Category Archives: digital humanities

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Social Change Project (DLS)

  April 12, 2015 , ,

The Social Change Project is a project that recovers old files and interviews and re-formats them in order to organize and preserve them. This is a brand new Digital Library Services (DLS) project that I have been working on, and it is honestly quite interesting. This process starts off by taking the PDF file of an interview, for example, and converting it to a word document. After that, you create a new document and type up a brand new header for that interview. Once that is done, you then begin the process of re-formatting the interview. This can be a bit of a tedious process, but it allows you to get an in depth look at the content of the interview. Currently, I am working on re-formatting an old interview of a historical Georgia lawyer, Millard C. Farmer. These series of interviews detail his life and some of his most famous court cases. Farmer graduated from the University of Georgia back when racism was still rampant in Georgia. He talks about how his father made the controversial decision to give a job to a black man that was on death row (apparently you can take a man out of prison for work until he is convicted). Farmer spent much of his young childhood working with this man at his father’s company, and he couldn’t stand the fact that this man was going to eventually be killed by court for a case in which there was no serious evidence that he was … Continue reading

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3D Atlanta Updates & Other Tidbits

  March 1, 2015 , , , ,

Hey Guys! Couple of new updates to share with everyone about the 3D Atlanta Project! First off–in two weeks we should have 3 completed models of architecture to show off! Which is pretty exciting! Wasfi, Nathan, and I are hard at work getting them ready! The other SIFs are currently working on compiling their historical research into interactive pieces. What I mean by that is this: If they find something on Coca-Cola from the 1920s that is relevant but maybe we don’t have enough information to fill up,say an entire booklet, we can simply hang up a flier on a building’s wall that a player can interact with. So the question then–is what is this interactivity supposed to look like? After Discussing a lot of different options, we came up with the simplified point-and-click idea. The point-and-click paradigm is well known and intuitive. We aren’t trying to create a new paradigm of interactivity–rather utilize pre-existing paradigms of interactivity to change a paradigm of educational interest and engagement. So–“Point-and-click”–which some of you might be familiar with from the ubiquitous mystery search games that are all over app stores and Steam, or from certain classics from Sierra or Lucas Arts in the 90s (Secret of Monkey Island, Quest for Glory, etc.) and perhaps the more well-known Myst series. In our environment–although it is a full 3D environment from a first-person perspective–the point-and-click interface simply means than when the player’s cursor,(which can be controlled from a mouse, or if the object is simply … Continue reading

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Playing around with data visualization and early modern texts

  January 26, 2015 , ,

As the Hoccleve project nears our first major milestone, the digital publication of an edition of Hoccleve’s holograph poems, we are beginning to ask questions about how to transform our XML into an HTML display. Thus, we are embarking on a graph design/display phase of our work. One of the things we have been discussing is creating data visualizations of the poems as an ornament to the edition. Most likely, these will be simple. Word clouds for instance. I have been asked to explore some options for this. This is not something that I have done before, but it is something that I have been curious about as a tool for my own work. Because the plain text versions of the poems weren’t quite ready, I decided to take a little time to begin explore what might be possible, from a historical perspective, with data visualization tools. I also figured it would make an interesting first blog post of the semester, even if at this point my foray into data visualization and data mining is completely amateurish. Even so, I am reporting on some early experiments using Voyant, a free web-based tool for textual analysis. I want to to see how it worked with early modern texts and with some of the documents I am using for my dissertation. This post is also offered in the spirit of a simple review of the software. My dissertation is a study of relations of power between the English and Native Americans in colonial … Continue reading

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Hole in History

  December 7, 2014 , , , , , ,

As you all may know, I am a part of a team of awesome SIFs who are working on an educational, innovative project. The project is aimed towards recreating an interactive virtual 3D model of the intersection of Decatur St. and Ivy St. (now Peachtree Center Ave.) in what it would have been like in the 1930s. Working on this project for the last semester has shed light in the fact that the project has taken a lot more time and energy than expected, while also hitting several bumps on the road. To me, that’s no problem as I know that all great masterpieces (not implying that our project will live up to the word “masterpiece”) take hard work, time, and dedication. Currently we have been at a standstill with the project because of one fact: there is a lack of pictures of the street during the 1930s. In order to resolve our problem, My job for the project was to search the internet inside and out for any pictures of buildings, preferably head-on shots, that would aid in recreating the building in a virtual 3D model as accurately as possible. Another SIF was setting up the 3D world in the game engine called Unity. As the search continued and the results were very disheartening and minimal, we decided to look to outside sources for help. One of our project supervisors heard that Emory was attempting to recreate the city of Atlanta into virtual 3D model in a similar project. … Continue reading

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Microfilm, TEI headers and bibliographic metadata

  November 23, 2014

One of the biggest and most urgent issues facing historical scholarship in the next several decades involves the transition to digital archival work, and with it the question of how the materiality of archival sources can be preserved, respected, and communicated in that translation. The importance of archival sources as material objects has become a vital branch of study in the last few decades, as historians and literary critics have begun asking detailed questions about the signification of paper, binding, type, etc., to the meaning of texts. This has occurred partially in response to the mania for textuality that was associated with the critical theory boom of the 1980’s and 1990’s, but it has also coincided with the advent of increasing digitization of the archives. On of the one hand, as anybody who has ever struggled with microfilm can tell you, digitized archives – even very simple ones that just display high quality digital images — can be a major step forward for scholars asking materially oriented questions. Most of the time on microfilm, binds are left unreproduced, paper and watermarks etc. are washed out in the harsh whites of the microfilm, and any sense of the materiality of the original document is lost in the always present awareness of the materiality of the film through which you are viewing it. Some digital archives, such as the EEBO database and a database I’ve been using a ton this semester, the Virginia Company Archives, are simply digitized images of microfilm, and … Continue reading