Digital Humanities

Rachel Crook’s Introductory Post

~ crookr1 ~ 1 Comment

Hello, my name is Rachel and I’m a freshman. My current plan is to major in English with a concentration in creative writing but I have many academic interests such as art history, philosophy, and education. Outside of school I sell furniture at Libby’s in Torrington, CT- hit me up for some discounts on shipping- and I’m also a senior counselor at Boulder Ridge Day Camp. I hope to learn more about computers and to get to know you all in this class!

– Rachel

Qualities of a Good Digital Humanities Project

~ Annie Swafford ~ 1 Comment

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

An example of tags that can be used to locate this blog post on a search engine.
An example of tags that can be used to locate this blog post on a search engine.

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.

Screen Shot 2015-04-17 at 8.29.26 AM
Artintheblood.com is a good example of a not so good DH project. The web page isn’t attractive, there are not descriptions of nearly any of the maps that were included and we don’t know who made it (was it a Holmes lover? A scholar? What was the project’s purpose?). I suppose we may never know.

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

The entire staff listing behind Locating London's Past. Very extensive team!
The entire staff listing behind Locating London’s Past. Very extensive team!

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.

DHM293 Juxta Editions In-Class Lab: Create a Digital Edition of a Holmes Story

~ Annie Swafford ~ 1 Comment

Assignment Goal:

For this assignment, you will use Juxta Editions to make a simple digital edition of a Sherlock Holmes story of your choosing. You will use page images either from the first edition of Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or from the original printing in The Strand Magazine. You will upload the page images and make a transcription of the story’s text to create your digital edition. You will then use Juxta Editions’s “Create a Website” option to publish your digital edition.

Due Date: February 27th, 10am (8% of final grade)

Getting Page Images:

  1. Choose page images from either first edition of Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (https://archive.org/details/adventuresofsher00doyl1) or from the original printing in The Strand Magazine (https://archive.org/details/StrandMagazine9).
  2. If you choose the version from Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:
    1. Click the full-screen button (in the shape of a rectangle with 4 small arrows pointing out), then click the button in the shape of an arrow pointing to the right to turn pages in the book. Click it until you find the first page of your Holmes story.
  3. If you choose the printing from The Strand Magazine:
    1. use this website (http://www.sshf.com/encyclopedia/index.php/The_Strand_Magazine) to find the publication month of your Holmes story.
    2. Go back to the Internet Archive The Strand Magazine page, and scroll to below the page images to find a list of the different issues. Click on the correct issue to find your story
    3. Once on the correct Internet Archive page for your story, scroll down to the list of contents. Find your story and take note of what comes before and after it.
    4. Scroll back up so you can see the page images. Click the full-screen button (in the shape of a rectangle with 4 small arrows pointing out), then click on the button with an arrow pointing to the right to turn pages in the book. Click it until you find the first page of your Holmes story.
  4. Right-click on the image of the first page of your story. Select “Save Image as,” rename it “1.jpg,” and save it to the desktop. Click the arrow to reach the next page.
  5. Repeat step 4 (i.e. Save, rename the image (2.jpg for the second page, and so on), and go to the next page) until you have saved an image file for every page in your story.
  6. Now, you need to get images for the “Front Matter” and “Back Matter” of your story (e.g. cover page, table of contents, and advertisements). Go to the beginning and end of the book to save and rename the images.

Juxta Editions Set-up:

  1. Create an account
  2. Watch instructional videos 1-3 and 5
  3. Click the blue “Create Edition!” button
  4. In the new window, under “Name,” put the title of your Holmes story. Under “Description,” write “Digital Edition of” and then the name of your Holmes story. Click “Create.”
  5. You are now looking at the main page for your digital edition. Click the button labeled “Add Document” to add a document to your edition.
  6. Under “Document Name,” put the Holmes story’s title, and leave “TEI lite” as the tag schema. Click “Add Document.”
  7. To start editing your document, click on the title of the story, which should be in blue, under the “Documents in this Edition” section. You’re now ready to add information to your edition.

Adding Metadata to Juxta Editions:

  1. It’s VITAL to any editions project that you say where your information came from, and this step will show you how.
  2. Click the words “TEI Header” at the top left side of the page to add information about this digital edition.
    1. Under the section labeled “Title Statement,” select “Main Title,” and make sure the title of your Holmes story is in the text field across from it.
    2. Under “Author,” write “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”
    3. Under “Editor,” write your name.
  3. Click the next tab, labeled “Publication Statement” (publication information about this digital edition.)
    1. Under “Name,” put “Digital Tools for the 21st Century”
    2. Under “Place,” write “New Paltz”
    3. Under “Date,” put today’s date
  4. Click the next tab, labeled “Source Description,” and click the button labeled “Structured” to give you some more boxes to fill out about the original story.
    1. Title: your story name
    2. Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    3. Name: either The Strand Magazine or “A.L. Burt Company” (for Adventures)
    4. Place: either London (Strand) or “New York” (Adventures)
  5. Click the “Save” button in the lower right-hand corner

Uploading Front and Back Matter into Juxta Editions (cover, title page, table of contents):

  1. Click on the icon of 4 lines with dots in front of them (next to the button labeled “Side by Side” at the bottom left of the screen), and select “Front Matter.”
  2. Click the button labeled “Upload Image.”
  3. In the next window, select the first image for the front matter and click “Open”
  4. In the right-hand window, directly opposite the image, transcribe the text from the image.
  5. To add a second page of front matter, click the button labeled “New Page” in the upper left immediately below the words “TEI Header.”
  6. Repeat steps 2-5 until you’ve added all the front matter. Then click “Save” (Upper right hand button)
  7. Repeat steps 1-6, but select “Back Matter.”

Uploading and Transcribing Page Images of the Story:

  1. In the pop-up window on the left (where you selected “Front Matter”), select “Document Body.”
  2. Click on the button labeled “Transcription” (below the button labeled “New Page,” and select “General Use.”
  3. Click “Upload Image” and choose the first image of the story’s text.
  4. In another tab of your browser, navigate https://sherlock-holm.es/ascii/ (plain text for all Holmes stories)
  5. In this website, find the title of your story and click the link.
  6. Find only the text that appears on the page you’ve uploaded into your digital edition, and copy it.
  7. Paste it into the empty box on the right-hand side of the Juxta Editions screen.
  8. Use the “Names, Dates, and Places” tagset to tag every name, date, and place in each page. Use the “General Use” tagset to bold and italicize anything that needs it in each page.
  9. Repeat step 3, 6 and 7 for every page of the story. Make sure to save frequently.
  10. Once every page image has been uploaded and every page has been transcribed, proofread the transcription and correct errors.

Getting Credit for Website:

  1. Click the button labeled “Preview” (between “New Page” and “Export as XML”) to see what your edition will look like in its final version.
  2. If you don’t see anything to change, then you’re ready to submit it.
  3. Email me your username and password so I can access your website.