Category: DH Projects

Time and time again, I have learned the lesson that I really should revise everything I write, whether it be this blogpost, an intense research paper, an email, or even a simple text.  Obviously, I do not need to revise a text anywhere near the extensive revisions I use for a research paper.  I use different revision techniques depending on what I am writing.  With texts, I simply read them once over, edit the parts that sound unclear, check to make sure the recipient is correct, and send it on its way.  The horror of sending a text that comes across as distasteful is only second to sending a text meant for my friend, to my unsuspecting mother! Sadly, Apple hasn’t created an un-send button yet.  For emails and blogposts such as this one, I type them up in a Microsoft Word document first.  I then make grammatical corrections and reread it to make sure there are no mistakes in the content of my email.  A copy and paste later, and it’s good to go.  Unfortunately, I failed to revise an email once, and instead of addressing a college coach who was recruiting me with the title “Coach,” followed by his last name, I instead sent “Coach” followed up by the name of the college.  Needless to say, “Coach Vassar” did not reply to my email.  When it comes to longer pieces such as essays and research papers, my revision process is a lot more intense.  I always create a rough draft first, with a piece of paper and a pencil.  Once the entire rough draft is complete, I normally have a peer or my mother read it over to check for grammatical errors and phrasing that doesn’t flow.  After that, I type up my piece, editing and rephrasing sentences as I go.  I read this draft aloud to myself to make sure I like how my ideas come across.  It also helps me to notice if I used an incorrect homonym or left out a word.  If you hear me talking to myself in the library, I promise I’m not crazy!  Once I’m done reading it on my screen, I print it out, reread it one last time, and if it is to my satisfaction, I consider it my final copy.  While revision can be very time consuming for me, I have only ever regretted not revising my writing.

Growing up, you could always find me with my nose in a book. Yet, it never occurred to me to write in those books; I never had a reason to use the margins to annotate and analyze anything I was reading, and quite frankly I didn’t want to.  As someone who constantly overanalyzes everything, I enjoyed the fact that books were the one thing I didn’t feel I had to analyze.  This began to change in middle school, when analyzing books so unfortunately became part of my grade.

From middle school onward, most of my English classes seemed to revolve around annotating different works of literature, whether it be a poem, a piece of fiction, a nonfiction article, or in one somewhat odd case, a nutrition facts label. When my teacher taught my class about annotating, we learned the GRAM method.  With the GRAM method, I also learned a strong dislike for marginalia.  For each new page of writing, I was taught to “Give a statement,” “Restate an idea,” “Ask a question,” and “Make a connection.” All this mundane annotating took place on photocopied pieces of each work, in pencil, and was always turned in for a grade.

Now that I am no longer “forced” to annotate what I read, I realize that all that practice writing marginalia was not for nothing.  While I do not annotate works of fiction any longer, I do dog ear pages throughout the books I read that contain information I may want to refer to later in the book.  In regard to readings for class, I do my fair share of marking up the text.  I’ll print myself a copy of the text and proceed to highlight key themes, draw arrows connecting ideas to supporting evidence, and ironically, I still use the GRAM method in the margins, although they now go much more in depth than the superficial GRAMS I use to do for a grade.  These annotations I keep solely for myself, mainly to keep up the façade that I still strongly dislike annotating (not really).  In reality, I think everyone should have their own annotations because each work can be interpreted differently by different people.

My DH project is interconnected with my research in Dr. Steet’s INTD 203: Social Foundations of American Education. I am looking into the impact of the Erie Canal’s construction on population redistribution in Western New York. Specifically, I am analyzing the connection between the construction of the canal, and the growth of the town of Perinton, which contains the village of Fairport. Known as the “Crown Jewel of the Erie Canal,” Fairport is a village which grew economically dependent on the manmade waterway. The Establishment of the canal led to the construction of numerous schools throughout the area, which eventually became centralized in the 20th century. I plan to use mapping and timeline tools to show the evolution of the village and town.

I am currently using arcgis online mapping to plot educational points of interest in my home town. A few notable educators of Fairport were educated at schools along the canal, and returned home to teach following teacher education at Geneseo Normal School. Perinton saw a few stages of development in education structure, from one room schoolhouses to one centralized district. These changes were brought about by multiple notable events, and I am making chronological maps to display these developments next to each other.

One area where I have encountered difficulty is the implementation of a timeline. I have not yet decided if I will make a separate, interactive timeline to present next to my maps. I am learning more about arcgis and will potentially download their software to use in place of their online hosting. Within arcgis online, a user can outline areas on a map and add layers to add metadata. I have added points to my map at the current schools in the district with various pieces of information. I have looked into layering a few maps on top of each other to allow for quick transitions. This is a work in progress, and I will continue to add to my maps as I collect more data.

Finally, I’ve managed to get an instance of Omeka up and running, and have begun transcribing my information from my Excel spreadsheet to Omeka. The goal of my project is to still create an archive of buildings that use Medina Sandstone in New York, while also providing metadata such as their location, architect, construction year, etc. I’ve narrowed down the buildings to those that are in the “Sandstone Hall of Fame,” which was created by the Medina Sandstone Society. 

Despite prior problems with Omeka, the platform has proven to be quite accessible. It was very easy to upload my information on to the platform and create tags for metadata along with it. The difficulty now lies in getting the mapping plugin, Neatline, to create a map for the information I’ve uploaded. This map is central to my project, because it is what differentiates this information from its physical form, by providing a visual of the buildings and their relation to each other, and Medina. 

Once this visual portion is up and running, it will reveal some of the observations that I’ve already discovered through my work. For instance, the concentration of buildings decreases greatly as the distance from Medina increases. This raises interesting questions as to why this was. Perhaps transportation issues? Also, what was the primary transportation method for the sandstone? Another observation was that there weren’t any buildings in the list that were built past 1901. What is the reason for this? Did the sandstone industry see a decline during this time? Was there a lack of resources? Or maybe a lack of interest?

A limitation of Omeka that I’ve noticed is the inability to display an image right on the page of the item that is selected. This could just be due to a missing plugin, and the image can still be opened from the page, but it’s an aesthetic issue that does bother me. Another limitation is the lack of aesthetic options to change the style of the page. I’ve have to look more into this to see if I can find a cool theme. Another feature that does not seem to be present is a graphing function, so that I could display the frequency of the buildings that were constructed and when they were most/least popular. I’ll probably just end up creating that graph separately and uploading it individually. Lastly, the lack of functionality with Neatline is annoying, but hopefully Kirk will be able to find a solution, so that I may begin working on that aspect of my project.

“Visualizing Emancipation” provides a detailed map of all known locations in the U.S. where a slave was emancipated in the Civil War era. This project in particular has benefited greatly from being created digitally, as it provides an interactive, simple to use interface for finding a plethora of information on emancipated slaves.

The project consists of a map with a number of red dots on it, each representing a location in which a slave was emancipated. In addition to the red dots are blue markers that represent the Union forces as they advanced through the confederacy.

These marks serve to show the relationship between the advancement of soldiers, and the increased emancipation rates.

The project’s goal is to provide a record of emancipations as they occurred throughout the U.S., while also providing a way to visual the location and frequency of these emancipations. The project advances the humanities work of organizing cultural events, analyzing historical events, and exploring relationships between events and places. The project advances a traditional humanities aim because the digital interface of the project allows the information to be organized in a way that is much easier to read and get access to. Rather than looking through numerous books to find emancipation records, you can just click on a dot on the map and it’s right there. The project utilized XML encoding, javascript, OpenLayers, and GeoServer.

While it is impossible to fully capture every single act of emancipation that occurred throughout the time period, the project does an effective job in displaying the information in an easy to understand manner, that is packed full of information on the events.

For my project, I looked at the letters of artist Vincent Van Gogh. The letters were compiled in different ways such as by time, correspondent, and location.

In this way the digital project provided more information to the viewer than the original book did which only contained letters in chronological order. The program also provided automatic translation of the letters and gave the viewer the chance to compare the original to the translation. The program used XML format and more specifically TEI to achieve its purpose.

The program also contained metadata that gave extra information about the letters that was not present in the book and it provides background information and historical information on Van Gogh himself along with all the other people that he corresponded with.

Because it is digital it is quick and easy to see the connections between the letters from different aspects like by location and time. The program also gives the viewer a way to explore different relationships between Van Gogh and his correspondents and it analyzes and interprets the letters which it doesn’t do in the book.