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
    • Google Maps
    • Neatline
      • http://neatline.org/
• Reading Discussion
  • Deep Mapping
    • Intense focus on a particular place to the point of almost recreating the place through scholarship
  • Visualization vs. Illustration
    • http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/evidence/theibault-2012-spring/
    • Visual imagery can make strong historical arguments faster than prose in many cases
  • Digital Harlem
    • http://digitalharlem.org/
    • Exploration of traffic accidents revealed patterns of interaction between residents and outsiders