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Week 8 Notes

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March 4, 2015 by Adina Langer

This week, we met in the CURVE where director Joe Hurley spoke to the class about digital preservation of geo-historical materials and access points through digital humanities projects. Below are detailed notes from the class.

Digital History Class Notes Week Eight

March 3, 2015

 

4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.

  • Presentation by Joe Hurley, director of the CURVE (Collaborative University Research & Visualization Environment)
  • To download a copy of Joe’s powerpoint presentation, please click here.
  • Joe specializes in spacial history and historical mapping and comes from a background in Urban History
  • Presentation about GIS from a library perspective and from a history or digital humanities perspective
  • Library Perspective
    • Concerned about preservation and access
    • Sustainable collections
    • Utility for future projects
  • Digital Humanities
    • Concerned about building scholarly platforms
    • Interpretation
  • Planning Atlanta
    • Library perspective project
    • Started with the desire to make collection of maps accessible
      • Maps make arguments, but people have trouble using them in contemporary research
    • Project needed money and people
    • Scanned maps
    • Used a content management system to enter metadata
    • Georeferenced the maps
      • (assigned real world coordinates) using ARC GIS program
      • Create files for Google Maps, Google Earth and similar programs
      • Emphasized how digital humanities is not quite as accurate in GIS use as scientific imaging
    • 1949 Aerial Moasic
      • Georeferenced each 2001 digital image individually
      • Used Atlanta Regional Commission Street Layers shape files in ARC GIST
      • Find intersections and line up critical points
        • Need at least four control points per map
      • Interstate makes things problematic
      • Clipped borders to enable tiling
      • Ran through mosaic process in ARC GIS
    • Suggestions for use
      • Locations along active BeltLine
      • Take screenshots from Aerial mosaic overlay
      • Use Google Earth Pro to save images in different formats and resolutions
  • ATL Maps
    • Platform to engage with these maps
    • Digital Humanities collaboration between Georgia State and Emory
    • Preservation of Digital Humanities projects is problematic
      • Sustainability is a long-term problem
      • Using open-source software can help, but you are at the mercy of the community
  • Social Explorer
    • Started with census data tracts
    • Minnesota Population Center
      • Converted printed tabular data to digital formats
      • 1790-2013
    • Got funding for Social Explorer project
    • Can create maps with historical data
    • Census tracts define census data geographically
      • Don’t always correspond with neighborhood boundaries, but close
    • Can create maps and export as Powerpoint presentations
    • Can create Story Maps and export them as well
    • Go through GSU library for full access
  • ARC GIS is available in CURVE collaborative workstations
  • Curve.gsu.edu/reservations
  • Notes for CURVE presentations — PREZI works well on the Wall.

 

5:30 p.m. – 5:45 p.m.

  • Questions and discussion

 

5:45 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

  • Break

 

6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.

  • Omeka Check-in
    • Copyright questions for Kathryn Michaelis (Adina has sent email with these questions)
      • ProQuest Newspapers: Fair use questions.  Can we use whole articles, excerpts of articles? Or do we have to get permission from the publisher as a blanket?
      • Are government docs just in the public domain?
        • City Assessor and City Directories?
    • Reach out to Georgia Archives?
      • Adina getting a good contact and will reach out
    • Please don’t add in own collections, even though the site does seem to enable this functionality for contributors
    • Try LOC Suggest in a newer browser if it is still not working
    • Don’t forget about tagging
    • Mapping and timeline functionality in Omeka
  • Reading Discussion

 


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