Class Blog 2

Booktraces: 1880 prize

~ prenattc1

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http://www.booktraces.org/submission-successful/

While searching in the stacks, I came across a small, dark green, hard-backed book with gold leafing on the pages and the front and back covers. It was titled “William Cullen Bryant; A Biographical Sketch, With Selections From His Poems and Other Writings.” The first thing i noticed was this inside cover because of the blue sticker attached to it. The sticker includes a decorative font and appears to be a gift tag for a christmas gift from the principal, to a student (Master Edward J. Brooks) at St. John’s Middle Class School in Tottenham, for “Excellence In Arithmetic.” This book was the first prize award. What really struck me was the fact that this was made out is 1880! The calligraphy it is written in is amazing and beautiful. The book itself was published in Gaslow in March of 1880, and given as a gift in December 1880. The author is A.J. Symington. Aside from the prize tag, there is no personal writing or other marginalia in the book. The book is falling apart and the pages are brown and pulpy. It is so amazing and interesting that we can see time paralleled, and personal relations through history. I looked up Tottenham: an area in the London Borough of Haringey, in north London, England, about 8 miles northeast of Charing Cross. How did this book, belonging to a man named Edward Brooks in England end up in the New School Library which would later become SUNY New Paltz’s Library system? It’s amazing trying to think of the many ways this could have happened, but also how fortunate for us here at this school to have such a worldly, historic collection amongst us for use. I was so amazed that i was able to check out some of these beautiful old books that are pretty much historical documents themselves.

 

Sherlock Holmes’ Short Stories, Topic Modeling

~ Annie Swafford

For this project I started off with 5,000 iterations, 20 topics and 10 words printed, but I realized the words seemed to different or many repeated and I couldn’t easily put a topic on them. I tried a couple more times with less iterations more topics and more words and as I went down in iterations and up in topic and words I started to get ones that I liked. After trying numerous of different options I concluded with 2,500 iterations, 30 topics and 20 words, that made it easy to get a topic from.

Topics:

Murder

1.”found, left, lay, end, body, dead, path, ground, feet, death, foot, blood, ran, blow, knife, carried, water, lying, showed, mark”

Travel

 2.”house, road, station, place, train, reached, past, line, carriage, direction, drive, haul, walk, back, town, country, drove, dog, pulled, round”

House

3.”room, door, window, open, opened, bed, entered, floor, bedroom, key, heard, closed, sound, passage, inside, step, sitting, safe, light, rushed”

Description

4.”face, eyes, man, black, dark, white, red, spoke, hair, thin, drawn, tall, appearance, features, blue, deep, pale, sharp, mouth, middle”

Religion

5.” wife, told, life, knew, woman, heat, girl, god, secret, hands, speak, love, truth, child, married, sake, thing, mine, understand, loved”

Divorce

6.”lady, woman, Mrs., left, back, husband, bring, pour, brought, story, maid, heard, told, happened, creature, gentleman, beautiful, terrible, real, live”

Schedule

7.”morning, night, day, doctor, clock, hour, morrow, DR., news, hours, yesterday, days, evening, early, state, breakfast, telegram, return, late surprise”

Job

8.”London, business, money, time, man, years, office, Hopkins, hundred, twenty, company, pay, west, pounds, country, thirty, thousand, paid, city, advertisement”

Investigation

9.”police, inspector, found, house, crime, made, murder, night, attention, London, shot, tragedy, dead, remainde, reason, arrest, attempt, moment, official,charge.

Performance

10.”face, instant, moment, cried, eyes, voice, turned, suddenly, sprang, forward, through, hands, sat,air, cought, struck, quick, sudden, strange, dreadful”

~ Annie Swafford

One of the most well-known meeting places between Holmes and Watson was St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. They met there for the first time in the chemistry lab in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (Smithsonian, pg. 4). The hospital is located in the Smithfield section of the City of London. The city’s two patron saints, Saint George and Saint Paul, are symbolized in dragon statues gazing from the corner of the street outside St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. It is one of the oldest sections of the city, the building itself having been founded in the year 1123, a half century after the Norman Conquest in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings. The point is, this is just about the oldest part of the modern world still standing, and that’s significant! How appropriate a destination for Holmes and Dr. Watson to meet – a reflection of Doyle’s veneration for his country perhaps.

St_Bartholomew

The map displaying St. Bartholomew’s location from the Charles Booth Online Archive show a central section of old London, close to main boulevards and two large plazas (Charles Booth Online Archive, Google Maps Link). Banks were often located nearby this area, and are still today.  The whole area now looks like the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan – white, stone faced buildings, four-stories tall, some with columns and others more modern. According to Doyle, the area looked similar then. Many of those buildings were built in the mid-1800s, and the area has looked aristocratic for a long time.

Good Digital Humanities Project

~ Annie Swafford

For a digital humanities project be considered good I think it should satisfy the following requirements:

  1. Organization: Everything should be labeled and easy to understand, otherwise it’s just gonna be confusing and won’t help anyone.
  2. Cited: the data must ALWAYS be cited so it’s not considered plagiarism. If you didn’t write something make sure you are giving the proper credits.
  3. Layout: The layout should be nice to look at and organized, for example: categorize each topic, the colors must match, you need a search bar…
  4. Focus: The project must be focused on a determined theme, and all of its data must be related.
  5. Reliability: all of the data must be reliable and authentic.

Besides the five items I cited above, a good DH project should contain a lot of information, it should be something that people actually use for learning and getting information. It has to be interesting, with interactive data, search bars, pictures and videos to exemplify and, of course, a nice layout! It doesn’t matter how awesome your DH project is, if the layout doesn’t match, no one is gonna like it.

DH projects allow scholars to ask new questions because it’s so easy to interact with it, students can just go into a website and search whatever they want to -that’s why the data has to be reliable, you need to know you can trust all the new information you are getting-. So now you can see why DH is so incredibly awesome, it connects everyone with the same questions or the same interests in some particular topic.