Category: Practice Blog

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Practice Blog – Caleb Broughton

The first project that I chose to use is a tool called Poemage, which was created by a team of four scholars at the University of Utah in 2016. Nina McCurdy, Julie Lein, Katharine Coles, and Miriah Meyer created this visualization system in order to explore the sonic topology of a poem. The primary DH focus of this project is visualization, with a secondary focus on textual analysis. The program Poemage has the capability of recognizing all of the different complex structures and patterns of words in any given poem. It also has the ability to recognize every other poem in the database that contains similar word structures and patterns to the poem, in order to group a large number of poems together to compare and contrast them. The textual analysis that is done through Poemage helps give readers a more clear and concise visualization of the poems they want to see.

The second project that I chose to write about is Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition. I chose this one in particular because of how it relates to what we are going to be doing in this class. The primary DH focus of this project is preservation and archiving, with a secondary focus on digital edition. Many of these original manuscripts are frail and very delicate, which has made it nearly impossible for a long time to locate and conserve these manuscripts. This digital reunification however, has made it possible to access and read these newly digitized versions of the original manuscripts, as well as view high quality images of the actual original manuscripts of Jane Austen. This digital edition of Jane Austen’s personal manuscripts, is a perfect demonstration of how these papers which are frail and shouldn’t be handled unless necessary, can be virtually reunified and conserved in history.

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Textual Analysis and Network Analysis

For my first practice blog post, I chose to write about textual analysis.  I always knew that textual analysis had to do with the examination of others and the way they interact in the world, but I was interested in learning how it had to do with digital humanities.  There are a bunch of different projects with the textual analysis tag. The relation to digital humanities that each project had, was that they included transcribing and records, such as historical.  These historical projects need to be passed down through generations in order to stay alive, so that involves a lot of transcribing. One of them was from 140 years ago, so that had to include a lot of rooting through cultures.  It also included maps which have to do with taking down what is shown.  This media below was from a diary written by David Livingstone and I picked it because it reminded me of the diary you mentioned in class that was very hard to read but they somehow found a way to transcribe it.

The second DH project I chose to write about was network analysis.  Pretty much all of the projects had visualization which is a major aspect of digital humanities.  One project was also on the textual analysis page, which I think makes sense because they obviously both involve analysis, and this project is a collection that holds a lot of information that is made to be easily found for historians.  This page also includes another map and it allows people to easily read it and easily analyze it.  This media below is called “The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon” and it shows things about his life.  I believe it tracks where he lived or traveled during a certain period of time on the map, so it shows that it is easy to see those different places.

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Megan Koczur’s Practice Blog

The primary digital humanities focus of the project, Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts, is digital edition. The author speaks directly of digitalization and provides photos of Jane Austen’s prints as well as the transcribed versions. There is a tie for the secondary digital humanities focus of Diane Jakacki’s project between archive and preservation. In order to analyze an archive years after being created, historians need to preserve it. Without different forms of preservation, the frail scripts would not be decipherable. The historians need to put forth ample amounts of time in order to clearly understand these scripts and transcribe them for readers. The digital representation used in the article is helpful in showing the readers the frailness of the scripts but also giving them the ability to analyze them on their own with the addition of the transcribed prints.

 

https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/a-womans-wit-jane-austens-letters/

 

The primary digital humanities focus of the project, Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, is network analysis. The creator provides researchers with a detailed diagram of Francis Bacon and his several connections. The link provides the researcher with direct connections as well as indirect ones. The second digital humanities focus of this project is visualization. The creator provides researchers with a visual network making it easier to analyze the relationships. By clicking on the dots, one is able to determine the person, their title, and the time they were alive. One also has the ability to click the visualize tab which orients the network around a specific person. The reader then sees the connections to this specific person. Users can also click on the lines and determine the confidence rate at which these two people knew each other as well as when their time alive overlapped. The different dots in the network represent direct and indirect connections. Historians put ample amounts of time into research and sorting in order to create this detailed network so readers can easily understand and analyze the connections. The digital representation used is vital in giving the readers a clear diagram of the numerous connections of Francis Bacon as well as many others.

 

https://www.biography.com/people/francis-bacon-9194632

 

 

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Morgan Graning’s Practice Post 8\28

I chose visualization and textual analysis as my two sample projects of DH. As Micki Kaufman described her project, “…it is an application of ‘big data’ computational text analysis to research the Digital National Security Archive.” Specifically, Professor Faull’s project was based on metaphorical thought and expression in the history of English. Another project by Professor Faull involving textual analysis is “The Great Parchment Book”. It was a major survey done in 1639. The purpose of textual analysis is to “decode” and gather information about the text given. Specifically, to “The Great Parchment Book” project, it was a manuscript that served as the City of London but unfortunately went through a fire. It is currently in London’s collections at the Metropolitan Archives. With text analysis, researchers can discover what the actual text might say. The method fits with this project because it serves the city as an important artifact containing a lot of information. For visualization, I usually think of pictures and photographs and what they represent. One of the projects that coinsides for textual analysis and visualization is Poemage. This project mainly focuses on poems. “Sonic toponology is the complex structures formed via the interaction of sonic patterns-words connected through some sonic or linguistic resemblance-across the space of the poem.” It was developed at the University of Utah and is a collaboration between visualization experts and poets. Another similar project having to do with visualization is the “Belfast Group Poetry” project. The main purpose of the visualization aspect of Digital Humanities is connecting pictures such as the various charts and graphs given to word and textual references. I decided to focus on these two methods because I felt that they went hand in hand. The visualization method fits well with these two projects because the projects have both photographs and text (poems) which later can be translated into textual analysis.