HALEEMA
at the cci. YEAR 0

Category: Project Work

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Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Serious Project 1: Update 6 – Completion

http://tdor-safehouse.glitch.me/

I feel my project is not fully realised due to the scale of it within my timeframe, but this is something I will very much be revisiting. What I had managed to publish on glitch was only my preface. The code for the page pertaining to my dataset will be posted below.

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
	
<title>tdor-safehouse</title>
<link href="stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
</head>
 
<body background="ASSETS/bg.jpg">


<div>
 
<table width="550" height="70" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="headtable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td><h1 class="header">&nbsp;Resources</h1></td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
</div>	
<div class="emptytable">
	 <table>
    <tbody>
      <tr>
        <td class="space">&nbsp;</td>
      </tr>
    </tbody>
  </table>
</div>
	<div>
	<table width="auto" height="auto" class="texttable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>
        <h2> Masterposts </h2>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://www.tumblr.com/transstudiesarchive/168139537672/transgender-resources-masterpost';"> Transgender Resource Masterpost by Bryn Thomas</a> <br><br>
         
<a href="window.location.href='https://transgenderteensurvivalguide.com/post/164540851980/thegrangersapprentice-all-things-pertaining-to';">Massive Self Care Masterpost</a> <br><br>
        
<a href="window.location.href='https://transgenderteensurvivalguide.com/post/144842314245/dysphoria-tips-masterpost';"> Dysphoria Tips Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://realtransfacts.tumblr.com/post/180287510823/gender-questioning-masterpost';"> Gender Questioning Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://nonbinaryresource.tumblr.com/post/190387009652/being-trans-without-dysphoria-masterpost';"> Being Trans Without Dysphoria Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://howtotrans.com/tag/masterpost/';"> How To Trans</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://medium.com/@hhunkin3/debunking-transmedicalism-a-masterpost-5c63c367f8b8';"> Debunking Transmedicalism Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://realtransfacts.tumblr.com/post/179351610973/top-surgery-masterpost';"> Top Surgery Masterpost</a> <br><br>

<a href="window.location.href='https://nekosabina.tumblr.com/post/126280798271/the-librarians-gender-masterpost/amp';"> The Librarian's Gender Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='';"> A Transgender Person’s Guide to Parents Masterpost </a> <br><br>
          
		<h2> Mental Health </h2>
		  <p>Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860

GLBT National Hotline: 888-843-4564 <br><br>

National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs: 212-714-1141(English and Spanish) <br><br>

GLBT National Youth Talkline: 800-246-7743 <br><br>

DeHQ: LGBTQ Helpline for South Asians: 908-367-3374 <br><br>

<a href="window.location.href='https://www.lgbthealth.org.uk/';">LGBT Health and Wellbeing Scotland (counselling waitlist may be full, keep an eye out)</a>

<a href="window.location.href='https://pgirl-gallery.neocities.org/paintings/cyber.html';">The Gender Centre Resources and Downloads</a> <br><br>

<a href="window.location.href='https://pgirl-gallery.neocities.org/paintings/cyber.html';">The Gender Spectrum Guide to Trans Mental Health </a> <br><br>
                   
<a href="window.location.href='https://pgirl-gallery.neocities.org/paintings/cyber.html';"> Self Care and Additional Resources </a> <br><br>
            
<h2>Campaigning Tools</h2>
          
<a href="window.location.href='http://publicinterest.org.uk/FramingEqualityToolkit.pdf';">Framing Equality Toolkit</a><br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/debunking-handbook-2020/';">The Debunking Toolkit</a><br><br>
        
<a href="window.location.href='https://glaad.org/tdor/';">GLAAD - TDoR</a><br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://glaad.org/tdor/https://tdor.translivesmatter.info/';">TDoR Database by Anna-Jayne Metcalfe</a><br><br>
		
<a href="window.location.href='https://campaignbootcamp.org/';">Campaign Bootcamp</a><br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201919/cmselect/cmwomeq/96/96.pdf';">Enforcing the Equality Act: the law and the role of the Equality and Human Rights Commission: Government and Equality and Human Rights Commission Responses to the Committee’s Tenth Report of Session 2017–19</a><br><br>          
		</p>
		
		</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table></div>
	

</body>
</html>

Upon reflection, I realise my concept can be expanded in many ways as there is so much more data of other scenarios within my theme. If i had to revisit this project and take it even further, I would not only make use of converging datasets but I would create my own separate features of the website that make it significantly more unique and more worth visiting than it is already – for example writng my own resources instead of using lists of other people’s creations or bringing more art to it than the text included. The original use was a double sided campaigning tool and art piece which wasn’t what I fully achieved in my opinion as that’s a concept that would need significantly more time and research to make properly. Overall, I still find it mostly useful to have all of this information in one place on my computer even if it didn’t make it to a live website.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Serious Project 1 Year 0

Serious Project 2: Update 5 – Building and Design Choices

The home page of my website uses a stock image of warm, well lit bricks behind off white lined paper that I scanned myself. This was chosen specifically to be comforting and warm. The other pages look like this as well.

I built 2 pages simply using html and css within dreamweaver (as i did not have time to make a webpage making use of the tdor database data.) I only really had time to use my own masterpost datasets.

That being said, when i put it onto glitch.com, my assets broke and I really couldn’t figure out how to correct them in time for submission so I left it to its bare functionality.

Here’s some of my code:

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
	
<title>tdor-safehouse</title>
<link href="stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
</head>
 
<body background="../project 1 serious/ASSETS/bg.jpg">


<div>
 
<table width="230" height="70" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="headtable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td><h1 class="header">&nbsp;SAFEHOUSE</h1></td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
</div>	
<div class="emptytable">
	 <table>
    <tbody>
      <tr>
        <td class="space">&nbsp;</td>
      </tr>
    </tbody>
  </table>
	</div>
	<div>
	<table height="250.2" class="texttable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td><p></p>
        <p class="mainpara">&nbsp;It is 2023. We are young, and transgender. We live a range of lives – ones that are hushed and hidden away; ones where we play in the streets at night; ones where an endless trail of beautiful art and music flows behind our footsteps; ones with difficult conversations, quasi-understanding and ones where we sit with our surroundings, thinking, ‘It could be worse.’ We are young and transgender, and we shake with the euphoria after washing from the shores of deprivation as we learn ourselves as young people barely budding in the adult world; secret lives and adjustments. It’s easy to understand why transgender people were considered near divine being in our faraway past. We are different, we are born to have high insight, we see the first division – Man, and woman. Male bathrooms, female bathrooms. Clothes. Roles.<br> <br>Looking up ‘transgender genocide’ yields calculated results in which transgender voices are trampled by blunt articles insisting it doesn’t exist, it’s not an issue, we die at the same rate as everyone else. If we are killed in the streets, it’s not because we are trans, and yet simultaneously it is our fault for being an anomaly. Somehow, we are the ‘scapegoat’ for issues within our society. Does it sound familiar to you? <br><br>
        My aim for this website was one of a shield to contrast the sword of transgender violence databases. As the numbers tick up, let us honour our victims and honour ourselves. This is a safe space to It was never supposed to be like this. We fight every day. So, while we fight like hell, every single day, how do we cope? How can we care for ourselves? Trans people and youth deserve rest, healing, treatment. Love. Healthcare.  As the numbers tick up, let us honour our victims and honour ourselves. Let this space be a place of hospitality and self-care, a quiet, featureless webpage for reflection. Take a breather. This is my database of transgender&nbsp; care and survival.</p></td>
    
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table></div>
    <div align="center">
	<button class="button" onclick=""> I want to see resources </button>
    <button class="button" onclick=""> Victims 2023 </button>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 5 – Display Captions and Code

Coding the website was a nightmare due to the clunkiness of Neocites – even if it’s on purpose.

I started the index page using the pre-requisite message.

When finishing the website, I will change the captioning message to a longer, more thoughtful text.

Importantly, every single image I chose had context that I could talk about in display captions. However, I realise that i’m running out of time in the project to write detailed display captions about every image. To combat this, I will try and write at least a short sentence for every picture, and develop a handful of captions if i feel it is more relevant to a data themed project. The captions are to present my paintings to a general wider audience and explain the context within them even if they are highly personal to my online experience.

To make the navigation, I used invisible tables and Windows XP boxes from my CSS package that made it much easier.

look how easy! however <a href> does not work and the correct way to actually use the buttons is to put ‘onclick=””‘ in the img properties.

However, something that i found long and gruelling was making 14 individual webpages for each painting and indexing every page within the website. It’s stressful and time consuming.

It took a lot of adjusting. In the website’s current state, lots of pictures appear too large and I do not want an audience to have to scroll to see the full image. Each individual page will need to be tested. I’m honestly worrying if i will have them finished at all.

My display captions do not have the desired effect but they do have some insight. I will try to make up for the lack of content in the display captions by adding to the preface paragraph.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 4 – Neocities

I had to refresh myself on html and css, so I pirated Dreamweaver and made a Nicki Minaj themed website.

Time to create my website with Neocities. Neocities is a recreation of Geocities, which was a service that let users create websites for free in the early 90s. At one point Geocities was almost one of the most browsed sites on the early internet and became a creative sandbox where users mainly made use of simple HTML.

Websites on Geocities looked like this.

I feel geocities is also relevant as a possible origin source for some of the graphics seen in images in the data set – but this is still incredibly ambiguous.

Functionally, I really hated Neocities IDE – or lack thereof. It is an online text editor with no preview options, so I was crossreferencing a lot with Dreamweaver while I coded this website. I’m assuming they are trying to stay as faithful to older methods. I did the majority of my code in dreamweaver.

To begin, I decided to look for a CSS library in the style of Windows XP or 98. This is to save time on my part in constructing a stylesheet, but also to imitate the Joel G website and other neocities websites. I feel it is fitting.

I found this library to use for a windows XP stylesheet.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Serious Project 1 Year 0

Serious Project 1: Update 4 – Text

In the same vein of ‘Get Well Soon’ I decided to write my own gentle, encouraging political text as a preface, and include things like mental health and trans survival resources on the front page. Aside from that, the text was heavily inspired by Anna-Jayne Metcalfe’s blog posts documenting her experiences compiling the data for the tdor database and the ‘Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn’ poem by Tim Turnbull.

‘It Is 2023. We are young, and transgender. We live a range of lives – ones that are hushed and hidden away; ones where we play in the streets at night; ones where an endless trail of beautiful art and music flows behind our footsteps; ones with difficult conversations, quasi-understanding and ones where we sit with our surroundings, thinking, ‘It could be worse.’ We are young and transgender, and we shake with the euphoria after washing from the shores of deprivation as we learn ourselves as young people barely budding in the adult world; secret lives and adjustments. It’s easy to understand why transgender people were considered near divine being in our faraway past. We are different, we are born to have high insight, we see the first division – Man, and woman. Male bathrooms, female bathrooms. Clothes. Roles.

Looking up ‘transgender genocide’ yields calculated results in which transgender voices are trampled by blunt articles insisting it doesn’t exist, it’s not an issue, we die at the same rate as everyone else. If we are killed in the streets, it’s not because we are trans, and yet simultaneously it is our fault for being an anomaly. Somehow, we are the ‘scapegoat’ for issues within our society. Does it sound familiar to you?

My aim for this website was one of a shield to contrast the sword of transgender violence databases. As the numbers tick up, let us honour our victims and honour ourselves. This is a safe space to

It was never supposed to be like this. We fight every day. So, while we fight like hell, every single day, how do we cope? How can we care for ourselves?

Trans people and youth deserve rest, healing, treatment. Love. Healthcare. My aim for this website was one of a shield to contrast the sword of transgender violence databases. As the numbers tick up, let us honour our victims and honour ourselves. Let this space be a place of hospitality and self-care, as we much care for each other and ourselves if we need to keep fighting every day.

This is my database of transgender care and survival.’

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 3 – Paintings

I traced, painted and scanned my entire collection after sorting them into their categories.

Below is a timelapse of one of my paintings.

I’ll upload my scans here.

UNDERSKETCHES

PAINTINGS

Acrylic paint was chosen to imitate the style of RateMySetup and to invoke a feeling within the viewer of a window to the past – like a renaissance painting, I want an audience to be able to see my website and feel how it felt for us to grow up in a tiny online subculture hoarding data, and the wonder and curiorsity we had associated with the origins of thousands of mysterious images with no explainable origins. The way we communicated with eachother using pictures like that, the wierd and surreal media we enjoyed, and liminal photographs associated with the feeling of childhood isolation. An audience’s look into the short life of people that lived invisibly.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Serious Project 1 Year 0

Serious Project 1: Update 3 – Masterposts

For this website, I decided the best course of action would be to gather transgender survival resources to compile in one place, categorise and display on my website combined with a place for victims using Anna Jayne-Metcalfe’s dataset and my own dataset. Due to a lack of time I decided to sort and compile resources straight into my html files.

Over the years, I have had an ongoing list of masterposts, which are enormous datasets in and of themselves filled with links and resources. Master posts tend to have tens or hundreds of resources within them. I gathered 10 masterposts which too have masterposts within them – creating a complex dataset of likely hundreds of survival resources.

I also added mental health and legal information below this, as i believe this website should have a main focus on mental health.

I also pulled data of the victims from the TDOR database to use in a separate webpage.

The idea is to make a dataset OF important datasets in a safe place.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 2 – My dataset

To download my dataset, I downloaded this program and edited the config.ini file to navigate to my channel of choice.

Not showing the finished edit because it has my password in it.

The program was able to produce an entire folder of images saved from the channel.

The link to the zip file is here.

Next in order was to select which pictures I wanted to paint.

I went through 3 iterations of choosing which pictures to use, settling on 14.

I then divided them into 4 categories:

  • Liminal, meaning liminal space images that are usually real pictures taken on older digital cameras in a ‘transitional’ space that invoke a dreamy or unreal feeling
  • Cyber + Surrealism, meaning images usually orginating from the 2000’s web with the unique aesthetic of the time
  • Media, meaning images of or derived from popular media within this subculture
  • Memes also from this subculture specifically

In the gallery, I will separate the paintings based on these categories.

I purchased a sketchbook. I printed off each picture and am going to trace them individually into the sketchbook, using a lightbox rented from CSM library.

I still haven’t decided the mode of this gallery – My first thought was a neocities website to stay on theme with the images in question, but Jazmin suggested something like a framevr gallery. We will have to see!

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Serious Project 1 Year 0

Serious Project 1: Update 2 – TDoR Database

Trigger warning: Violence agaisnt trans people

Let’s look at the TDoR database. I’ve been following this database for a few years.

Every year on or around 20th November trans people worldwide gather for the Transgender Day of Remembrance to remember those we have lost to violence in the past year.

This site gives details of trans people known to have been killed, as collated from reports by Transgender Europe and trans activists worldwide.

Details are also given for those lost to suicide where known.

The site is intended to act as a supporting resource for anyone involved in Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR) events and is intended to be used alongside the official data collated by the Trans Murder Monitoring Project and published by Transgender Europe (TGEU) in early November of each year.

A big thanks are due to the many trans activists and organisations worldwide who work tirelessly collate data on anti-trans violence and in particular to the members and admins of the Trans Violence News Facebook group, without whose support this site would not be possible.

All material presented is gathered from publicly available sources. Please don’t read anything into the raw numbers. What matters is the lives lost, and their stories. Be warned though – some of their stories are horrific.

This project is generally of more of a solemn topic as transgender people become more and more persecuted each day in horiffic and violent ways. One of the things that spurred me on into being more enthusiastic about this specific dataset is the death of my close friend Claire, an 18 year old trans girl. She died by suicide in April of this year, which was extremely difficult for me as we used to be extremely close. I just remember thinking ‘I, and we, are to young to be dealing with this.’

We have no protective weapons, we only have ourselves as we are stripped of our rights. Recently, I’ve also been lookng at perspectives by genocide scholars discussing what the future looks like for us as one of the most persecuted groups on the planet within the context of the 10 stages of genocide.

I believe that we are nearing stage 8 and 9, as recently it was noted that Florida recently published a bill citing that child sex offenders can be punished by the death penalty. Horrifyingly, it’s also being pushed that Florida, a state that ONLY recognises transgender people to legislate that they should have no access to healthcare and young trans girls can’t play sports with the other girls at school, is also trying to mandate that those being caught in the ‘wrong bathroom’ can be charged with a child sex offence. Do you make the connection?

So, as younger transgender people who reside mainly on the internet for our comfort and community as the real world gets worse and worse, I thought, perhaps we need weapons. Not in the sense that all trans people should arm themselves, but campaigning weapons and resources for ourselves.

So I see the TDoR website as a tool, as a weapon, something like the bricks thrown during Stonewall – as it is the cumulative dataset which is used to organise vigils for transgender people for us to remember our dead. It can be used for protesting, rememberance, and an open source of information as I see that our killings are being denied. In fact, upon searching for articles to read for this blog post, I saw many articles trying to say that ‘trans genocide isn’t real, we are not at risk of being killed more than anyone else.’

It tells you otherwise. It will become a staggeringly important source of information in the future. So, what can I personally make from this?

Perhaps if this website is a sword, I can make a shield. What I want to make is a gentle, comforting website where we can explore and reflect on what’s happening to us safely – a digital saferoom, perhaps. This concept likely needs more facets and development, but the bare minimum will be a dataset OF masterposts and of the victims from this year.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 1 – Project Idea

We were given 3 project prompts – Language, Data, and Bots. I chose data.

I’m making 1 serious project and 1 unserious project. This post is going to be about my unserious project covering my own database from #pgirl-image-channel.

In my last blog post for Serious Project 1, I spoke about being inspired by works that can double sas both art pieces and campaigning tools, but for this project I became inspired by a physical exhibition that I went to, named Rate My Setup by Mauro C. Martinez.

There were 2 main parts to the exhibition – the upstairs, where there were large acrylic paintings of several pictures gathered from the r/RateMySetup subreddit. Through these paintings, this Martinez reflects on the lengths that internet users will go to stay connected to eachother.

Hot Single Anime Chicks With Dicks Near You!
It’s Jade in front of one of the paintings. She was excited to see this one specifically.

To me, these paintings appear as almost Renaissance-esque depiction of life during our recent history as a species battling constant social isolation. Martinez specifically touches upon the role of technology in his life during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way of keeping in contact with all of his friends – the bland neutrals of the home enterior contrasting with the bright, inviting hues of the various screens in each painting allude to the mundanity, and perhaps, bleakness of the real, physical world as opposed to the limitless internet where the margains for social acceptance are significantly larger AND you can’t infect or be infected. These are pictures of a communtity that can ONLY exist online, bringing visibility to a world that is invisible, the virtual. I became fascinated with these highly reflective paintings and for my project, decided to look inside myself and see what I could create in the same manner.

Downstairs, a few of the paintings had been physically recreated, inviting you to dwell on the physical implications of setups that are barely stable.

This one in particular irks me. That’s dirty!

One of the setups was completely open to mess around and interact with – So of course me and my friends messed with the computers and took loads of pictures of ourselves with the webcam, reset the desktop wallpaper, played solitare and almost tagged the pc with pictures drawn in MS Paint. I visited the exhibition twice, and on the second time I came I noticed another group did the same thing to the computer. Checking the hard drive, we noticed there were many many pictures taken over all of the days the exhibition was open. This open PC reflected the images in the rest of the exhibition by providing an open platorm for user generated content, like the internet itself.

I love user generated content. I grew up playing Little Big Planet for a significant amount of my childhood, and I also have several personal databases from gathering images of interest from the internet from a young age. For this project, i decided to use a user generated database I had started in a similar vein when I was 16 or 17, in the form of a channel in a mildly popular discord server I used to moderate, called #pgirl-image-channel.

I sent this message out in 2021 and recieved about 1.2k images in response.

Because our submission for this unit is digital only, I decided to reuse the skills from my serious project and make another website encompassing a digital gallery. I’m going to pick <15 pictures and paint them, then exhibit them in a similar way to the RateMySetup exhibition, almost as a way to reflect on the images from the online communites I grew up immersed in.