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~ Annie Swafford

After a good half hour of searching through books that are older than my grandparents and have a distinct “old book” smell, I finally found the perfect,margin marked up, before 1923, book.  Stacked on the  PS shelf, it was staring at me:  E. Barrington’s The Ladies!, published in Boston 1922.

 

Although it was not the book I originally set out to look for,it was from the same time period and the same subject, women, plus the spine of this book looked promising.

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On one of the first pages  had “NPN” branded into it, meaning this book was part of the New Paltz collection from before it was SUNY New Paltz. This book belonged originally to New Paltz Normal School– the college when it was a teaching school back in the early 1900s.

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Even though this book was not extremely marked up, I found a few marginalia worth noting. Just from the cover page, someone was kind enough to note the Author’s full name- Emilie Isabel Wilson Barrington. The Person also wrote “Beck L.M.A.” I researched what this could mean and came up with nothing solid other than it may possibly be the name of the copyright.

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In the back of the book I found someone left a simple math equation: 500+268= 768. Could someone have been multitasking reading and math homework?

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One piece of Marginalia I found worth looking into was a simple, neat check mark next to the quote, “Indeed, Ma’am, I did my part as well as others.”  After reading the before and after parts of the book I came to conclude this could be an important part to the plot because the duchess who says this line is defending herself to “her majesty.” Since the Duchess’s superior tried to make a joke of the girl, asking if she actually believed the duke would come for her, the Duchess stands up for herself with this quote that means  yes, she did think so because she did everything she was supposed to, he is in the wrong.  Considering women were not granted suffrage until 1920 and this book was published in 1922, it is very ballsy for this woman to take such a stand– and perhaps the person making this mark thought the same thing.

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Looking for marginalia in old books turned out to be much more interesting than I expected. It leaves you wondering who left these marks and what they were really thinking, can our hypothesizes be correct? Leaving marks in books is like leaving a mystery legacy, you will never know who will find it, and no one will ever know you left it.

 

Dan Albrecht’s Scandal in Bohemia blog post.

~ Annie Swafford

I used Wordle to make a wordmap of A Scandal in Bohemia, by Arthur Conan Doyle. I chose a chunkfive font and a chilled summer color setup. This was similar to one of the setups that was done as an example in class.
One of the first things that one notices when looking at the wordmap is how prevalent the word “Holmes” is. That probably offers little significance other than the fact that Watson is narrating the story and Holmes is present in every scene. After that one sees that “photograph” pops up often. That offers more insight into the story since the whole plot revolved around retrieving the photograph that Irene Adler had taken from the King.
Wordle: Dan'sFirstWordle“>

I found this to be one of my favorite of the Sherlock Holmes stories since it really establish the personality and identity of the character.   The story has shown that Holmes has a competitive streak when it comes to solving mysteries, and it wasn’t until Irene Adler emerged that he was ever challenged or beaten.  When Sherlock is beaten by Adler, he doesn’t get angry or demoralized, or show any resentment towards her, he simply refers to her respectfully as “The Woman.”  The word “woman” is one of great significance to the story at least in the opinion of this blogger, but in the wordmap it is surprisingly small.  The reason for the word’s significance is that it offers a deep insight into the protagonist’s personality, but since the word only appears sporadically, the wordmap fails to emphasize it very much.

My opinion of wordmaps is that they are extremely useful  in looking for trends in a certain amount of text, and those trends can be well hidden in that text.  Wordmaps are a great way to bring them out.  They have a limited usefulness, however, as quantity of words doesn’t always reveal significance, but it still a very useful tool.

Word Cloud ” The Speckled Band”

~ Annie Swafford ~ 1 Comment

With taking a class on Digital Humanities, we learned how to look at literature in a new way. Not just reading words on a page but really visualizing the text. In class, we learned more about these by messing around with world clouds. These world clouds represent the frequency of words. The higher the frequency the bigger the words appear in the cloud. There were two tools I used the websites for to examine the Sherlock story “The Speckled Band”.

The first website tool I used, was Wordle. Using Wordle, the first time I entered the text in I used the random setting just to see what would come up. This word cloud represents the “random” that came up.

http://wp.me/a4UATe-9n Screen shot 2014-09-21 at 11.41.57 PM

This setting I tried messing around with things a little bit to make it easier to read. I cut down the words shown from the standard setting of 150 to 100 which I think helped a lot. I also put it in alphabetical order. I really think this helped a lot more for a refresher on a story I have read. It also may be more helpful is someone was just trying to figure out small details of what the story may be about.

Screen shot 2014-09-21 at 11.57.37 PM

I was not surprised when Holmes was the biggest word in the word cloud. “Holmes” is a big part of the story and he is well represented. Other words that help are “save”,“sister”, “death”, “stepfather”. Those are really helpful for details about the story. Other words are not as helpful such as “know”, or “one”.

I even wanted to see what happened with Voyant, by doing the same type of thing.

This is the word cloud before the basic words before I made any changes to the settings. It has nothing but common words in it. Wordle was easier because the basic English words were already taken out of the cloud. It was a lot more work to individually add each word I wanted to take out. But what I liked more about Voyant than Worlde was the fact it showed you how many times the word shows up in the text.

Word clouds seemed to be really helpful if you just need a quick refresher of what you have already read, but sometimes it can be a lot of work and other times it can not really represent the proper information that comes from a reading. I feel like that is something we need to keep in mind anytime we see different visualizations of readings.

~ Annie Swafford ~ 1 Comment

I used voyant-tools to create this word cloud. The main thing I noticed about this word cloud was the amount of describing words that were included the cloud. I was expecting to see “Holmes” or “London” appear as the largest words. I take this observation though as a sign that the story itself is very descriptive and pays close attention to detail. However, it doesn’t reveal much about the plot of the story which makes it not the best source to use.

word cloud

Welcome to Digital Tools for the 21st Century: Sherlock Holmes’s London (DHM 293)

~ Annie Swafford

 Course Description:

Do you want to learn how to read 10,000 books at a time? Create maps of crimes in Sherlock Holmes’s London? This course provides an introduction to digital humanities (DH)–the practice of using digital tools for scholarly purposes in all majors–including its different uses, methodologies, tools, and projects.  You will learn different DH techniques, study existing DH projects, and try these techniques yourself in weekly labs.  We’ll use DH techniques to examine Sherlock Holmes short stories alongside Victorian court records, coroners’ reports, and maps of crimes in London.  While the in-class material will focus on 19th century London, your final group projects can be more immediately applicable to your own major or academic interests.  In lieu of taking exams and writing traditional papers, we will create digital exhibits, write blog posts, share our work through social media, and collaborate with students and scholars from around the world.  All majors are welcome. Computer literacy is helpful, but no programming experience is required.

Student Learning Outcomes:

By the end of the semester, students should be able to

  • Have an interdisciplinary understanding of 19th Century London
  • Identify, use, and discuss different DH methodologies and tools
  • Explain the pros and cons of the different methodologies and tools
  • Identify and explain key DH terms
  • Create projects using the tools covered in lab
  • Articulate what makes a DH project successful or unsuccessful
  • Use social media to engage with the larger DH community of scholars
  • Come up with research questions that can be answered with DH tools and methodologies and come up with the idea for tools and methodologies in order to answer research questions
  • Work collaboratively in groups to create a project that relates to their own research interests

Course Materials:

Every week will focus on a different DH methodology will include a discussion-based class and a hands-on lab when you will practice the tools we have been discussing. All readings with URLs can be found online and through the course website.