I wanted to work through the NYPL’s mapping tutorial, so I built this. Still working on color coding the markers for different themes, but they can be toggled via the drop-down menu in the upper right hand corner.
Month: January 2015
Themes in famine reporting
While working on the citation stuff, I came across some work I was doing last year on mapping famine reporting across space and time. This map uses the tags I created for individual famine reports to show when and where articles concerning different themes (slavery, agriculture, American government, British governance, landlords and charity) were published.
Nodes!
I’m taking a look again at the citation networks that famine newspapers were embedded in. In the past four years, dynamic network visualization has become much easier, leading to things like this, thanks to Google Fusion Tables:
Previously, the closest I could get was a visualization that this (this one is based on co-occuring words in the bibliography of the diss):
Times, changing.
Imaginotrasnference technology -or- books as technology
I’m teaching a class on early American communication technology/introduction to digital history next (almost this!) semester. For one of the early classes, I wanted to drive home how books (and pens and paper and presses etc.) fit into a history of technology. While there are some great theoretical articles on book-as-tech, I ended up going with an extended quotation from Jasper Fforde’s The Well of Lost Plots, on the genealogy of books – and then I made an infographic:
“First there was OralTrad, upgraded ten thousand years later by the rhyming (for easier recall) OralTradPlus. For thousands of years this was the only Story Operating System and it is still in use today. The system branched in two about twenty thousand years ago; on one side with CaveDaub Pro (forerunner of Paint Plus V2.3, GrecianUrn VI.2, Sculpt- Marble VI.4 and the latest, all-encompassing Super Artistic Expression-5). The other strand, the Picto-Phonetic Storytelling Systems, started with ClayTablet V2.1 and went through several competing systems (Wax-Tablet, Papyrus, VellumPlus) before merging into the award-winning SCROLL, which was upgraded eight times to V3.5 before being swept aside by the all new and clearly superior BOOK VI. Stable, easy to store and transport, compact and with a workable index, BOOK has led the way for nearly eighteen hundred years.
When we first came up with the ‘page’ concept in BOOK VI, we thought we’d reached the zenith of story containment — compact, easy to read, and by using integrated PageNumberTM and SpineTitleTM technologies, we had a system of indexing far superior to anything SCROLL could offer. Over the years . . . . we have been refining the BOOK system. Illustrations were the first upgrade at 1.1, standardized spelling at V3.1 and vowel and irregular verb stability in V4.2. Today we use BOOK V8.3, one of the most stable and complex imaginotransference technologies ever devised — the smooth transfer of the written word into the reader’s imagination has never been faster.”
Digital Projects at the AHA (now with projects from THATCamp)
As many others have pointed out – on Twitter, in blog posts, and in person – this was a good year for digital at the AHA, and a great year for some wonderful and innovative digital projects. I’ve been compiling a list of projects mentioned on Twitter and in panels, and I thought I’d share them here (in no particular order). I’m sure it’s not complete- and that other wonderful digital projects were debuted and mentioned at the AHA. I’d be happy to add to the list, if folks want to tweet their projects.
- The Historian’s Macroscope: Big Digital History – An experiment in writing in public, one page at a time, by S. Graham, I. Milligan, & S. Weingart
- Houses of Worship – Information on over 250 congregations and over 500 sites related to religious and ethnic groups who settled in several neighborhoods in the Twin Cities from approximately 1849.
- Books, Health and History – by the New York Academy of Medicine
- Dog Eat Dog – An RPG about colonialism and its consequences
- The Shirley Chisholm Project – Brooklyn Women’s Activism from 1945 to the Present
- USAIDS – United States of AIDS, an outhistory.org project
- Robert Boyle’s Experimental Proof of the Possibility of the Resurrection – from Historian at Work
- Queering Slavery Working Group
- O Say Can You See – Early Washington DC law and family project
- Getting Started with Digital History in the Classroom
- Voting Viva Voce – Unlocking the social logic of past politics
- Her Hat Was In The Ring! – U.S. women who ran for political office before 1920
- Freedom on the Move: A database of fugitive from North American Slavery
- Texas Slavery Project
- CDRH @ University of Nebraska – University of Nebraska Lincoln center for digital research in the humanities
- Visualizing Emancipation
- Khronikos – showcasing the research of University of Maine graduate history students
- Virtual Paul’s Cross Project – A digital re-creation of John Donne’s gunpowder day sermon
- Trading Consequences
- TAPAS – TEI publishing and repository services
- Translantis – Digital Humanities Approaches to Reference Cultures: The Emergence of the United States in Public Discourse in the Netherlands, 1890-1990
- Openmarginalis – A curated aggregation of medieval marginalia selected from open access collections
- On primary sources and historypin
- Mercedes of Castile: A Digital Edition
- Dorr letters collection – the Dorr letters at the TAPAS project
- CUNY Academic commons digital humanities resource guide
- Mobile historical – strategies for mobile interpretive projects for humanists and cultural organizations
- History engine – tools for collaborative education & research
- UCDH Digital Humanities boilerplate – boilerplate content for the development of digital humanities courses and programs
- Prisonmap – Geography of incarceration
- Landscapes of slavery and freedom
- Politics of Women’s Culture – #writinginpublic open review site
- Unghosting Apparitional (Lesbian) Histories – Where are the stories of the thousands of grassroots activists who participated in women’s liberation?
- London Lives, 1690-1800 – Crime, poverty and social policy in the metropolis
- TEI by example
- Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761 – A cartographic narrative
- Suffrage Activism: Mobility and Activism on the Great Plains
- Quantifying Kissinger -Text Analysis, Visualization and Historical Interpretation of the DNSA Kissinger Correspondence