[In lieu of readings for the final class meeting of UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar. Each student was to give a brief presentation on the digital humanities in their field.] As a field built around places, urban history has always been cognizant of space. Beginning with Phil Ethington’s Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge digital urban history has used the digital medium’s visual power to explore space. As an early digital history project, Ethington modeled the digital medium’s visual power for spatial analysis. Building on his Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge, Ethington developed HyperCities,…
Leave a CommentTag: dh projects
For the Digital Humanities Seminar that I am taking, the instructor, William G. Thomas (who has blogged about the class), assigned us a project in which we, as a class, were to build an iPad/iPhone App during the first month of class. From the beginning the project was intimidating, exciting, and occasionally terrifying. Two Thursdays ago (September 29th), we presented our unfinished App. The fact that our App was unfinished really highlights the true beauty of this assignment: Failure was explicitly allowed and encouraged. I am not even sure if building an App in a month from scratch (no one…
Leave a Comment[In place of a reflection, this week for the Digital Humanities Seminar we were instructed to pick out three examples of great design after reading Johanna Drucker’s SpecLab] What Middletown Read: A project I found a few month’s back, I really enjoy this project from a theoretical and practical stand point. From a design perspective, I find its simple design to be sneaky good. While its earth tones and simple search interface may seem plain, its plainness is its beauty. The project explores the “plainness” of everyday life, taking something many people do everyday, check out library books, to analyze…
Leave a Comment[This post is the first of many reading reflections written for UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar. I will be posting my reflections each week. Jason Heppler and William Thomas will also be blogging about the class. This week the readings were Reinventing Knowledge and “As We May Think.”] Predicting the future is, unsurprisingly, difficult. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Vannevar Bush describes a future machine, the “memex,” which congregates, organizes, and dispenses information that bears remarkable similarities to the current technology. Writing over sixty years later, Ian McNeely looks backwards more so than forwards, though he seems comfortable projecting the laboratory’s…
Leave a CommentA few months ago, I checked up on a digital history project to which I was introduced in my introductory digital history course, Richmond’s Voting America project. It is a great project and a wonderful teaching resource, but I was really interested to see that it had been updated. In addition to some cosmetic changes, since the last time I had visited the project had added the presidential data for 2008 and more analysis of their maps. I had originally explored the website to review it for part of the DH course I was taking. In the review (in December…
Leave a CommentAlso very interesting from Ball State’s Center for Middletown Studies, a project attempting to create a virtual Muncie in the 1920s: Robert and Helen Lynd’s seminal investigation into the social conditions in Muncie, Indiana, during the 1920s not only marked the community as the nation’s Middletown, it also generated a substantial body of source material documenting social experiences in it. Simply put, Middletown research has made Muncie the best documented city of its size and thus the ideal setting for the digital re-creation of ground-level American social history.
Leave a CommentThe What Middletown Read Project (I’d love to see them add a spatial dimension): “What Middletown Read” is a database and search engine built upon the circulation records of the Muncie (Indiana) Public Library from November 6, 1891 through December 3, 1902. It documents every book that every library patron borrowed during that period, with the exception of one gap from May 28, 1892 to November 5, 1894. For more details, follow the links below.
4 CommentsI am participating in the Day of Digital Humanities 2011 they asked applicants to define the digital humanities. I have first listed my definition of DH and then I have re-posted Dan Cohen’s definition and short reflection. Me: At its core, the Digital Humanities is the use of digital tools to gather, organize, analyze, and present scholarly research in the humanities. Humanists seek to understand the world and cultures in which people live and have lived through a variety of disciplines including literature, English and other modern languages, philosophy, art, art history, and history. While many of the questions humanists…
Leave a CommentPBS: TileMill is a modern map design studio that lets you design maps for the web using your own data or any publicly available data set. What makes TileMill unique is that it allows anyone who understands the idea behind CSS in web design to quickly and easily design custom maps.
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