It’s difficult for me to narrow down how much I’ve learned this semester about Digital Humanities. I guess I’ll choose my good examples from my favorite topics: archives, wordclouds, and topic modeling:
With archives like the Old Bailey, data can be easily accessible online. So so so much data, including books, photos of paintings, sound bits, video, and et cetera. It’s not just digitally scanned documents anymore. You no longer have to travel to some dark basement or well established college in England to see the original paper documents– they are scanned for you, ready to be read. Although physicality is still important, digital archives offer ways to the general public to access once hidden and/or difficult to study materials. Problems concerning this access and what gets put up online are certainly an issue, but digital archives allow scholars and non scholars alike to access things… Which is pretty neat.
Old Bailey Archive Home Screen
The Old Bailey Proceeding site is easy to navigate, offering plenty of instructive videos on the search functions. Huge plus, especially given how much info there is. It also provides illustrations pertaining to the Old Bailey’s history, in paintings or photographic form. The graphic design choices remain uniform and pertinent to the topics at hand. If you are interested, the site allows you to look at original copies of some proceedings. Also, all the data is cited, a number one rule. Continue reading →
A good DH project must presents some features, as we have discussed through this course. I have selected five from these important qualities:
1) Built in collaboration
It is really easy to contribute to Book Traces, you can submit photos of the marginalia and information about the book online.
A good DH project is “open-ended”, which means, a lot of scholars or regular people can contribute adding material. Book Traces is a good example. You can easily submit a 19th century book, which contains something on its “marginalia” or objects inside. It is interesting because it is a collective effort to preserve endangered books, which can be discarded by libraries or disintegrated by the time.
This feature makes the project more effective, because its resources can grow in number and quality faster, as a lot of people are helping.
Collaboration also allows scholars to publish their work before finishing it, so they can get feedback from the audience, from other scholars and, then, improve their work. These “work in progress” was really difficult when the projects were paper-based.
2) Be Scholarly developed and oriented to scholars
The Rossetti Archive presents the artistic production of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, contributing to the wider scholarly initiative called NINES.
Being a scholarly project means that it has been built based on reliable sources and that the project cites those sources properly. Projects which are developed by Universities or Research Institutes are scholarly. However, everyone can build a scholarly project, if he/she is concerned where he/she gets the data and how he/she cites where it came from.
The Rossetti Archive is a good example of a scholarly project. It has been developed as a basis for the project NINES (Network Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship), which demonstrates that it is built towards scholarly purposes. As it is stated on the website, “the Archive provides students and scholars with access to all of DGR’s pictorial and textual works and to a large contextual corpus of materials(…)” – (The Rossetti Archive, section Home).
3) Integration
Good DH projects gather a number of objects, maps or even scholarly texts into a single digital interface. This characteristic makes them useful as a scholar or a student can find plenty of information in the same place. Moreover, the digital platforms make possible to conjugate several levels of information onto the same visualization, which would be confusing using printed materials. This is the case of Locating London’s Past, which put together 24 printed maps. Charles Booth Archive is another example. Different colors represent each kind of information, such as crime’s incidence and population through region.
4) Be user-friendly
A good DH project is concerned about how is it easy to a user to figure out by him/herself how the platform works. Being user-friendly involves displaying the information on the screen in an easy way to read and find the data the user is looking for. Locating London’s Past really fulfills this expectation. Besides using design resources to display the information in a clear and readable way, they offer tutorial videos. Besides that, all the tabs follows a coherent organization. At the top of the page, the user find the two ways of researching – directly onto the map or looking for specific data. Since he decides for data, all the data sets will show up on the left side and the user can pick one up and fill the blanks to find the information he wants.
Thus, part of being user-friendly is presenting the next DH project’s quality – Design.
5) Design
As the article RadiantTextuality explains, “computerization not only vastly increases the amount of accessible information, it enables much greater flexibility in the ways information can be shaped, scaled, and negotiated” (p. 385). Then, a good DH project takes advantage of the design resources to be good-looking, which makes it attractive to the user as well as user-friendly. Using design properly means doing smart choices of colors, different font types and font sizes to organize and categorize different kinds and levels of information. As the image on the right shows, Locating London’s Past is really successful in using design skills. We can identify the use of the variety of font sizes, and a use of colors that is related to the English flag.
On the other hand, the archive Sherlockian.net has a lot to improve concerning to design. The use of colors doesn’t seem to have a purpose. The yellow background and the small font type, as well as the organization of tabs and objects is not very readable and doesn’t attract the user. The links are presented in the regular blue color, which also badly affects the whole appearance of the website.
How DH lets scholars ask new questions?
Through DH, scholarly work can be preserved and self-integrated much better than on paper-based instruments. As Jerome McGann affirms in RadiantTextuality, now it is possible to “integrate the resources of all libraries, museums, and archives and make those resources available to all persons no matter where they reside physically” (p. 381). He adds that “electronic publishing permits scholars to present their work in far greater depth and diversity. Essays can present all their documentary evidence as part of their argument (in notes and appendices, or in electronic links to the original documents). They can also exploit fully the use of illustrations and images, including video film clips, as well as audio clips” (p. 384).
Therefore, DH brings up new issues, that couldn’t be seen without the new technologies such as maps, graphics and visualizations. Scholars and students start to search and identify patterns between data, which was really difficult to do with paper based documents. We didn’t have everything together, online, available to access from any place in the world. Now we can compare information at the same screen, and ask questions about what they signify, which trends we can distinguish. Technologies such as N-grams enable us to exercise these skills of discerning trends and patterns. DH projects can function as a beginning of a research, as we discover some data and start looking for the meaning of it.
Furthermore, digital platforms are available to a broader audience and enable critics to dialogue, as well (p. 387). Thus, scholars can discuss and bring different points of view about some data, which means that DH permits scholars to ask new questions.
Today, the 2 corner shops of Goodge Street on to Tottenham Court Road are Hamburger Union and Cards Galore. One of these 2 modern buildings was likely the corner store where the “row” took place outside of in Sherlock Holmes, The Blue Carbuncle. Maybe the assailants worked at Hamburger Union and were low on deli meat that night. HA!
It is interesting why there was a crime that broke out on the corner of Goodge Street being that this location is within 100 yards of the police station. It is no wonder the assailants fled after Henry Baker broke the window behind him. The Sherlock Holmes text says that the man, Henry Baker, “dropped his goose, took to his heels, and vanished amid the labyrinth of small streets which lie at the back of Tottenham Court Road.” Since the police station was located on Tottenham Court Road, it can be inferred that the assailants and Ryder himself, ran the opposite way across Whitfield and Charlotte Street.
Using the Old Bailey Proceedings Archive, I searched Goodge Street and discovered a prevalent crime was counterfeit coinage. I checked the Charles Booth online archive for the poverty map and observed that Goodge Street is primarily middle class.
According to British History online, Goodge Street used to be a shopping district. If there was coin forgery prevalent in the early 19th century, it is no question Goodge Street was potentially home to similar acts of deceit and defiance. Another search in Old Bailey Proceedings Archive revealed that in 1889, a man broke into a house on Goodge Street and stole 18 pairs of trousers. That is a lot of trousers—what an odd thing to steal. However, the band of assailants in Sherlock Holmes were trying to steal a goose so it doesn’t seem too unreasonable that a similarly oddly chosen burglary item was on the line in real life.
The British Museum is mentioned in the story The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle when Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are asking the owner of the stolen goose about the place he had bought it. Mr. Baker explains that he is a member of a “goose club”, in which each affiliate would receive a goose at Christmas, after contributing with a small amount of money during the year. Mr. Baker says: “There is a few of us who frequent the Alpha Inn, near the museum – we are to be found in the museum itself during the day, you understand” (in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, p. 5; Arthur Conan Doyle).
I have found this specific quotation very interesting, giving concern to what I have discovered about the place in The Booth Poverty Map. It tells us that the area surrounding the British Museum was not that poor. As the map key assigns, the colors shown around the museum correspond to “Middle class. Well-to-do” populations, some wealthy people from “Upper-middle and Upper classes”. People with “good ordinary earnings”, in a “fairly comfortable” situation also used to live in that area (in Booth Poverty Map, Charles Both Online Archive).
However, if we use the arrows resource to search about the surrounding area, the frame changes. Especially if we go to the north-east, south-east or south-west directions, we find dark and light blue patterns, as the image bellow shows. As the key explains, these colors correspond to “very poor, casual, chronic want situations” (dark blue) and “poor who earned “18s to 21s a week for a moderate family” (Booth Poverty Map, Charles Both Online Archive). However, we can still see significant presence of middle-class families in that area, which suggests that people with really different life styles lived together in the same place. Today it is very unlikely to happen, due to the financial speculation.
Combining these two data, I could suggest a reason for the appearance of the British Museum in the story and for Mr. Baker’s sentence as well. As Holmes has deduced from the hat, Mr. Baker is an intellectual middle-class men even though he is probably running into financial difficulties at the moment. As he is an intellectual middle-class men, it is coherent that he frequents the Museum and the surroundings. However, he remarked that “we are to be found in the museum itself during the day, you understand” (in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, p. 5; Arthur Conan Doyle). I had come up with a possible reason for this statement. Even though the area is populated by middle and upper class families, it doesn’t mean that it is safe. Maybe, during the night, the area was occupied by criminals.
Indeed, some crimes used to happen in the area at night. I have found the case of a theft on George Street, located in the same parish where is the British Museum – Bloomsbury. Coincidentally, this is a case of a hat stealing, that happened in 1819. Both victim and defendant were males. You can see the description of the theft on the image bellow. It tells the details of the action, which is particularly interesting. (from Old Bailey Proceedings data set, at Locating London’s Past)
In addition a curiosity about the British Museum: some renowned names used to frequent the Museum’s Library and the reading room: “Sir James Mackintosh, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Washington Irving, William Godwin, Dean Milman, Leigh Hunt, Hallam, Macaulay, Grote, Tom Campbell, Sir E. Bulwer Lytton, Edward Jesse, Charles Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, Shirley Brooks, Mark Lemon, and Count Stuart d’Albany” (in Old and New London: Volume 4, The British Museum part 1 of 2, Chapter XXXIX).
In “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” Goodge Street is mentioned as the place in which James Ryder was attacked by the street gang while fleeing with the stolen gem inside the goose. I looked at the real Goodge Street to see if there was any outside information which may have influenced Doyle’s representation of that street.
Goodge Street is located right next to the Goodge Street Underground Station. The first fact that there is tube station located on this street is one sign for why Doyle may have written that there was minor violence and physical attacks near this location. Street crime is attached to locations near train and tube stations, as people are usually quick on the move and not paying attention. This knowledge paired with the late night that James Ryder was walking down this street would suggest that violence could happen in this location.
Other sites that I attempted to research this street turned up with no information, except for British History Online. This site writes that Goodge Street was mainly commercial and more of a shopping district, rather than residential. This information makes sense within the context of the story, as not many people were around in the area and the window James Ryder broke was a shop’s window. Some type of violence late at night, by an underground station, and in a shopping district would make total sense, and Conan Doyle’s representation seems accurate according to my outside research.
In A Scandal in Bohemia, many fictional locations are mentioned (mostly related to Irene Adler, oddly enough). However, there were a few actual locations in the story, one of which being the Langham Hotel, where the King tells Sherlock Holmes he’ll be staying at.
Langham Hotel, VictorianLangham Hotel, modern
The Langham, situated at the corner of Langham Place and Portland Place, appears (at least in the modern view) to be an exquisitely grandiose establishment, which would make sense considering the fact that Arthur Conan Doyle chose to include it briefly in a way that would imply it is truly fit for a king. In order to learn more about the demographics associated with this hotel, I decided to take a look at it on the Charles Booth Online Archive.
As shown on the map above, Booth classified the area surrounding the hotel as generally ranging from middle-class to wealthy–this was certainly no slum, to say the least. Bearing this in mind, it comes as no surprise that Doyle chose this as the hotel the King would be staying in, as the demographics of the surrounding area seem particularly fitting to the archetype.
A search through British History Online revealed that this ritzy hotel also has quite a ritzy history. Until around 1860, the Langham was preceded on its lot by Mansfield House, the mansion owned by the Earl of Mansfield. When the hotel was finally built in its place, it cost over £300,000, going on to become, and remain, one of the largest buildings in the city. It officially opened with a luncheon in 1965, which the Prince of Wales attended. Needless to say, even the history of this hotel is absolutely bathed in royalty and riches, thus making it the perfect choice for the King’s hotel in A Scandal in Bohemia.
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes short story, Scandal in Bohemia, Holmes and company have discovered Irene Adler has eluded them after a servant has informed them of her departure for a 5:15 train at Charing Cross. The station itself, is located on a fairly large road known as, “The Strand”.
