an interesting title of Digital Projects Librarian. What kind of projects does a Digital Projects Librarian do? In my role, I’m responsible for our media archiving service (ERA A+V). This involves working with our users to archive…

  • Cameron Library Staff @ The Shack Makerspace this July

    by Sonya Leung July 1, 2018
    by Sonya Leung July 1, 2018

    This July you will see some familiar faces in the Faculty of Science and the Physics Department’s Science Hardware Space: The Shack* (The Shack) as the Cameron Library Public Service Assistants (PSAs) will be covering The Shack’s staff vacation leaves. The Shack is located at L2-136 in the Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science Building – pop by and say “Hello!” The open hours are Monday to Friday 1:30 – 3:30 PM for the…

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