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. 

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