Category: Practice Blog

Categories
Practice Blog

Practice 8/28 – Tyler George

My first digital humanities approach I chose to look at is mapping, by observing the Map of Early Modern London (https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/agas.htm) page created by many members, who were lead by Janelle Jenstad, Martin Holmes, and Mark Kaethler. This map is designed to streamline the information found in encyclopedia, library, and stow editions all into one place with an easy user interface. Primarily this map is an example of textual analysis, by bringing hundreds of texts together to provide the viewer a streamlined overview of each particular area, while also providing the information to dig deeper into their research should they choose. The map is also an example of visualization, while also preserving and analyzing the areas of historical London. This is a great way to do this because maps provide a much more clear representation of what London actually looked like than you would ever find in a typical textbook. This interface allows us to visualize great amount of historical information in an accessible way. Easy to use, this map allows me to zoom in on a location, click on it and provides vast information on that location. Additionally, you can sort by category and pull up any locations relating to that category with ease. This map revolutionizes the way users view maps and find certain things in London. Not only does it show me the location of each place, it provides historical context as well as hundreds of articles about each place. This is easily the best interface for viewing a map, as it is easy to search for or find new places, and provides more information on each place than possible to find anywhere else. Lastly, this map is able to include where each piece of information came from, making it easy to verify the authenticity of their information.

.

 

Another interesting website I viewed is titled Selfie City (http://selfiecity.net/#) coordinated by Dr. Lev Manovich, by there help of several contributors. This site provides image plots trying to categorize the commonalities of selfies in particular areas. This is a clear example of visualization, define by Johanna Drucker as “a methodological reversal which makes visualization a procedure rather than a product and integrates interpretation into digitalization in a concrete way”  (Whitley reading). This site uses image analysis to relate themes between selfies, for example the tilt of photos, use of glasses, age, gender, etc. There is definitely no better way to find information regarding selfies by region than through their technology used that closely examines each image. One interesting stat found was that Sao Paulo females tilt there head on average 17 degrees in their selfies compared to Moscow males who average a 7 degree tilt. This is a very interesting stat that I would never have previously thought possible without the use of this technology. Their automated analysis of images allowed them to recognize just the smallest details that would’ve taken forever to browse through so many photos with just the human eye. When examining photos, this is truly a remarkable discovery that will revolutionize the way we study images.

Categories
Practice Blog

Practice Blog

http://thehumanitiesnow.blogs.bucknell.edu/files/2014/08/Screenshot-2014-09-03-07.38.49.png

I chose to explore network analysis and archive for this assignment and found two sources that I found to be very interesting. Essentially, one is an “Old Weather” log used for the purpose of analyzing past weather. The second source, selfiecity, is used to provide information on the dynamics of “selfie taking.” The primary DH focus of the website https://www.oldweather.org, categorized under the archive section, is to help readers understand ship and weather logs from the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is important because it provides information that could assist in the understanding of future climate change by exploring past weather patterns. The primary DH focus of the second website http://selfiecity.net/#, categorized under the network analysis section, is to explore the art of “taking selfies” using quantitative methods. It takes into account peoples poses and expressions and arranges them in a method that identifies patterns from the data collected.

http://selfiecity.net/selfiexploratory/

The secondary approach addressed for the first project is preservation. This method fits with the scholarly subject matter because it could be used to help develop methods that assist in the preservation for our planet and environment. We can look at what this means for the future based on the past. In comparison to that, the secondary approach addressed for the second project is visualization. This fits with the scholarly subject matter because it provides a visual of the information that was gathered. There are images of selfies containing different subjects with different poses and facial expressions. They are then separated based on demographics, pose, features, and mood. The data collected was then formed into numerous graphs and when clicked on, selfies would pop up. Both of these sources use a medium of the subject matter that is both engaging and relevant for digital representation. The Old Weather uses ships to show ship logs to show data in the form of digital representation, where as selfiecity uses selfies to show this.

Categories
Practice Blog

DH Project Analysis 8/28

The first DH project I have chosen to address is called “Transcribe Bentham.” This project’s primary goal is to transcribe Jeremy Bentham’s (a famed philosopher and reformer) manuscripts. The challenge to attempting this lies in the fact that most of his manuscripts are labeled under either “moderate” or “difficult” handwriting, and are often times in a foreign language, such as French or Latin. This project is filed under Crowdsourcing, Digital Edition, and Textual Edition. This falls under the Crowdsourcing approach due to it being an internet-wide collaborative initiative. The method fits with the scholarly subject matter in that one would generally need a large group of people to transcribe 20,679 manuscripts. I believe this also falls under digital edition and textual edition because the contributors are converting Bentham’s work from a textual manuscript into a digital format.

Jeremy Bentham, a famed philosopher and reformer

The second DH project that I am addressing is titled “Belfast Group Poetry”. This project involves the Belfast Group, which started when Philip Hobsbaum created a writing workshop for poetry. These workshop meetings involved a group of poets discussing and analyzing a single poet’s work. Then, they would have a session where the members of the group could read any work that they wanted to. These routine meetings objectively contributed to the development of the poets’ writing, and some of the poets, such as Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney, began to create a name for themselves all over Northern Ireland. Though they were spread out all over the country, they were still connected. Unfortunately, in 1972 the group disbanded. The primary DH approach to this project was mapping. As you can see in this diagram below, the locations of the Belfast Group were highly concentrated in the northern section of the country, making it more convenient to meet.

The secondary approaches are Network Analysis and Visualization. These approaches are prevalent to the subject matter as well in that a visualization and analysis of the networking between the poets proved essential into understanding how the group conglomerated.

Categories
Practice Blog

Approaches to Digital Humanities

 The two articles I chose were Transcribe Bentham and Selfiecity. Transcribe Bentham is a collaborative transcription initiative which invites people to transcribe and access the manuscripts written by Jeremey Bentham. Selfiecity is a project that analyzes and compares 3,200 selfies of people from five major cities: Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and Sao Paulo. These digital humanities projects are both extremely interesting and they both utilize different Digital humanities approaches.

Firstly, the primary digital humanities approach of the Transcribe Bentham project is undoubtedly crowdsourcing. Transcribe Bentham invites the public, specifically anyone interested, to access and transcribe Bentham’s work. The project doesn’t have a sole contributor, but rather many. This method allows for more transcriptions to become available in a shorter amount of time, simply because so many people are able to be working on the project at once. Additionally, the secondary approach this project is taking is digital edition. When the manuscripts are transcribed, they are typed onto a computer and put on a platform for others to access. In this way, a once single non-digital copy of Bentham’s work becomes available for people to access infinitely digitally. This project seems to be very similar to our work with the Moravian Lives project in the way that we both will be transcribing manuscripts for others to access.

Secondly, the primary digital humanities approach used by Selfiecity is visualization. Selfiecity compiles selfies digitally and assembles them in a way that onlookers are able to see patterns between the images. Selfiecity uses “imageplots” which places the selfies on top of each other so that they oriented the same way. In the case of Selfiecity, the medium of the subject matter largely determined the way in which the data was represented digitally. Selfiecity’s data was made up of images, so using a visualization approach was an obvious choice. Using visualization allowed Selfiecity to establish patterns between the selfies more easily and made their findings more apparent to others.

Overall, I feel that both Transcribe Bentham and Selfiecity’s digital humanities approaches were effective.