One DH project I found interesting was called, “Old Weather”. Its primary Digital Humanities focus was to preserve and archive information from old logbooks of whalers and Arctic voyagers in order to understand the weather of the past. It also had a secondary approach and also involved textual analysis. Once pages of old logbooks were archived, they were then transcribed. These two methods to organize the information fit the scholarly subject well, because the pages from logbooks are easy to find and the transcriptions make it easier to understand what we are looking at. Since some of the pages date back to the mid-19th century, they do need to be preserved and archived in order to save the information, especially since they are written on paper. Transcription and textual analysis are also necessary in order to understand what is actually written down since some pages can be too hard to read in their current state.
Another DH project is called, “Mapping the Republic of Letters”. This project is a network analysis project that aims to map out how communication by letter had changed throughout history. The project looks at people from Voltaire and Galileo, to the Spanish empire, and works to show how large their network of communication was. It also used visualization to show how how many letters were sent by a particular person, and graphs to show where the letters went to geographically, and who they were received by. The graphs and images are really helpful to show just how far publications traveled, or to show how limited people in the past where to spreading their works. Since the information the project was looking at were letters that had to travel to other places, the visualization approach does a great job at communicated the difference between communication today and the past.
Jacob Hubbard is a sophomore at Bucknell University, and is from San Francisco, CA.
