Qualities of a Good Digital Humanities Project

April 17, 2015 ~ 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.

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.

Novels and Tales by Maria Edgeworth : A Christmas Gift

February 19, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

After searching in the library for at least an hour in addition to when I had searched during class on Tuesday, I finally found some writing in a 19th century book! It seems like I probably went through 50 before I could find one that actually had writing in it outside of just underlining marks. Going through this many old, dusty, mildew-y books sure did spark my allergies up, but at least I can say that it was worth it because I found what I was looking for!

My Find

Book Name: Novels and Tales, Vol. 10

Author: Maria Edgeworth

Publisher: New York Harper & Brothers, 1846

To be honest, I picked this book up because it looked really worn and torn. My inner detective had a feeling it had to be old – and it was! It was published back in 1846, making it a 169-year-old book. The outside of this book looked nothing special. There was only an inscription on the spine and neither on the front nor back covers. Due to its worn nature and the state that the binding of this book was in, I can make an inference and say that it probably still has its original cover and binding from 1846. Opening up the book, there is a stamp mark that says “STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LIBRARY NEW PALTZ, N.Y.” On the opposite side, was writing dating back to 1849.

The apparent guess to make here is that M.R. Fisher received this book on December 25, 1849 (or at least a few days around there) as a gift for the holiday. I believe that this was written with a fountain pen.

This inscription very well may have been written into the book with a fountain pen such as this.

I have to say that this lab was a super interesting and informative experience! Looking at my finding as well as the cool marginalia that my classmates have found in our very own STL showed me how much we really do overlook how much history is hiding here at SUNY New Paltz. I had never in a million years imagined that we would have these old treasures in such a public place like our general stacks collection, but I am so glad that we did.

Book Traces findings or lack there of.

February 19, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

I was rather upset to not find anything for the Book Traces website. I find the overall idea and assignment super fascinating and hoped to find something interesting or at least authentic in my search but I unfortunately had no luck. I spent over three hours searching the stacks for a book with some sort of writing in it. I looked all through poetry, literature, letters, history, religion and more. I really felt confident that poetry or literature would have something and spent most of my time in the PR and PS section. Overall, I was really disappointed.

I found a few books with pencils markings and writing in them but I had no way of telling when that was done for example, The Life of Sterne by Percy Fitzgerald and Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin. One book The English Poets by T.H. Ward got me especially excited because it appeared to be marked all over with notes about the poems and inferred meanings behind certain symbols but on further examination I realized the writing was too current as on one of the final pages it was dated for a lesson plan. For a few others the writing was clearly done in ballpoint pen. I also found books that had what I thought to be markings but turned out to be printed that way like Life and Letters by Robert Browning which had what I thought was a signature but sadly wasn’t. One book tricked me because I thought it contained a handwritten letter from the late 1800s but the letter was bound into the book and was apart of the story. The closest I came to finding any sort of authentic ancient article was a receipt in a book from 2004. Everything else seemed to be a dead end.

I do not really understand how I did not find anything as I looked through a variety of books and focused on the two sections that seemed to have the most luck for other people. A section like poetry or literature would seem to have a lot of writing in it as people try to deceiver what the author is trying to say or as they make comparisons to their own life. There were also a few books that were about other languages such as Irish and Scottish books and I hoped that they would have markings about the translations or something along those lines but again nothing. In all, I enjoyed looking through the well over 50 books and wish I had found something but the appearance of the books themselves with interesting some had marble like patterns on the seems and one book had pink pages but I never found what I set out to find.

Introduction

January 23, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford ~ 8 Comments

Hi there! My name is Christine Wohltjen. I’m currently a senior at SUNY New Paltz, and I’m studying Digital Media Production.

Some of my personal interests are below:

And for a video that’s sure to make your day a little better, click here

My Verrrry First Blog Post

January 23, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford ~ 2 Comments

Hello, My name is Kiran Kalantri. I am a Digital Media Production Major at SUNY New Paltz. I have just started my second semester of sophomore year. I am also quite excited to be taking this course. My hobbies include writing, listening to music, playing with my cat, gaming, and trying to comprehend the importance of Kid Ink in the rap community. I’m also excited to start recording an EP with my friend, Josh, “The WZA”.

He enjoys to call himself that. He’s weird.

Squidward_Door

First Digital Humanities Blog Post

January 23, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford ~ 1 Comment

Hello, my name is Maria Hutman and I am nineteen years old. My major is Spanish here at SUNY New Paltz and this is my first semester because I transferred from Dutchess Community College. I have successfully figured out how to write my very own blog in my Digital Humanities class!

Greetings!