Assignment

How to Create a Good Digital Humanities Project:

~ Annie Swafford

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.

Screen shot 2015-04-16 at 9.48.42 PM4. 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.

Screen shot 2015-04-16 at 10.01.24 PM5. 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.

Screen shot 2015-04-16 at 10.23.23 PMDigital 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.

Mapping Holmes

~ Annie Swafford

For this assignment, I decided to focus on Fenchurch Street, a location that was mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes story A Case Of Identity. In the story, Fenchurch Street is the location of Miss Sutherland’s step-father’s place of business. Located just around the block from here is Miss Sutherland’s fiancee’s home on Leadenhall Street, which (SPOILER ALERT) turns out to be Miss Sutherland’s step-father. You can see a picture of Fenchurch Street on a map I got from Victorian Google Maps below:

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When I looked at the Charles Booth Online Archive, I found out that during the 19th century Fenchurch Street was a very poor area, as you can see on the map and color guide below. The black and blues show that people of the lowest classes lived in this area. This relates back to the Holmes story because Mr. Windibank, Miss Sutherland’s step-father, tried to pose as another man to make Miss Sutherland fall in love with him so he could eventually marry her and take all her money. Mr. Windibank’s place of business was also located just around the block from Fenchurch Street on Leadenhall Street. This area was a good location for Arthur Conan Doyle to put both of Mr. Windibank’s identities in because it shows that he has very little money. If he lived and worked in a different area it wouldn’t make as much sense to the story.

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On the Old Bailey Archive, I did a search on my location and found a list of the crimes committed throughout the 19th century. Most of these crimes listed were for all things theft related, like grand larceny, shoplifting, pickpocketing, and even a couple of theft related murders. When I looked at the Locating London website, I found similar results. Then I decided to look at the British History Online website. When I searched my location on there, I found many texts involving businesses and factories, where I learned that this area held many businesses and industries and probably had many jobs that people of the working class had. I’m not saying that poor people were more likely to be criminals, but in order to survive and support their families people of the lower classes needed to do what they could, and theft was probably a last resort option for them to get necessities.

Topic Modeling Results

~ Annie Swafford

I first decided to compare the topics of “crime scene”, “writing”, and “crime solving”. In the beginning of the chart, writing spikes significantly in 1893. I wasn’t able to find any major reasons why this happened history wise, but when looking at the date of the publication, I found out that this came from The Adventure of the Reigate Squire. In this story, the main clue that Holmes and Watson find is a torn piece of paper found in the victim’s hand, which (SPOILER ALERT) turned out to be written by the murderers. Crime scene seems to fluctuate until it spikes in 1908. From then to around 1925, it seems to stay pretty constant. I noticed that crime solving seemed to be pretty steady with crime scene, and would increase/decrease at around the same times, which I thought was interesting.   Screen shot 2015-04-02 at 10.41.39 PM

The second set I decided to compare was “light” and “smoking”. I put these two topics together because I thought the words in the light category were words that would be used when lighting a cigar/cigarette. The main thing that I noticed in this chart is whenever one rises/decreases, the other does as well, which makes me think that my first assumption was correct. And when you look from around 1920 on, you can see that although they are at different levels, they increase and decrease in the same pattern.

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The third set I compared was “time” and “physical description”. I thought that the two would have some things in common based off of physical descriptions over time. But after doing some research, I unfortunately wasn’t able to find much of anything that would tie these two categories together.

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The last categories that I analyzed were “marriage”, “business”, and “travel”. A cool thing I found was when I noticed that business made a huge peak in 1904, and after doing a little research I found out that this was when the telegraph started becoming more popular in common society. I also found that the 1904 World’s Fair occurred during this time, which was a big time for business and introducing new products to the world. Travel peaked in 1908, and I found out that this was when Ford first began making the Model T, which was a widely popular car during this time.

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Overall, I thought this assignment was interesting, but when it came to figuring out how these categories compared to things in history I didn’t find it very helpful. I thought the spikes in the charts would lead my research to significant things throughout history but most of the time I couldn’t find anything, which was a little disappointing.

Communication Through Time: Telegraph vs. Telephone

~ Annie Swafford

Something that particularly interests me is modes of communication throughout the ages. From the 19th century through today, we experienced huge advances in technology that helped to sculpt the way we live in this day and age. Two of the biggest forms of communication that arose during the Victorian era were the telegraph and the telephone, which I decided to compare for this assignment.

graphI was surprised at my Ngram chart results because I was expecting there to be a much bigger rise in the telephone from the time it was invented in 1876. Though it did receive wide popularity before 1900, I thought it was interesting to see that the telegraph still exceeded it by a significant amount by the end of the century.

The telegraph’s mentions begin before 1800, when the electric telegraph was first being developed. But its growth begins in 1830, when Samuel Morse perfected this invention for long distance communication with the help of his system called Morse Code. The telegraph became quickly accepted by the public as a faster way of sending and receiving information. Its rise continued consistently as it came into use all around the world until around 1860, when the first transcontinental telegraph line was cerated. This sparked a jump in the chart as telegraph’s came into use worldwide. Something I also noticed was after the telephone was invented, you still see the telegraph going up, but it’s not as consistent anymore and you see more drops in the graph.

In 1876, when the telephone was invented, it automatically made a significant jump in the amount of times it was mentioned in texts, as you see a slight fall in the telegraph. The telephone came into wide use very quickly, with around 10,000 telephones in service by 1878. In the 1880’s, the telephone continues its upward climb with the development of long distance service from the Bell Telephone Company, which was the only telephone company at the time. In the 1890’s, independent phone companies began to pop up all around, giving the Bell Company competition and also supporting the continuous rise of the telephone.

I also wanted to see when exactly the telephone became more popular than the telegraph. In 1900, the telephone’s book mentions skyrocket and exceed that of the telegraph by 1905, a huge jump in just 5 short years. Since then, the telephone has almost continuously risen until modern years while the telegraph has continuously fallen to almost 0% on the Ngram chart.

Overall, I thought it was interesting to see how the amount of mentions in books and texts correlate to popularity. I was surprised to see that mentions of the telephone didn’t rise over that of the telegraph until 1905 because its usage grew so quickly in such a short amount of time. But since the telegraph was so common and prevalent in that society, it took awhile for it to lose that popularity, something that still happens all the time with technology today.