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Qualities of a Good Digital Humanities Project
From taking this course, we sure have looked at a lot of different digital humanities projects! From looking at them at the surface to learning how some of them were made, a few very important aspects of some of my favorite examples exhibited the qualities of a good DH project!
Accessibility
A good DH project must be able to easily be found. This includes the project’s web address being something memorable or easy to search on Google so we can access the project right away if we need to. One way that scholars can make their projects more accessible would be to include an SEO-friendly (Search engine optimized) title as well as many relevant tags that will enable search engines to locate the right page.
User Friendly
As saucy as this may sound, a project must be easy on the eyes! In other words, working with fonts, color schemes and site layouts can really add to the professionalism and visual appeal to a project, thus making people more inclined to read/ view more of all of your hard work! If a website is really difficult to navigate, it can be very frustrating for users.
Human Interest
Delving into a project based off of a personal interest is fantastic, but it also helps to choose a project on a topic that would appeal to a large array of people, such as students or scholars. If a project topic is too oddly specific to just one idea that not many people know about or not many people are effected by, I’m not so sure that it would necessarily be considered a good project. However, just because something is not commonly known does not mean that it will not interest people!
Collaborative Effort
A successful DH project is most commonly supported by its various staff members behind it. For example, in Locating London’s Past, a staff of educators, design experts, planners and historians were all behind the same project – and this factor, in my eyes, is what made it so interesting and humbling at the same time! Although these people were generally from the same area, all of their paths crossed due to their expertise in one field that was then built upon by the next member and so on. As any student who has had the misfortune of being stuck in a less than productive group for a group project, I can only imagine that this collaborative effort, while very useful, also could have become a large source of stress because so many people were involved.
Well-Researched, Accurate Data
This last quality is probably the most important one from my condensed list. Everything that is included in a DH project must be true – this means checking, double checking and triple checking information and also retrieving it from reputable sources, whether it be from a scholarly study or an online database such as the Old Bailey Proceedings database. If information compiled within a DH project is incorrect, the entire project could be at stake and all of one’s hard work could be invalidated by the presence of incorrect information.
How can DH projects spark scholarly questions?
One of the most prominent of DH means that interests me the most is trends in data. If a DH project presents an issue such as a statistic involving crime, health, poverty etc., as a journalist I am very interested in the history behind the issues. What does this mean? Why is it important now? How were things different five years ago? Ten years ago?
Through the digital means of DH, we are easily able to seek out answers to these questions at the click of a mouse. We are not only utilizing the technology that we have for information, but getting in-depth analysis of the data that has been retrieved by means of people all around the world with more advanced technologies in their possession than us. By discovering a DH project, we are not only learning about the specific topic but also the amazing tools that were used to put it together in the first place. By becoming more aware of these technologies, scholars can then inquire just how these means work, where they come from, how much they cost, what else they can be used for and also how they were utilized for a specific project.
The connection that DH creates between educational professionals, students and scholars is a very broad but intriguing relationship. Instead of spending hours in a library doing research on a topic, students are able to look into a DH project on the same topic that someone halfway across the world had put many years of hard work into. And the amazing thing about that relationship is that we, as students in a DH class, have the potential to spark inquiries and views from scholars from halfway around the world with our final projects as well! A thought that is very exciting and promising.
DeFranco_What makes a good DH Project
Five qualities of a good DH project:
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.
How to Create a Good Digital Humanities Project:
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.
Mapbox Project: A Case Of Identity
Click here to see our mapping project for A Case Of Identity!!
-Christine, Emily, Hannah
Mapping Holmes
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:
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.
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.
DeFranco_Mapping Holmes Assignment
I chose to focus on Leadenhall Street from the Sherlock Holmes story, A Case of Identity for this mapping/research assignment. This image is screen-shotted from the Victorian Google Maps website. Leadenhall Street is the thick, long street running horizontal through the image.
On the Old Bailey Archive I did a search of Leadenhall Street in the 1800s and found man phrases that much of what came up seemed business related, as if Leadenhall was a bustling, though not incredibly wealthy, business district with many places of employment and local businesses. Here are some examples of what I found that lead me to make this conclusion:
-“…I am a clerk at the post office, 114, Leadenhall Street…”
-“…Holder Brothers, Ship brokers, 146, Leadenhall Street…”
-“…he was an advertising agent in Leadenhall Street…”
-“…I am a printer, of 18, Leadenhall Market…”
-“…I am a tea importer, of 158, Leadenhall Street…” etc.
On the Charles Booth Online Archive I searched for the Street and came up with the following 1898-99 map.
According to the legend, the coloring of the map showing the surrounding areas of Leadenhall Street indicate that this was not a wealthy area. It seems that most of this area (the light blue range) is poor and some (the dark blue) indicates very poor areas. I can’t really tell if there are actually dark blue areas or if it’s just light blues layered on top of each other making certain spots look darker. Anyway, from this information and what I previously discovered about the many businesses along Leadenhall Street, it seems that it was a very working class area where people just barely managed to scrape buy and support their families and provide the necessities. Maybe there aren’t quite and “very poor” dark blue areas because there are lots of small local jobs in the area so people are not in the range of “chronic want.”
On the Locating London website, I did a search of Leadenhall Street to discover what typed of crime were reported in this area in the early 1800s. What I found were that all of the offenses were related to theft: pickpocketing, grand larceny, coining offenses, theft from a specified place, shoplifting, highway robbery, etc. I supposed this makes sense if the area was full of businesses and people just barely making it by. I’m not associating the poor with the crime, but these people were, in some way, wanting (indicated by the map showing wealth), and this could lead to theft.
Topic Modeling Results
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. 
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.
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.
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.
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.
Topic Modeling
200 topics, 7500 iterations, 10 topic words
Physical Description- man, hair, cut, middle, appearance, short, clean, faced, eagerly, shaven
Crime Scene- dead, body, found, knife, blood, cut, wound, death, heavy, lag
Travel- train, station, carriage, journey, roof, bridge, started, body, leave, ticket
Writing- paper, note, wrote, written, book, handed, writing, sheet, slip, write
Smoking- room, pipe, sat, fire, cigar, tobacco, chair, smoke, lit, writing
Marriage- woman, love, wife, husband, loved, knew, life, heart, married, women
Crime Solving- case, interest, points, remarkable, facts, singular, problem, fact, experience, solution
Time- night, hour, late, quarter, clock, work, twelve, eleven, time, ten
Business- hundred, money, pounds, business, thousand, company, price, sum, terms, pay
Light- light, lamp, darkness, dark, match, lantern, gas, lit, heavily, burning
DeFranco_Topic Modeling Assignment
Iterations: 2000
Number of Topic Words: 15
Number of Topics:150
Body/Posture: face eyes turned caught stood looked sunk glimpse mouth staring breast sat chin sight covered
Attack: man found dead body blood knife struck blow weapon fell wound stick head picked wounded
Family/Household: family england people real year high children live friends folk history shows household governess gather
Writing a Letter: paper read note written wrote handed sheet letter writing post write slip pen tossed printed
Neighborhood: house passed garden door walk gate lane cottage walking park windows dark grounds road knocked
Clothing/Wardrobe: black coat dressed hat st clair broad cap wore dress collar den eye trousers coloured
Thought: mind clear idea make remember observed vague effort easily forced absurd draw suspected memory false
Marriage: woman wife husband love life loved knew married girl women nature marriage marry power lover