First and foremost I think it is important to actually keep up with the project if it is something like an archive and make sure everything works. For example Sherlockian.net for me was just not a good DH project at all, but aside from not being user friendly and not visually appealing it’s biggest problem is links not working. Clearly the owner does not check up on the links and keep up with the project entirely. It is not very useful because of this.
DHAdditionally, a project needs to be well researched. The Old Bailey Online project is great example of this. The project offers so much to user on the topics of old London. There are several tabs you can click on that lead you to even more tabs, like if you click “Historical Background” once you get to that section you get like 5 new tabs and those give way to even more options. The project is well researched and contains a lot on information.
A good DH project has to be visually appealing. Whenever I see a project that is too busy, or the colors just don’t work I usually get off the website right away. That is how I feel about BookTraces.org. Although, the project is amazing and so cool the website is an eyesore for me. The background is too busy, I don’t like the colors used and all the photographs right on the front page is too much.
It also have to be user friendly. London Gallery Project was very user friendly but, it did not let you search which then it makes it not user friendly anymore. The rest of the website was easy to navigate and nice to use until it was time to search which was a problem.
One last thing a could DH project needs is to be applicable to a variety of fields. You want the project to work for several topics so that a lot of people can utilize it.
DH projects lets scholars ask new questions because they can looks at things in ways they never have before. They can take an older project, topics or question and look at in a new light and ask the question in a different way. It also lets them ask new questions because they are able to work with a variety of people all over the world. They can ask questions over a lot of fields in ways not asked before because they have the resources like those we use in class. They can use the internet to work with others and look at things differently.
1. Aesthetically pleasing design. This is the first thing people notice when coming to a DH project. If a site is not designed appropriately to the content and in a way that makes sense to present the information, people will move on to another source.
2. Links to outside information. This allows people to further their research on the topic that your DH project covers. Like most of the sites we used in class, DH websites are often a starting place for research. Sometimes they only show a certain correlation or something and in order to make sense of it or find examples you need to use a more broad search website like Google. So this is an obvious way to have scholars ask questions. You’re using the information from the DH site to create a new or furthered study.
3. User friendly. This is one of the most important aspects of a DH project. It must allow the information to be found, easily accessed and organized in a way that lets you find what you need in an efficient timely manner. I think Locating London is the best example of this.
4. Appeals to a wide audience. This is is important in order to get people to use your site. If it’s limited to one tiny topic, not many people will be interested in viewing the site and it won’t be a valuable resource to many people. My example of this is the London Gallery Project. The only people that would find this site informative would be people interested in the progression of art galleries and even then only one set of information is shown.
5. Sources. It’s very important to site where you get your information form when creating a good DH project.
Digital Humanities is an exciting new field that allows people to make really interesting projects in the field of humanities. The possibilities of what you can do are endless, which is why I loved doing several projects and learning a few things about different tools. When you create a project however, I have learned these five important qualities a project should have in order to make it as best as it can be.
1) Your objective should be clear.
What is the purpose of this project? Before you even begin, you should be able to answer this question. This is very important because you need to know what you are trying to achieve. For my Google Ngrams project, my objective was to show the usage of “Evolution” and “Charles Darwin” during the Victorian Age, as well as demonstrate the different options that will affect your results when changing some of the options, and case-sensitivity. This was the purpose of this project.
2) Your information should be accurate and relevant.
Oops, I just remembered that during my Google Fusion Tables project I got a little off track (but that’s serves as a congratulatory for scrolling through all the photos) for posting a picture of a husky puppy, but the rest of the information is clear and accurate. The information about the vehicles on this long list (wasn’t too tedious) are describing what they are and their performance in terms of sales, which has been sourced from reliable websites to ensure accuracy. That way, it’ll make your project much more informative and it’ll make sense to the average reader who wants to learn a thing or two from it.
3) Design should be just right.
This is a little tricky, a boring design will make a project very uninteresting but if you go overboard with the colors and themes, than people will get distracted by the all the “shiny” bits and possibly not take the project seriously. With my word cloud project, the key is to try to aim for that “sweet spot” where your project is just the right design so it can be clearly read and nice to look at. The swan shaped word cloud from my word cloud project is in a cute swan shape and has several nice shades of blue to grab the reader’s attention, but is still in an easy to read font so the words are not hard to read. Did that word cloud hit the sweet spot? I think so.
4) It should be user-friendly.
I think this is very important, you really don’t want to frustrate the user don’t you? Good, so don’t be the creator of this site. Anyways back to the word cloud project, there were three sites that we were able to use to make the word clouds. I have used Tagxedo and Wordle. The one I didn’t use was Voyant. Tagxedo wasn’t the most user friendly but had great options for making word clouds. Wordle was very simple to use but limiting and Voyant was nearly the same as Wordle, but the opposite with most options. Basically, the user should not have to Google how to use ______ to use a project or software, in this day and age, most people should have this figured out.
5) Have fun!
No seriously, I mean it, is it really a bad thing if you don’t have fun while doing a project? Think about it, you’ll learn so much while doing your projects like I have with my Ngrams. When I noticed some trends with my results, I was able to learn a lot about Charles Darwin and Evolution during the time period that I saw an increase in the usage of this word. Plus when Darwin’s Theory of Evolution started to gain traction, I noticed that its usage has increased a lot, and you can also see why this is the case. Plus with my Fusion Tables, I loved doing research of the best selling cars of 2014 and seeing what cars Americans want and also learning why this is the case.
So how does DH let scholars ask new questions?
Many DH projects are shared freely and allow everyone to contribute. People will learn a lot from these projects and they will therefore think and perhaps question what they know. Since people usually collaborate on these projects, they will bring new perspectives to the table and ask questions about things that some people wouldn’t have known if they haven’t seen history or information in that new perspective.
Over the course of the semester, we have learned many ways to make a successful Digital Humanities project. I’ve listed 5 of the most important ways below.
1. Good Design
One of the first things a good Digital Humanities project needs is a good design. Having a visually appealing website helps to attract more users and makes for a much better overall experience. It is important to think about choice of colors, fonts, sizes, and placement of your content so that is easy to find and use without being too distracting or difficult for the user. Having lots of photos also helps people who are visual learners to understand the information.
2. Easy to Navigate
Having a good design to your project helps for it to be more user-friendly. The information must be displayed and organized in a way that makes everything easy and simple for the user to find in order to get the most information and use out of it. Having a key that explains graphs and maps is a must because it helps users to fully grasp what they are looking at. Many of the sites we have seen in class have had easily accessible tabs on the side of the project that help you navigate through the site and find everything you need.
3. Interactivity
Having a website where users get to interact with the content is very important. It keeps them interested and more motivated to use it. For example, on the London Gallery Project, they included an interactive map where you could navigate and find art galleries that came around during the 19th century. By clicking different categories, you can press play on the timeline and see the art galleries come up on the map. It makes it more interesting to see the information and easier for users to understand.
4. Be Collaborative
Sometimes a Digital Humanities project requires the help of the masses in order. For example, Book Traces is a site that collects submissions of pictures of 19th and early 20th century books that have marginalia pertaining to that time in them in order to learn more about the people and the culture of that time. Over 350 people from all around have submitted their pictures with books they found that contain marginalia. It makes it easier to obtain information for a project and it helps to obtain information that you may not have been able to get access to without the help of others.
5. Have Context/Citations For All Data
It is very important to have proper citation for all of your information if it is not your own. You should try to keep much of the information your own, but if you use someone else’s it must be properly cited to save you from trouble with plagiarism. Having proper context for all of your information is a must as well. If you have a picture or graph without stating what it is or why it’s in your project, it will make users confused and not sure as to why it’s there, which would probably turn them off from the project. For example, on the Art In The Blood website, most of the information is very hard to grasp, but the maps and pictures they show have little or no context to them, so you don’t know why they correlate to each other or why they’re there.
Digital Humanities projects allow scholars to ask new questions because they introduce people to new topics and information that they may have never been introduced to before. Many of the sites we’ve looked at in class are very specific, so seeing something might spark someone’s interest and allow them to do research on that topic and solve new questions. Digital Humanities brings together information in a way that’s relevant to our time and the technology we use, and helps to open our minds to questions we haven’t thought of before.
There are many qualities that one needs to consider having when one decides to create a good Digital Humanities project. Here are five qualities that we have discussed this semester in class:
1.) It has to be scholarly
In order to create a good Digital Humanities project, it must be scholarly. This means that the project has to cite where the data is coming from in order to make their project credible and legitimate. In order to make it scholarly, one must also post a list of all the individuals that collaborated together in order to make the project. A Digital Humanities project that has included this quality is the “Old Bailey’s” digital archive. On their archive, they included on the home page a link called, “The Project” which takes you to all the sources that they compiled to create the archive and also a list of the project staff. Here is a link to their “About This Project” page.
2.) A walkthrough of how to use it
In order to develop a good Digital Humanities project, one must have a walkthrough of how to use their project. This would be very helpful because not everyone will know how the website works and by having a walkthrough of the project, you can show them useful tools in order to make your project seem even more interesting and useful. A video walkthrough would be ideal so that the viewer can actually visually see how the project functions. One of the Digital Humanities project that has included this quality is the “Locating London’s Past” mapping project. On their home page, they placed a link to a video walkthrough of how to use and navigate through their project. Here is the video walkthrough link. What is really great about this particular website is that they decided to post not just one video, but rather multiple videos in order to differentiate what topics they are presenting in each so that it is not just one very long video.
3.) It has to be focused
In order to produce a great Digital Humanities project it also important to keep it focused on a central theme or subject. This is so essential in a project because this is what makes the project organized. If the project is not focused on a particular theme or subject, then the viewers will be confused when navigating the website because they will not be sure of what the project is trying to convey or how each of the subjects that the project presents relate to one another. Therefore, it is crucial that the information that is included in your project must somehow all correlate with one another. One of the Digital Humanities project that demonstrates this quality is the “Old Bailey’s” digital archive. In this archive, the project team describes exactly what information they are going to present in the archive, which is located on the home page. On the home page, they have described Old Bailey’s as, “A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.”
4.) User-friendly
In order to create a good Digital Humanities project it is also wise for it to be user-friendly. This is important because if it is not user-friendly, then it will be difficult for the users to navigate on the website. One of the Digital Humanities project that is very user-friendly is “Locating London’s Past” because the map has a zoom in and out function and you can also go to the street view when you place the little orange figure on the map. The creators used google maps in order to have these functions. It is also user-friendly because everything is clearly labeled. For example, if you want to find data, then there is a red tab that says “Data.”
5.) Nice design
A great Digital Humanities project should be created with a nice and clean design. It should not by any means be cluttered. This quality is also necessary because if you have a nice design, it will attract people’s attention and it will make the project even more visually appealing. “Locating London’s Past” has a nice design because they chose very nice colors and the colors that they chose are interesting because it is red, white, and blue which are the colors of the British flag. That is a very brilliant idea because it correlates with the subject of the project, which takes place in London, England. At the top of the website, there is a man that is dressed in an outfit from the 1700s which also makes sense because the map that they use is from 1746. Designs like this make the website even more interesting because it makes it even more realistic.
How does Digital Humanities let scholars ask new questions?
Digital Humanities projects, like the ones that I mentioned above, let scholars ask new questions because scholars are the viewing the data in a completely different way, which allows them to find patterns between the different data, which is more difficult and timely to compile from written documents. In addition, because of technology, everything is brought online for everyone to view whenever anyone wants to. Therefore, we can compare information without leaving our own home and by comparing the data we can create trends and see how the data correlates. Scholars can ask new questions about history and whether history could have changed based on mapping projects that they have conceived.
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.
