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This is, by far, my favorite tweet. https://t.co/Vl19Z4I7Cq

— Roopika Risam (@roopikarisam) June 24, 2016

It’s not often that I go to a keynote speaker at a conference and feel like I’ve come away from a sermon.

Normally, keynote speakers are generally useful for setting the tone of a conference; library conferences tend to have a keynote speaker that coaleses around some common theme, especially emerging issues. Diversity, understandably, is discussed a lot (which is really helpful in DH conferences that sometimes straddle the line of pedagogy/library/tech) as DH practitioners try to come to grips with the reality that it is still a white male-dominated corner of academia (perhaps more so than the other corners).

At the 2016 Keystone DH conference, keynote speaker Roopika Risam talked more about love than any sort of technical/practical understanding of DH; yet her methodology re: love is vital to understanding how we do DH in our institutions and as a broader DH community. She spoke a bit on how love builds community and care in the digital humanities; that we, as DH practitioners, put a lot of ourselves into these projects because not only do we value what we do, but because we think we can build a better world through the world we do. We can tear down walls, seek to repair damage done from colonialism, and empower the powerless to do amazing things.

Dreamers and tinkerers can be builders of better worlds, ones built on love – @roopikarisam #keydh

— R.C. Miessler (@iconodule) June 22, 2016

We are dreamers and tinkerers in DH; one of the themes of this summer’s fellowship has been “Dream big,” which we try to take to heart. We want people to be ok with tinkering, with messing around, with failure, all on the way towards realizing dreams. Of course, not all dreams can happen immediately, but we can get them started, and nurture them throughout our fellows’ academic careers.

Of course, love has a dark side as well; as discussed, love can be exploited, especially for free/cheap labor. Often bandied about is the idea that if you really love doing something, it isn’t work … and in turn, that can become an excuse to deny or reduce compensation for something. DH practitioners at all levels should be compensated in some manner for their work in a sustainable and ethical way; often we turn to grants in DH (and higher education in general) to fund something new and exciting, but love in this context means that grants may not cut it, that we need to look to ways to make sure those doing DH are going to be taken care of in the long haul.

That love for digital humanities is why this fellowship was created, in a lot of ways, so that students could explore DH in a safe environment, with funding, and be able to tinker and dream to create new worlds. I’m glad to be a part of this endeavor, and honored to work with this core group of students.

This week I meet with Dr. Birkner to discuss some questions I had about my project. He gave me some very interesting advice. He said, “to make your project interesting, find the story, find the personal narrative.”  I know I had originally planned to use Barbara Holley as a featured woman, but I wonder what other ways I could incorporate other women’s stories. How can I make a cohesive narrative out of multiple women’s stories? I have been reading the Oral histories of women who attended college during the ’50s. Each has their own unique story and not all women fit the mold of the 1950s woman. I don’t know how I will display each women’s story through my project yet, but am excited to see how it turns out.

This week’s discussion about time really threw me for a loop. While the group was discussing timelines and how they display time, I was having an existential crisis. Time is a very tricky thing, a man made invention. Everyone perceives time differently, so how can you use a digital tool to show the different perceptions time? The western world conceptualizes time as a straight line. I have been reading the book Outlander which is about a WWII combat nurse who travels back in time to 1746. If you make a straight timeline of her life, it wouldn’t make any sense. To complicate this issue of the straight line, imagine what the Doctor’s timeline from Doctor Who would look like. Most of the digital timelines we have looked at are linear. Is there a way to create a time mapping tool that isn’t a line and doesn’t utilize a western perception of time?

This week, I decided to critique “The Garden of Earthly Delights” which is an example project for Storymap JS. The project offers background and interpretation on the painting it details, “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch. It can be found at https://storymap.knightlab.com/examples/bosch-garden/.

Something unique and appealing about this particular story map is that the “map” platform it uses is an image, rather than a traditional geographical map. Because it’s a large image, it is sorted into Storymap’s gigapixel collection, which is created for large, detailed, images. By moving around, the storymap brings the image to life and draws the user’s attention to the most important and distinguishing features of the image. As such, the learning is more interactive than if a user were to read about it in a textbook. However, the site has the potential to be even more interactive by integrating more media sources than just text. The text that is included as a part of the project is simple enough for the average user to understand, while still being useful and informative.

One of the drawbacks of this project is that it does not feature an about page for the project. A link in the introduction takes the use to a Wikipedia page about the time period the piece was created in, which is helpful but not necessarily reliable. However, the project is clearly made on Storymap JS. A link at the bottom left of the site takes the user to the Storymap JS website which has information about how to make and use Storymap. The metadata on the image is provided in the introduction to the website and includes the title of the piece, the artist, the date it was created, and the place where it is housed.

Given that the website does not have an about page and is hosted on the Storymap JS site, it appears that the intended audience is people who are interested in see what a project using a gigapixel image on Storymap JS would look like. If this were to be a more fully-fleshed DH project, it would need to have more of a sense of community by including and about page and contact page, and increasing interactivity by incorporating more forms of media.

The project is called Martha Washington: A Life (http://marthawashington.us/), it is about the life and history of Marta Custis Washington, wife of General and Former President George Washington. The project was a collaboration between George Washington’s Mount Vernon, a private non-profit that runs the Mount Vernon Home, and the Center for History and New Media.
The target audiences for this online project are school groups and visitors that go to Mount Vernon or want to know more about Martha Washington. It especially has a focus on school groups because it includes lesson plans for middle and high school teachers; it even has the national history standards for schools.
The questions that this project seeks to answer are: Who was Martha Washington? How did she live and what was her life like in Mount Vernon and how was her life affected by the events and institutions of the time?
The project is pretty easy to navigate; there is a menu that divides the site into four sections: Martha’s biography, teaching materials, archive, and resources. The front page gives a description of the menu sections and has links.
The writing is not only clear, succinct, and precise but it is also easy to read and does not use difficult or advanced terms. The writing was obviously meant for the public, not a hard-core Martha Custis Washington biographer; however it does not come across as condescending to someone’s intelligence.
The link to the about page is at the bottom of the site, it has the staff and information about both of the foundations. There is some technical information about the site included in the information about the staff that worked on the site in what they did to contribute to the site. It says that it is powered by Omeka on the bottom of the site and in one of the staff’s information it said that he “implemented the design and did all of the custom programming for the website on the Omeka web publishing platform.”
Digital assets in the form of artifacts, pictures, and documents obtained by the Mount Vernon foundation were used. Metadata is readily available because it is an Omeka powered website which puts its importance on metadata. Omeka is an online exhibition tool that lets you identify, log, and present artifacts and pictures. In my experience, there’s not much to Omeka besides a display of pictures and artifacts but this project did more than I ever expected from Omeka.
This project is unique in the way that the artifacts coincide with the writing. Like for every section of Martha’s life there are artifacts that coincide with the story, such as the courtship between George and Martha, off to the side it has artifacts one of them being a garnet necklace believed to be from early in the marriage of George and Martha Custis Washington. It brings the artifacts and pictures to life in the context of the story that is being told which is rarely done even in physical exhibits but overall very pleasing to me.

-Julia

I spent the larger part of Thursday and Friday researching in special collections. The more I researched, the more I realized how scant my sources were. As it stands, the information I plan to use in my project largely relies on individual photographs, or small written anecdotes, rather than a comprehensive and fully fleshed history. The noticeable lack of materials made those sources that I could find all the more significant to me, and helped me to realize that we are constantly documenting and shaping our own histories through the memories we immortalize through pictures, words, or sounds.Even if they seem commonplace in the moment, we cannot anticipate the importance they may hold in the future.

In looking for what digital project to write about for this week’s reflection, I stumbled upon a very unique digital project called Sound and Documentary in Cardiff and Miller’s Pandemonium by Cecilia Wichmann. It can be found at http://scalar.usc.edu/works/pandemonium/index.

This project was created as a digital companion to a student’s master’s thesis, “Sound and Documentary in Cardiff and Miller’s Pandemonium”, and was completed in Spring 2015 in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. The student decided to create this Scalar project because she thought “sound art deserves a format suited to listening as well as looking and reading. My aim is to offer an accessible, informal, and flexible experience of my research.” Since this was meant as a companion to a Masters thesis, it is safe to assume that the audience is a scholarly group of people who share the same interest in art and sound. But this project can also be viewed by anyone who stumbles across it.

This project seems to be analyzing the intersection of sound art and documentary to better understand both fields of practice through the organized sound and silence of the composition Pandemonium. Overall, the site functions as a typical Scalar site. The front page is very clean and simple, directing the viewer where to go next. Although the project is written in conversational language, the very nature of the topic is sometimes hard to understand because the topic is very non-traditional.

Even though the topic itself is hard to grasp,, the author does a very good job of explaining it in her numerous About and Information pages. The Welcome page gives the viewer a brief and concise overview of the project. If the viewer would like to learn more, they can read a more in depth description on the Project page. From my browsing of the project I could see that the site was a Scalar site and most of the media was done within the Scalar platform (nothing embedded). The author uses various images, texts, audio, and video in her project. What I though was really nice about her project is that she had an All Media page where you could see every image, text, video, and audio in her project. If you clicked on the link to an image or other form of media, there was decent metadata if you explored further. In conclusion, everything was very well documented.

The author mostly just used Scalar as her main way of displaying her project. I assumed Scalar was chosen because it could move in the traditional way of a thesis paper (by chapter) while also allowing the use of image, audio, and video. On the Project page, the author really explained how she wanted her audience to be able to listen to the sound of Pandemonium. I believe that the audio inserted throughout the project is one of the main things that you wouldn’t be able to learn from a traditional research paper. Although the author does include images and video, you can easily add a flat image into your paper and you could have understood her project well enough without the video. The audio component of this project is what makes this thesis unique and gives the audience a better understanding of the project.

For this week’s blog, I chose to review Identities: Understanding Islam in a Cross-Cultural Context which is hosted on an Omeka platform. It can be found at http://marb.kennesaw.edu/identities/.

The project was created by Museums and Community Collaborations Abroad (MCAA).  Its aim was to use a variety of sources to create an exhibit that examined the cultural similarities and differences between the materials (especially oral histories and photographs) in a museum in Morocco and the materials from a museum in Georgia.  MCAA planned to analyze these materials and infer how identities are formed in immigrant communities, both in Morocco and Georgia.

Though not explicitly stated, it seems like the site is meant to appeal to a general audience, and especially highlight and connect with immigrant Muslim communities.  The central question the project asks is how identities are formed in these communities, both in Morocco and Georgia.  The project also centers on the idea of integrating community in general—by featuring community input in the exhibit, the project becomes a community itself.

Identities is an easy project to explore. My favorite aspect is that it’s structured, but still allows the user to take their own path through the website.  The homepage uses a slideshow tool to draw in the user and highlight various parts of the exhibit. Because the slideshow never goes in the same order twice, users can expect to explore a different part of the exhibit each time they visit. The writing on the website is informative and interesting without being dense, especially with regard to the photo captions.

The website features an about page that provides a comprehensive overview of the project and all the museums and organizations that helped to make it. However, there is not information about the specific digital tools they used to make the website. The metadata on the website is comprehensive and follows dublincore formatting.

     Identities’s most compelling feature that distinguishes it from a traditional research paper or exhibit is how easily a user can bring themselves into the website’s narrative. A tab on the home page named “talk back” allows users to either share their story or answer a survey that asks questions about how the user views Islam or what further topics they’d want to see included in the exhibit. Instead of being a passive experience, Identities is active because it fully immerses and incorporates the user.

It seems that the rite of passage for college freshmen is to indulge in their unlimited meal plan and gain the freshman fifteen.   But the freshman fifteen is nothing compared to the freshman customs women had to follow in the 1950s. The freshmen customs were a set of rules that freshmen had to follow for a period of time throughout the first semester. These rules consisted of wearing ridiculous hats called dinks, not being allowed to walk on the grass, running errands for upperclassmen, not being allowed to wear makeup, and following many more humiliating rules. Looking at these rules, I wondered, if I were going to college in the 1950s would I have been able to follow them?

Researching these rules allowed me to really imagine what it would be like to be a woman attending college in the 1950s. It gave me a glimpse into the life of a co-ed freshman. The rules are tangible, and if I wanted to I could try to follow them for one month. Although I probably won’t try to replicate these customs, they will be displayed in my digital project. I hope that my audience will be able to picture themselves in these women’s shoes in the same way I have been able to, and appreciate the culture of a different time and how far women have come.