Victoria Landry
Jana Remy
Intro to Digital Humanities
COVID-19 Remote Learning Archive
The COVID-19 Remote Learning Archive is an initiative to curate an archive that will act as historical data from college students’ individual or shared academic-based experiences during the 2019 Coronavirus pandemic that carried over into 2020 and 2021. This archive will be available to access by all college students who attend universities within the United States to share how the pandemic directly affected their educational experiences. Participants will be encouraged to share these experiences through an archive that is based on featuring personally narrated blurbs, videos, voice recordings, hyperlinks and imagery. The archive should be built upon by future students as universities continue to make adjustments and changes in an academic setting as we are gradually coming out of the pandemic. The collected narratives provide future generations of students, professors and scholars with rich first-hand historical data from individuals directly impacted from remote learning and academic adjustments.
The intended audience for this project is college students who are enrolled in schools within the United States as a way to narrow the focus. This archive is not meant for students who graduated pre-pandemic, but rather for students who were already enrolled during the emergence of COVID-19 and for college students post-pandemic. This audience also includes international students who currently attend universities within the United States or who were attending a college in the United States during the start of the pandemic.
This archive will utilize a technology, ArcGIS StoryMaps, which is a “web-based software that allows you to share your maps in the context of narrative text” and other multimedia content (ArcGIS StoryMaps, 2021). This content includes imagery, video content, hyperlinks, text, and other embedded media content to tell an overarching story. No datasets will be requested, as this project is meant to create a new historical data set.
As there is limited access to student records and contact information due to “Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act laws”, this archive cannot deliver guaranteed responses from students (FERPA, 2020). While we hope that our contact within Universities across the United States will encourage the participation of responses for the project, it is not required and is solely a participation based archive. Additionally, this archive cannot deliver guaranteed responses from already graduated college students who may not have access to their school emails to receive information about the project.
This team will consist of professors within the Humanities field at Universities across the United States. If there is not a humanities program at a college with potential participants, then the dean of the college will be used as a substitute to share the project with its student body. It is necessary that the team has a direct relationship to the students participating in order to maximize response rates.
The schedule for this project would be rapid. The ArcGIS StoryMaps webpage would be developed in a three-week time frame, and dispersed the following week after development in order to ensure accessibility to current college seniors who would access their student email for information directing them to the webpage. After the webpage has been shared with students who fit the criteria, response time-frames are optional. There is not a designated time-frame for the end of the project, as it is meant to be built upon over time by students who are documenting their past or current experience in relation to the objectives for this project.
Appendix A: Mockups of Interface
Mockup 1: 
Mockup 2: 
Appendix B: Environmental Scan
The humanities places a huge emphasis on collecting and displaying data, especially that of historic data. For the last two years we have all been living through a historical event, the Coronavirus pandemic. While there are several projects that utilize archive based data regarding COVID-19, there are very few resources that highlight student experiences in an effective way based on geographic location. This gap in effective data collection from the proposed audience creates an opportunity to utilize an available resource, ArcGIS StoryMaps, to capture memories from arguably one of the largest historical events during our lifetime. Existing projects in their field with comparable subject matter and approaches have been examined to provide this project with a basis to grow and expand from.
The first identified digital humanities project is similar in approach, and was a memory based archive curated from ArcGIS StoryMaps titled COVID-19 Memory Archival Project. This project was developed at The Duke Kunshan University in Jiangsu, China and was a professor run initiative sent out to students to encourage “reflection on how the pandemic affected their livelihood” (Zhang, 2020). However, the reach was only within that one University and responses primarily contained information about how the pandemic affected their personal lives. There was little to no information about the students academic experiences. A con to this project is that the aim and audience did not quite match. By only requesting responses from students and staff within the university they were unable to accurately meet their objective of documenting how the pandemic affects the livelihood of ‘people’. The project I am proposing has an aim directed towards university students and is academically driven, thus focusing the responses specifically to how the pandemic altered their academic life, not personal life. This project also did not showcase the map in its presentation but was more narrative focused because all of the students were in the same location, creating a gap in the capabilities of the resource they utilized.
Various other organizations utilized ArcGIS StoryMaps as a way to connect people who had valuable resources and stories to share with others. The RedCross created a StoryMap to highlight their mission activities and document their work. They successfully “utilized the platform to showcase the scope of their reach” while volunteering by highlighting the stories on the map itself (Bell, 2020). My proposed archive will use the map as a core element to highlight the narratives being displayed, as ArcGIS StoryMaps key component is how the geographic location represents the narrative intended to be told. The home page will feature the map and make the stories accessible per college location.
Another digital humanities project similar in subject matter, is the “San Diego State University COVID-19 Memory Project” which requires you to fill out a questionnaire that is then compiled into an archive of memories specifically for the SDSU community (SDSU, 2021). The project asks questions related to how the pandemic has affected students in their academic life, however, there is nowhere to view the archive and it is limited to that campus in particular. There was a large gap in resources for this project, being that there was nowhere to view the responses and the responses were contained to that particular community. In my proposed archive, all responses will be viewable to the public so that the project reach is large and available to the general public.
Developments within the software I plan to use, ArcGIS, make focusing on the map element of the software easy to use and add to. Multiple people can edit a StoryMap by co-authoring a collection. These permissions are accessible by “updating sharing capabilities and publishing the collection” with a group update capability (ArcGIS, 2021). The alternative to this is to publish the content with the Everyone setting and emailing it to the account holder to be added. Both options make the reach of this project feasible. This proposed project would contribute to the humanities by utilizing ArcGIS software to reach a large audience and display a relatively new historical database collection in regards to geographic location.
Funding is essential to obtain the reach for the desired proposal. The NEH, National Endowment for the Humanities, would be a perfect fit for this type of project. The NEH has twenty-four million dollars to allocate towards 225 digital humanities projects nationwide. The NEH gives grants to support the preservation of “historic collections, documentaries, and scholarly research”, all of which fit the criteria for the proposed project (NEH, 2021).
From the academic reading, What is Spatial History, we can learn that ArcGIS forces individuals to think about different kinds of representational space. Seeing how the space correlates to the data being displayed is essential for “revealing historical relations that might go unnoticed otherwise and it generates questions” for future historians (White, 2010). By utilizing ArcGIS, we will be able to see how the narrative of students correlates to their representational space as a historical archive to draw questions from later. Another course reading, Humanities Approach to Graphical Display, discusses how graphic display can often cause us to participate in “interpretation bias” (Drucker, 2011). To avoid this, ArcGIS acts as a tool that both displays the graphic data while also prompting the desired interpretation with its text based applications to avoid misconstruing the information that is visually displayed.
I curated a ArcGIS webpage for a practicum project that helped me explore how to correlate a topic to a geographic location. I was able to map filming locations for a TV show that was set in one town, but the actual footage was shot in a variety of cities all over the United States. The project taught me how visual representation is essential to understanding an overarching theme. This proposed archive should accomplish a similar goal of tying in the historical recollection of events from college students to the geographic location of where they went to school. This may open up dialogue for further analysis in the future, and provide an immediate resource for students to connect with people from all over the country who may have shared academic experiences.
Link to Adobe Spark Video “Pitch”
https://spark.adobe.com/video/Ymu1r9ERdcfnD
Bibliography
Drucker, Johanna. (2011). DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html. Accessed 19 May 2021.
White, Richard. (2010). Spatial History Project. http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29. Accessed 19 May 2021.
“The National Endowment for the Humanities.” The National Endowment For The Humanities, https://www.neh.gov/home. Accessed 19 May 2021.
Coauthor a Story or a Collection—ArcGIS StoryMaps | Documentation. https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-storymaps/author-and-share/co-author-a-story.htm. Accessed 19 May 2021.
Bell, Michelle Bush, Chris Nickola, Jennifer. “Connecting People with Lifesaving Resources Across the Globe During COVID-19 | Storyteller Role Enables More ArcGIS StoryMaps during COVID-19.” ArcGIS Blog, 3 June 2020, https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/story-maps/mapping/storytelling-with-maps-supports-users-across-the-globe-during-covid-19-2/.
SDSU COVID-19 Memory Project | SDSU Library. https://library.sdsu.edu/covid-19-memory-project. Accessed 19 May 2021.
Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). US Department of Education (ED), 15 Dec. 2020, https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html.
“ArcGIS StoryMaps.” ArcGIS StoryMaps, https://storymaps.arcgis.com. Accessed 19 May 2021.
Zhang, Chi. (2020). Call for Participation: COVID-19 Memory Archival Project – Duke Kunshan University Humanities Research Center. https://sites.duke.edu/dkuhumanities/call-for-participation-covid-19-memory-archival-project/. Accessed 19 May 2021.
“Do Your Research!” The National Endowment for the Humanities, https://www.neh.gov/blog/do-your-research. Accessed 19 May 2021.
Dear Future Student,
I learned a lot of important things this semester about Digital Humanities. Some of the most important things include the softwares that we learned to use. My favorite was Zotero which helps with citing sources. We also learned to use the Voyant tool, which could be beneficial for documentation practice. Topic Modeling is great for understanding the breakdown of compositions and how word choices impact the text. Studying archives gave me a new perspective on ways to interpret historical data. We even learned the basics to coding which was really fun and informative and really exciting, especially from a potential graphic design perspective which is my minor. Finally, exploring the uses and future of VR prompted interesting discussion about the future of technology and the ways that we interact with it.
My advice to a future student in this class is to really read the weekly readings! They help so much when you are doing in class activities and engaging in in-class discussions. I would also really encourage building a friendship with the people in your small groups because you will be working with them all semester and it makes the class so much more enjoyable. Lastly I would say to not get overwhelmed with all the softwares that are introduced. It may seem like a lot up front but they are all fairly easy to learn.
The most important skill I have learned in this class that I will definitely be using in the future is the software Zotero. It allows you to combine a mix of books, articles, and other media into a folder and create a bibliography from that section. The best part is, you can use any type of formatting you want, whether that be MLA or APA and cite all your sources at the exact same time. It has already saved me so much time on assignments this semester and will be great for future work purposes with creating bibliographies as well. However, I would love to find a way to incorporate using coding skills into graphic design and website development if my career leads me in that direction. Overall, I would just say to enjoy the class and make friends with your classmates. It’s interesting conversation, wonderful skills and lovely people.
Sincerely,
Victoria Landry
VR has an equal amount of pros and cons in my opinion. As we learned in our class reading, What is Virtual Reality by Robert Cable, VR is being used in the military and in medicine. He also points to the fact that VR is well suited to training, and is notably an immersive medium. In our class reading 3D Recording and Museums by Stuart Robson we learn of all the possibilities that come with 3D imaging of surfaces for museums and digital reparation. This author states “3D models offer new ways of interacting with, and understanding, museum objects within the museum, providing eye-catching contextual information… that encourages visual thinking, communication and learning” (Robson, 97). Kenderdine reiterates the positive museum experiences by stating that the technologies can provide “creative visualization” and “creative data collection” (Kenderdine, 36). I really love all the good that virtual reality can do in a variety of scenarios. I think that these uses should be limited to work, education, simple games and research.
Robson discussed concerns, which include its “high cost, accessibility, overall process, risk of damaging the real objects in museums and shifting perceptions of real objects” (Robson, 98). Another author from our class readings, Cable, states that a con to VR is cultural criticism that can come into play when using the virtual environment by deconstructing the real world with an artificial one. I personally believe that VR can create damage by providing a false perspective on reality. As we discussed in class, these virtual spaces might become more fun and appealing than the real world which in my opinion could turn into a real problem, especially as technology continues to advance.
I really loved the Traveling While Black video. I think experiences like this can be really educationally beneficial. As the video stated, experiences like these can be helpful to understand things from a new perspective and sometimes feeling like you were in these spaces creates an impact that pictures and videos simply won’t envoke. The Pure Land AR experience is crazy to me. It really helps set in the idea that these technologies are far more accessible in ways that we never would have imagined. I have an ipad and it’s crazy to me that small modifications can totally change the future of mobile media. Finally, The Virtual Studio shows how museums can use VR technologies to create virtual spaces with unique perspectives, colors, geometry, sense of time, and floor plan constructions. I am taking an Art History class right now and we viewed lots of virtual exhibitions over the semester so I definitely appreciate the use of technology from an art perspective. There are things you experience from these virtual environments that provide a deeper level of understanding than you ever would have got from the physical space.
Overall, I think I am probably on the same page as Robert Cable which is neutral. The pros are really unique and have enhanced a lot of experiences and provided lots of historians and educators with amazing tools. Yet, the cons are very scary to me. I already feel so connected to technology that the idea of becoming connected in a way that can shift reality freaks me out a lot. With that said, my neutrality only extends so far. As soon as games become too realistic on VR where individuals cannot separate real life from an imaginary one, then I will no longer support the advancements in VR or its uses.
Cited Sources:
Schreibman, S., Siemens, R. G., & Unsworth, J. (2016). A new companion to digital humanities. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons.
Cable, R. (2019, May 18). What is virtual reality? Retrieved May 09, 2021, from https://shc.stanford.edu/news/stories/what-virtual-reality
Claire Warwick, et al. Digital Humanities in Practice. Facet Publishing, 2012. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.libproxy.chapman.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,uid&db=nlebk&AN=558471&site=eds-live.
Week 12 Practicum
In class we played with several tools: IFTTT, Monkeys Writing Shakespeare, a Twitter Bot and a re-mixing of Emily Dickinsons. I want to begin by talking about the tools IFTTT. It essentially connects services you may have together by using Applets. These Applets help your apps do things that they wouldn’t normally do on their own. I was able to connect my Google Assistant to my iPhone calendar which has been very helpful especially during finals week. There were a variety of ways I could have connected my Google Assistant, and I have included a screenshot of those varieties below. I have learned that sometimes it’s necessary to break things in order to build new things. This activity was a perfect example of that.
Another tool we played with was Monkeys Writing Shakespeare. This was helpful to just look at to get familiarity with how the site works. It essentially replaces words in the simple script with common words and words found within the text. Later in class we used this as an avenue to practice and learn how to code. We used JavaScript and GitHub to add words to arrays and switch out the source text with a new block of text. Even though we worked in our small groups, I think this is a great introduction for anyone wanting to learn how to code on a basic level.
Another tool we discussed was a Twitter bot which can be used very playfully or as an actual tool to revise things. However, the instructions to complete this were a bit too over my head and I also don’t want to break any terms of service with the app. After reading professor Remys “CREATING AN ACTIVIST TWITTER BOT”, I do think that this tool can be used for good on a platform that often has cycles of negativity if coders choose to use it in a similar fashion. I can totally stand behind that!
To relate this to class readings, I do think breaking things is necessary in Digital Humanities in order to build new ideas or projects. Our class reading, The Digital Humanities is About Breaking Stuff by Jesse Stommel, is a great source that introduced me to this opinion. I learned that “digital humanities reframes the work we do…” in order for it to be more “collaborative” (Stommel, 2013). This gives us an opportunity to take something already known or created and develop a deeper understanding of it in a new way.
In regards to the other reading, Think Talk Male Do: Power and the Digital Humanities by Miriam Posner, I think that coding should be more accessible and approachable to women. Most of our class is female and if I learned anything from our most previous meeting time, it’s that women can code! We can do it just as fast and well as our male classmates. I think overall it is something valuable to learn if that interests you, but I don’t find it necessary to be successful in Digital Humanities. There are many avenues to take to create and explore different projects without those skills, as long as someone on your creative team does know how to execute them if you do not want to.
Cited Sources:
Stommel, J. (2013, September 02). The digital humanities is about breaking stuff. Retrieved May 03, 2021, from https://hybridpedagogy.org/the-digital-humanities-is-about-breaking-stuff/
Think talk make do: Power and the digital humanities. (n.d.). Retrieved May 03, 2021, from http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-2/think-talk-make-do-power-and-the-digital-humanities-by-miriam-posner/
Miriam. (2012, February 29). Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code. Retrieved May 03, 2021, from http://miriamposner.com/blog/some-things-to-think-about-before-you-exhort-everyone-to-code/
https://scalar.chapman.edu/scalar/test-book-/users/144
During the Scalar project, I learned many things about multimodal publishing. The publishing site utilizes a variety of multimodal features such as YouTube videos, images, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Internet URLs, and archives. I tried to link as many multimodal features as I could on my pages to give them some variety in interactiveness. Scalar also teaches you how to link pages to one another to help the flow of information go smoother.
When adding widgets, I chose to use the Carousel, where you create a responsive gallery showing you media from the path. This one allows you to add as much imagery as you want. I also chose to create the visualization widget, which creates visualizations out of pages, media and their relationships. This one almost appeared like a circle and gives you information when you hover each relationship.
I understand that this was just a practice to become more comfortable with using the site and all its features. However, I think this practice is very intuitive and I can see how all these skills we have learned could be really useful when actually pulling information from a variety of sources and inputting the data. This resource is a lot more complex to use than something like AdobeSpark, or WordPress. It is laid out similarly in the blog format but otherwise there is a lot more detailed user input required to make the book function.
Archive Practicum Ten
My proposal for the Center for American War Letters would be to utilize digitization, OCR, collections, and one-dimensional classification. To begin with, the Center for American War Letters could amplify its outreach by utilizing OCR. As we learned in our class reading, Optical Character Recognition, OCR is the process of converting “images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text” (Wikipedia, 2021). The reason I believe this would be a good idea is because OCR is mostly used as a form of “data entry from printed paper and data records” (Wikipedia, 2021). Most letters from the war are going to be printed documents or handwritten. This seems like the best way to scan and digitize them in my opinion.
Another way I think you could organize these papers would be by sorting them into collections. From our class reading, Digitization and digital resources in the humanities, we learned that digitization is a way to “deliver digital representations of cultural and historical documents to… foster greater understanding of the material they hold” (Terras, 2012). While I understand that digitizing can be expensive, I think that the benefits make it worth the investment. It allows “dispersed collections to be brought together” and that’s something I think is extremely important, especially when dealing with letters that may be dispersed. Sorting these letters by collection would improve the organization of the site so that viewers can easily find correspondence similar to what we read in class between Wally and Florence.
Finally, I think using classification schemes could be a good way to also organize the data once it is digitized. These classification schemes could act as a way to sort the information down to details such as time, place,and topic of conversation. As we learned in our class reading, Classification and its structures, one-dimensional classification structures seem to be the best fit for something like this because they typically use “nouns and adjectives” and often group things as categories ( Sperberg-McQueen, 2004). In my midterm project I talked about how this type of classification could be beneficial for information that needs to be sorted based on words rather than numbers. I think this is true for these letters as well. One-dimensional classification would be beneficial for pulling out words from letters to categorize them and make it easier to be sorted. All of the suggestions could be beneficial for the American War Letters when trying to amplify their outreach.
Cited Sources:
Warwick, C., Terras, M. M., & Nyhan, J. (2012). Digital Humanities in Practice. Facet Publishing.
A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth, Sperberg-McQueen. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
Optical character recognition. (2021, April 07). Retrieved April 12, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition
After watching the video “Into the Future” I was able to identify that scarcity worries me far more than abundance. The video talked about how methods of retaining information have changed so much over time that preserving data has become extremely difficult. I think having too much data, or abundance, does come with its issues but they don’t outweigh the issue of scarcity.
In the video, most examples used seemed to reinforce the idea that scarcity is a big problem. For example, fires, floods, and acid in printed materials has caused physically stored information to be damaged or destroyed. Another idea discussed was magnetic tapes and how they were used to store information. Over the course of 20 years, it became difficult to find a machine that was capable of playing them and the tapes themselves began to decay. Both of these concepts of scarcity are scary because they describe the loss of information and the negative implications that come along with the loss.
An effective approach to ensure that cultural memories and significant data are not lost would be to improve conversion efforts as technology begins to change, not after it’s already gone. For instance, the Navajo nation used magnetics tapes to store information but these tapes began to decay. They began to use electronic recordings as a way to capture valuable information that bridges the gap between past to future. This effort appears to be a viable way to give access to information from the tribes to those living in future times. This concept is true for all information though, if it is something valuable that needs to be preserved, then make sure you are able to store it properly for future generations especially as technology changes.
As we learned from our reading, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era”, the system for preserving the past has evolved over centuries and is in crisis. The author believes that historians need to take hand with archivists in building a new system for the coming century so that we can make sure to digitize our present as well as our past. Despite the author’s arguments that abundance can be troublesome due to navigating the growing records and digital data, I still stand by my assertion that scarcity seems much worse. We need to learn from the past and be able to access these sets of data so that we don’t make the same mistakes.
A perfect example of this was seen in the video about hazardous waste disposal and how important it is to know where these sites are so we don’t harm the planet further to protect future generations. In our Archive Projects from this week’s module we see great examples of valuable data from the past such as the 9/11 archive featuring first-hand stories and digital images. I understand it’s important to move forward and preserve our present, but it’s equally as important to preserve the past as well even if this causes an abundance complexity.
Cited Sources:
Home · September 11 digital archive. (n.d.). Retrieved April 05, 2021, from https://911digitalarchive.org/
Scarcity or abundance? (n.d.). Retrieved April 05, 2021, from https://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/scarcity.php
Kevinglick (Director). (2009, August 24). Into the Future: On the preservation of KNOWLEDGE (CLIP 1) – VIDEO DAILYMOTION [Video file]. Retrieved April 05, 2021, from https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa9dp6
Victoria Landry
Google Slide (Lightning Talk): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yaVybdIiJOtawxbagV1-SowEg-i6qHc62PON3E4qwlE/edit?usp=sharing
Welcome to the Cannabis Museum
https://www.cannabismuseum.com
This Digital Humanities Project is on The Cannabis Museum, which collects, preserves and shares the history of cannabis use, culture, prohibition, and politics.The museum uses its materials to inform the public on the use of Cannabis prior to its prohibition in 1937 and how it has evolved over time. It also designs free standing artifact collections for public interaction on both their website and on all their social media platforms through a series of virtual museum exhibition tabs that feature the collection of documents, pictures, posters and other forms of research.
The project is meant for the public, researchers and scholars. The goal is to educate the public on the hidden artistic, historic, medical, and industrial mainstream venues of cannabis. It is also meant to act as a collection that can be accessed to researchers and scholars virtually.
Don Wirtshafter is the owner of The Cannabis Museum and has been the primary scholar behind the project. He has been collecting cannabis paraphernalia and advocating for legal, homegrown marijuana for 40 years. Wirtshafter has also been a figure in a “number of activism groups such as Grassroots Ohioans, Ohio Rights Group and National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws” (2021).
The organization also has memberships with the American Alliance of Museums, the Ohio Museums Association, and the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy. There are multiple team members/scholars who assist in the research process including Liz Crow, Joe Brumfield, Steve Schofield, Gregg Blake, and Basil Masri Zada.
The Cannabis Museum is an Ohio 501(c)(3) educational and research nonprofit organization based in the Hocking River Valley in Southeastern Ohio, and was established in October 2018. The project has been available for four years and is still currently in operation. Due to the fact that it is a non-profit, they receive their funding through grants and donors. According to their website they only have one donor, the Ohio Art Council who provides the project with Grants as a form of funding. Another source of income comes from the sale of their high quality photographic images on a variety of archival substrates. Additionally, there is a donation button on their website for people to contribute to as well.
This project fits into the discipline of Digital Humanities because it applies computational tools and traditional humanities such as literature, history and philosophy to display their collection of more than 10,000 items and artifacts while educating people on their history behind cannabis. This collection includes books, posters, journals, catalogs and manuscripts collected from all around the world and they are easily accessible and readily available to the public. All of these documents can be accessed through a variety of tabs, search bars and virtual exhibitions. The search bar provides the most widespread access to the collection because you can search anything you want. However, if you don’t know where to start searching, the virtual exhibitions include resources to the basics of cannabis history.
In our reading from class, Social Media for Digital Humanities and Community Engagement, the author discusses social media and how it is a form of digital humanities. Social media encompasses a “wide set of functional characteristics, within the context of computer mediated communication and networked digital media. It uses audio, images, video and location based services as channels to encourage, facilitate and provoke social interaction and user participation”(Claire Ross, 2012). The Cannabis Museum project utilizes social media to display their private collection in order to educate the public on their findings.
Their Instagram page features images, videos to showcase the collection while the captions provide textual insight on the pieces. While their following is fairly small, about 2,000 followers, the social interaction and engagement on the posts is pretty high. Twitter and Facebook are their other two forms of social media and from what I can tell the content is consistent on each platform. Simply having a social media presence has encouraged and provoked social interaction on the topic as a form of digital humanities.
According to What Is Digital humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?, digital humanities “today is about a scholarship that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed…and that is collaborative and depend on networks of people and that live an active 24/7 life online” (Matthew G. Kirschenbaum). I feel that this project is a perfect example of this due to its collaborative environment of researchers and scholars, and its wide collection of research and information that is provided digitally. The team working on the project is constantly adding to the collection as cannabis history continues to be written.
In our class reading, Optical Character Recognition, it discusses how OCR can be used to “make electronic images out of printed documents and images” (Wikipedia, 2021). The Cannabis Museum utilizes this in just about every source of material they provide. The collection itself is composed of magazines, images, and posters that have been converted to a digital platform for mass distribution by utilizing OCR. The scanned documents provide a digital landscape for this historic private collection. These items can be searched using the search bar but can also be accessed through the virtual exhibition tabs as pdfs and jpegs.
There are many successes of this project, most notably the 10,000+ collection of documents and images that has been made available not only on their webpage but also on three social media platforms as well. The curators of the digital environment have utilized multiple ideologies we have learned in our class readings and applied them to form a successful digital environment for their research. I think the shortcomings are small in comparison to the successes. I wish there had been more information on the specific type of software they used to create their database. Overall, I think their project was interesting and contains a lot of valuable information for people seeking understanding on the history of cannabis use and where it is headed in the future.
Works Cited:
Cannabis Museum | THE CANNABIS MUSEUM IS DEDICATED TO EDUCATE THE PUBLIC ON THE HIDDEN ARTISTIC, HISTORIC, MEDICAL, AND INDUSTRIAL MAINSTREAM VENUES OF CANNABIS AND ITS COUNTLESS USES IN THE UNITED STATES AND AROUND THE WORLD. https://www.cannabismuseum.com/. Accessed 18 Mar. 2021.
—. https://www.cannabismuseum.com/. Accessed 18 Mar. 2021.
“HOME.” Cannabis, https://hruhoff.wixsite.com/cannabis. Accessed 18 Mar. 2021.
Kirschenbaum – 2010 – What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in .Pdf. https://mkirschenbaum.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/ade-final.pdf. Accessed 18 Mar. 2021.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin, 2010, pp. 55–61. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1632/ade.150.55.
Optical Character Recognition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition. Accessed 18 Mar. 2021.
Ross – 2012 – Social Media for Digital Humanities and Community .Pdf. https://dhcertificate.org/HIST-680/sites/default/files/pdf/Social_Media_for_Digital_Humanities.pdf. Accessed 18 Mar. 2021.
Ross, Claire. “Social Media for Digital Humanities and Community Engagement.” Digital Humanities in Practice, edited by Claire Warwick et al., 1st ed., Facet, 2012, pp. 23–46. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.29085/9781856049054.003.
https://arcg.is/0yXnby
I made a story map based on the television series Vampire Diaries, which was primarily filmed in Covington, Georgia. The series is based on books written by L.J. Smith who follows the life of a teen, Elena Gilbert, in a mysterious town full of supernatural beings. Part of the reason I chose this tv series/book was because all of the locations are real places and the story takes place in multiple locations. I thought this would be good for the exercise due to the varied locations and because I enjoyed the books and show. I learned that all the story locations were in really close proximity to each other in both the story and for filming. This re-affirms the notion present in the plot that the story takes place in a small town where everyone is close to each other and knows everyone’s business.
From my mapmaking experience, I have learned a unique strategy to graphically organize elements of books and stories. By identifying story settings on a map, I am better able to organize plot points as well. I have also learned a new tool that I can utilize in the future for other purposes as well. For example, in class we used presidential libraries as our locations, and it taught me a lot about how dispersed the museums are and where they take place. Something about seeing it visually on a map actually allowed me to identify where they are most prominent, and has inspired me to visit ones that I am close to.
Additionally, we learned how to use Arc-GIS in class where we created two maps: Count of Presidential Libraries and Museums and the US States version. Each map shows you different things based on how many layers you include, and how you display the data. These maps can show you a variety of things such as aggregate points, join features, center and dispersion, and attributes from one layer or table to another based on spatial and attribute relationships. It takes all the points you included on the map and analyzes them and provides you with not only a visual aid but also a summary of how they are related.
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Johanna Drucker has many concerns about spatialization of texts, but the one that stuck out to me regards representing a large copra of texts and immense archives. The author states that this is a challenge because “the conventions of wayfinding and navigation that are part of print media and its institutional structures are not yet reworked in a digital environment meant to address the shifts in scale and experience brought on by new media.” She points out one more major concern in addition to this which is giving graphical expression to interpretations built on documents, or collections of documents. Acts of interpretation use format features of graphical presentation to produce the content of these artifacts which can sometimes underpin the graphical visualizations. Additionally, the conventional graphical features of texts “that inscribe interpretation do not show or model interpretation on the fly as a constitutive act of reading, relating, connecting, and sense making”.
The reason I included both of these major concerns is because they both relate to each other in many ways. Johanna Drucker elaborates on the main point that digital environments have trouble re-working the data they are given in a way that accurately connects and relates the information. While digital environments are really good at making correlations and inferring information based on data, it is not always accurate and we should treat it as such. However, these same digital environments despite their downfalls can also produce really interesting and helpful results that teach us a lot about topics we may have otherwise not been able to learn from.
Cited Source:
Humanities approaches to graphical display. (n.d.). Retrieved March 08, 2021, from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html
1) Use the Voyant Topics tool or the TMT to generate a Topic Model of a text you know well. Report on your results–are you seeing the patterns in your topics like Blevins and Posner describe in their articles about Topic Modeling? Perhaps try to run the tool multiple times with different topic and word lengths to see if that offers any insights into a “distant” reading of your text. You may also want to try using more than one text to see if one generates better topics than another.
In Belvin and Posners article about topic modeling, they discussed how topic modeling finds words that frequently appear together and then it groups them into clusters. The program is only concerned with how the words are used in the text and what words tend to be used similarly. I ran the topic tool through each available platform; corpus, document and grid. In my text, The Great Gatsby, I found different results each time I ran the tool through each platform. I found that most of the results that made sense presented themselves when I ran the corpus tool and with smaller word lengths. The larger the word length was, the less things made sense together and had minimal correlation. The shorter word length but higher topic count, the best results appeared.
The most common themes I found when I ran the topic tool on corpus was names and what I consider major symbols. For example, I found Tom and Daisy grouped together often, or Gatsby and Jordan. I also found the names Gatsby and Daisy grouped with topics such as love, and the city. These things are heavily correlated in the text to one another. On the grid and document topic tools, none of the results really quite made sense. I was expecting that the bigger the word length and higher the topic length, the better the results would be. However, for The Great Gatsby, this was quite the opposite result.
In our other reading from class, Topic Modeling: A Basic Introduction, it says that one of the best ways to understand what the program is telling you is through visualization because the output is not always human readable. I was looking at the vizuations provided on Voyant next to the topic output, and I did not find it super helpful because the output results did not quite make sense together so neither did the visualizations. According to the article, you have to prepare the corpus before you use it by stripping out the punctuation, capitalization, and ignoring stop words. However, I could only use the Voyant tool because the TMT was not working. Due to this I could not properly prepare the corpus to have these optimized results. I think this largely affected the output because many of my words happen to be stop words.
Due to the fact that the Great Gatsby did not run great results, I ran a second text, The Wizard of Oz. Unfortunately I saw much of the same issues with this text as well. There were a lot of names and places mentioned when I kept the word length shorter but when I increased the word length I was shown a lot of random words that might have been cut out if I had the proper modifications on the TMT platform.
2) Use one of the neural net tools to generate some text on a Humanities topic. Do you notice anything concerning in your results? If so, why do you think you are getting these results? If you use the same prompt again, do you get a different kind of response?
When I used the neural net tool, the Humanities topic I typed in was “textual mining”. I ran it twice and got different results both times. The first result I got appeared to be a definition of textual mining. The second result I got was very strange. It was discussing Bromium and cyber-attacks which was a bit odd. The next topic I put in was digital archives. Both results I got each time I ran it made no sense. The first was a link to another article, and the second was about Berkeley Auditorium which does not seem to have anything to do with digital archives in my opinion. In the last reading from class, Data, Algorithms, Fairness, and Accountability, it discusses how accountability of data is not always accurate because we don’t really have the tools to do it well. I think that this is the case with this tool. It is not correctly reading and representing the data because data is not always accurate, and neither are the tools that we have to make sense of certain things.
I think that the TMT tool is the most accurate because it contains options to refine the search. I was only able to use Voyant for this assignment which does not have the same refining options for the text analysis. I think that it still can produce meaningful results, however its limitations include not being able to eliminate stop-words which can make the results slightly less readable. The neural net is the most sketchy. It does not ever produce similar results and most of the results make absolutely no sense. I think it has the most limitations because you really have no idea if your results are accurate or how to read it. I think computer data is increasingly impacting our lives in many ways, most frequently seen in online marketing and advertisement on a daily basis. I think we can learn a lot from computer data, and from Boyds reading, I have learned that it should not be used for everything.
