Dear Future Student,
Hello! Welcome to Digital Humanities! This class will welcome you into a bucket of useful tools that will change the way you navigate documents for the rest of your life! This course name sounds very scary but trust me it’s not! This class will challenge you in a positive way. Digital Humanities will test your patience, your prior knowledge of tech and your ability to try new things that you may, or may not, enjoy.
Some of the most important things I learned this semester was how technology has evolved din the way it has in the Digital Humanities space. Many exhibits and digital documents are analyzed through tools. A really cool tool that actually has changed the way I view is the ability of tagging. Tagging is a system where a person, or robot, goes through a document or photo and analyzes it to make it easier to categorize. This is what search engines use to give you your information quickly and effectively.
My advice to a student who is approaching this class is to not be scared and to not take this class tooooo seriously. Enjoy it. Take these tools and utilize them in your life. Consider this class a workshop to help you navigate and understand infostructures that have been created for us to be able to make history and art be utilized in an online or digital presence. For an example a skill that I use DAILY is the tool where we can create a works-cited based off your search history. This is a prime example of how categorizing and digitalizing can impact your daily habits.
Good luck and have fun! (:
Virtual Reality is a new technological device that has become popular in the last decade. This tool has both pros and cons just like any other form of technology. So, what is virtual reality? Virtual reality is a simulated space that is displayed through a screen. Some early forms of virtual reality include projecting onto a physical screen such as the ride at Disneyland, Soaring Over California. Another from is just on a computer screen or any other digital screen. In this blogpost I will be talking about the pros and cons of the highly acclaimed digital glasses which is now the most popular form of virtual reality.
The benefits and pros of virtual reality is greater than most think. Virtual reality gives the individual the opportunity to travel or be wherever you want. Most people use virtual reality to play video games or travel to destinations they cannot access. Many people bought virtual reality headsets to visit museums during the pandemic. Our professor, Dr. Remy, interacts and sees her son on the virtual reality headset. In the Kenderdine reading, Kenderdine talks about the development of museums. The museums’ emphasis on the quality of their collections and scholarly frameworks has evolved to include visitors framed by these qualities. The next generations of embodied experiences described in this chapter, however, require new tools for analysis and evaluation.”
The cons of virtual reality are very slim. I don’t think this type of technology is hurting anyone other than museums. More and more museums will be transferring over to the virtual reality space. By doing this, museums will slowly lose physical people coming in and more people tuning in on their devices. Although this sounds scary and bad, look at the publishing industry. I would argue that Kindles and e-books have made reading more accessible and have made more authors become successful due to the accessibility.
In high-school, I was involved with the robotics program. While being involved, I was coding movements and actions for the robots to do. This is the most coding I have ever done. This was all done through statements called “If this, then that.” These commands are what creates a code and can help generate the algorithms or patters that we are trying to achieve. In class, our professor showed us the website IFTTT which is a service that connects your product with the ability to connect and interact with other services. A prime example is when you go on a news website and at the bottom it says “Share this on Facebook.” This means that the website and Facebook will work together to share the post. The program would be programmed as “If shared then will post on Facebook.” The next service we talked about was Monkeys Writing Shakespeare. This was fun because we got to pull up the code and insert our own words that we wanted to see appear on our generated text. This was a great excursive to do because we got to see the code interact with a webpage via internet.
Building this is hard to do because it requires previous knowledge and frameworks to build on. While breaking things, you can just paste in words or commands and see what happens through trial and error. I am definitely someone who likes to tinker and mess with things so I am a breaker! I learned a lot through these excesses and mainly what I am happy to share is that you dont have to be an expert coder or a computer science major to understand code, all you need is patience and time to understand the patterns and formulas written in the code. With that being said, I think you dont have to be a coder to understand or be involved in the digital humanities space. In the end of the day, Digital Humanities is about building up our resources and new ways to access our information and new ways of innovating or breaking previous systems.
Here is my Scalar assignment about the 2021 Masters that took place last weekend.
This week in class we learned how to use the tool called Scalar. Scalar is an online publishing software that allows you to create online books that work in a flow. You can create different pages and link them together to create a seamless flow called a path. This path works like a book where you move from page to page. This helps keep your information in a sequence that goes well with your story or subject. The other thing because Scalar is useful is because you can share with with anyone you want just by sending a link. Nobody needs to have a software or pay for a service to access your book!
While using Scalar and practicing in class I noticed something very different. In class, when our guest speaker was showing us Scalar, I was getting lost and frustrated because I was having a hard time catching up with the instructor. After class, I felt like I was confused and scared of this software. After class, I played around with it and learned that it is one of the easiest and most useful tools I have used in a long time. Scalar showed me how to make fun engaging presentations come to life with different paths and widgets to make the website fun!
While approaching this new era of the internet and looking at other digital databases in the digital humanities realm, many databases we have seen are not successful for many reasons. Many of the projects that we looked at for our midterms have failed due to inactivity or lack of innovative technology holding the database updated and current. My idea is based off of an idea that my midterm had, create a database with a social media aspect. In this analysis, I will be talking about why I think my idea of turning the database for the Center for American War Letters into an online database with social media aspects would be successful.
Digitalization of documents is the “new” era of accessing old documents. In the article, Scarcity or Abundance, the author, Roy Rosenzweig talks about the accessibility of documents being online. “Digital information is mounting at a particularly daunting rate in science and government. Digital sky surveys, for example, access over 2 billion images.” This is extremely useful and beneficial to the public because you are granted free, or paid, documents at your convenience. This ultimately could destroy and force physical libraries to move completely online. I also think that adding a social media aspect to it would be innovative and draw more users to interact and speak their voice to the authors or the institution. The project I did for my midterm was an interactive exhibit where the employees got to write a blog post and you could view their profile and comment on their work. This made me feel like I was included in the work and kept me coming back!
As a digital humanities scholar, the possibilities are endless with coming up with new ideas to embrace and innovate this industry. The Center for American War Letters needs a revamp to its process and can do this very easily. At Chapman, we have the tools and services to digitize its collection. By digitizing them it only doesn’t give access to the public but it also grants us, digital humanities scholars, the option to use custom tools to analyze the documents.
The themes of both scarcity and abundance in the realm of digital humanities is important when it comes to how we store and collect our documents. First, we will discuss what exactly is scarcity. Scarcity revolves around the idea that some documents and data sets may be harder to access than other topics. This can be due to documents being missing or damaged or just non-existent. Abundance, on the other hand, refers to the surplus and copious number of documents belonging to one topic. This can sound nice but can mess up data sets and other analytical aspects.
Both scarcity and abundance are worrisome, but abundance scares me more than scarcity. Abundance can sound nice because it seems like there is more data and documents about specific topics and that can make it sound more accessible and more researched than other topics. Well, as we see in our daily life with social media and other sources of media, every story regarding politics, news, and facts are all contradicting themselves and adds more opinions than facts. This can mess up data sets and themes regarding events and documents due to the information being cluttered. Psychologist Aleskandr Luria brings up a point saying “How do we find the forest when there are so many damaged trees,” comparing the truth and lies with abundance.
In order to preserve and not lose historical documents, we must include them onto digital databases where they can be accessed forever. Many libraries and other data centers are using these methods, but another problem arises. “Licensed and centrally controlled digital content not only erodes the ability of libraries to preserve the past, it also undercuts their responsibility.” Although storing them online and having them being accessed from all over the world, publishers and licensing teams must agree on how these documents can be accessed. My solution to this problem is for all libraries to create a subscription service where you can rent or buy online books to support the authors and be able to access the content.
Link to my story mapping about the company Supreme: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/c7109d752ace4d1cbb7549fa422d75fc
Honestly, when we started to create story maps in class, I was scared because it seemed very difficult and at sometimes pretty confusing. After we finished, I felt somewhat knowledgeable but when we were given the assignment to use a story map on a set of data of our choosing, I chose to do a set of data I was interested in. I am very into clothing and a huge fan of the brand Supreme. In this practicum, I was able to look at a globe and pinpoint where the company originated from and where it moved around the globe!
A concern that Drucker covers in her closing paragraph on her document is that we should look at data sets and include a geographical component to our data if it is applicable. If we are able to do so, we can look at the data in a whole new way. The only problem is that most humans don’t look into the geographical ways that they should be.
-After reading the texts from Belvins and Posner, I thought Topic Modeling consisted of categorizing words off of relative meanings. After using the tool and returning to the texts, I now have a better understanding of what topic modeling is! To make it simple, topic modeling is the list of words that appear together. Last week, we used the Voyant tool which allowed us to count words and look at statistical data of our texts, the Topic Modeling Tool allows us to look at the words that appear together. In my test, I chose to use the Book “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley. I chose this book because I felt as Shelley’s use of emotions would be placed in similar areas. These are my results:
As you can see, the data sets are pretty accurate with my hypothesis. The fifth line shows the feelings Frankenstein has towards people. In my second book, I chose “The Great Gatsby” by Scott Fitzgerald. This is where the TMT tool really showcased a “distant” reading.
If you look through these lines, you can see in line three the word “love” and “Daisy” are both here. That is because our main character is in love with Daisy.
-I put the sentence “Digital Humanities is useful because” and the response I got was:
Honestly, this result I got was concerning. Instead of offering me a definition or a well-structured answer, it gave me more of an opinion. There is no substance to this and not really an answer. I feel like if I re-generated it, I would get a different answer. For educational purposes, I’m going to generate it again! 🙂
Hmm, pretty funny of the first one was more of an opinion and this one is a definition. This answer is the exact answer I would expect an algorithm to give me. I am pleased with the second response!
-Overall, I think algorithms are able to gather a large set of data and break it down into categories or limitations that you can set. I think the average person does not have time or the capability of running through these large data sets so it is helpful but the accuracy and quality is not as good as a human.
The book I chose was “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley. I read this book in high school and fell involve with Shelley’s use of descriptive adjectives to paint a picture of what Frankenstein looked like through words. By using a tool called Voyant, we are able to look at what words Shelley used to described the beast and look at analytical aspects of the novel.
By looking at this word art, we can see that the most used terms that Shelley used are: Man, Father, Elizabeth, Eyes and Feelings. The word man is used a majority of times in the book to describe Frankenstein. I do believe however that man was used a lot in the book because of the culture when this book was written. Second, the word Father is used to associate Alfonso, Victor’s Dad. Elizabeth is the love interest for Victor. Eyes in the book are a key theme to show off emotion and feelings.
This chart correlates with the book but also can be described in this weeks reading as the amount of times that a word is published din any form or written documentation. As we can see, the word “man” is used fare greater than any term in published books. The tool “Voyant” is a tool that would be classified as a Text Retrieval. By suing Voyant it analyzes every word in a text and builds graphs and data structures to provide further correlation to the book and its words.
