The Tuberculosis Specimen

4.3.1: Working with Opacity

Introduction

Specimen Studies
0.1.1 | 0.1.2 | 0.1.3 | 0.1.4 | 0.1.5
Methods
0.2.1 | 0.2.2
The Structure of this Dissertation
0.3.1

Tuberculosis' Visual Culture

Visual Practices in Medical Culture
1.1.1 | 1.1.2 | 1.1.3
Seeing and Settling in the Sanatorium Movement
1.2.1 | 1.2.2 | 1.2.3 | 1.2.4 | 1.2.5
Teaching Public Health
1.3.1 | 1.3.2 | 1.3.3 | 1.3.4 | 1.3.5
Representing Doctors in Tuberculous Contexts
1.4.1 | 1.4.2

Using Human Specimens in the Study of Tuberculosis

Seeing Disease in Methyl Violet
2.1.1 | 2.1.2 | 2.1.3 | 2.1.4
Case Histories
2.2.1 | 2.2.2 | 2.2.3 | 2.2.4
Visceral Processes
2.3.1 | 2.3.2
Relation
2.4.1 | 2.4.2 | 2.4.3

Arts-Based Inquiry

Introduction
3.1.1 | 3.1.2 | 3.1.3 | 3.1.4
Terminal Imaginaries & Tuberculous Imaginaries
3.2.1 | 3.2.2 | 3.2.3 | 3.2.4 | 3.2.5 | 3.2.6
Dermographic Opacities
3.3.1 | 3.3.2 | 3.3.3 | 3.3.4
Tactical Pretensions
3.4.1 | 3.4.2 | 3.4.3

Designing Opacity

A Shift towards the Anticolonial
4.1.1 | 4.1.2 | 4.1.3 | 4.1.4
Refusals and Opacities
4.2.1 | 4.2.2 | 4.2.3 | 4.2.4
Digital and Ethical Workflows
4.3.1 | 4.3.2 | 4.3.3 | 4.3.4 | 4.3.5
Conclusion
4.4.1

Coda

Prometheus Undone
5.1.1 | 5.1.2 | 5.1.3 | 5.1.4

Appendix

The Tuberculosis Corpus
X.1.1 | X.1.2 | X.1.3
Web Design
X.2.1 | X.2.2 | X.2.3 | X.2.4
Installation Materials
X.3.1 | X.3.2 | X.3.3

Index

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Much of the workflow and design of the site is indebted to the functionality of Jekyll and GitHub Pages (X.2.3), as well as to the base community archiving site which Kalani Craig developed for the Memory-making and Anti-custodial Reclamation for Collaborative Histories (MARCH) initiative (4.1.1).1 The opacity function, which literally swaps out images and applies changes to text, was the main hand coded feature which was developed for the platform first by Sagar Prahbu during the 2023 IDAH Summer Incubator,2 before being completely revamped by Kalani Craig in late 2023 and 2024.3 I want to start with Sagar’s code, before discussing Kalani’s changes, because it shows different approaches to the problem and how they might be addressed.

As I discussed above (4.1.3; 4.2.3; 4.2.5), opacity is a major component of the ethical intervention provided by the OOPP. Our main interest during the two weeks of IDAH’s summer incubator was to provide a framework to think through these decisions, and enable the writing of the dissertation as it appears now. There are some additional privacy concerns regarding the opacity of online information which we were unable to address.4 What is important for this section is that the additional theoretical and ethical approaches required an additional technical intervention: it was not just the development of a theoretical frame, but also the development of a specific tool and approach with that tool. The technological affordances at times caused issues with how to approach the theoretical interventions, which Kalani and I are still trying to address and reassess in our work. Sometimes, for the Opaque Online Publishing Platform (OOPP) to function, we had to admit to specific technical or conceptual gaps, and address them in the best way we saw fit. With this in mind, I will describe the code as it functioned during the incubator (4.3.2), Kalani’s revamped code (4.3.3), and then the workflow required for images and text (4.3.4). I will finish with a broader note about how to think about a project as it ends, with specific interest in how the opacity filter can address ethical problems which arose during the process of a project, but could not be addressed directly (4.3.5).

  1. This is now a project known as DigitalArc. ↩

  2. Xavier Daniels also assisted in this project at this point, largely as a data entry specialist. ↩

  3. Thanks Kalani! ↩

  4. This includes provisions to protect from scraping for use in Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM). ↩


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TuberculosisSpecimen
The Tuberculosis Specimen

Sean Purcell

This dissertation examines the ways human subjects were turned into research objects as part of the war against tuberculosis.

Sean Purcell,2023 - 2025. Community-Archive Jekyll Theme by Kalani Craig is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Framework: Foundation 6.