Author: Hoang Anh Just

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Thank you and bye bye!

Hi Everyone,

I cannot believe it is already my last but not least reflective response for the DSSF 2019. I feel both happy to be able to part of DSSF this summer and sad that it is time to say goodbye now, it went by so quickly.

Firstly, before answering the question I would like to THANK the DSSF 2019 TEAM: Amy, Clint, Emma, Emmarie, Eric, John, Maci, Michaela, Kevin, and RC. This was a pleasure to work with you guys and it was very a enjoyable time to spend summer with you. I think together throughout this program, we were able to build a strong, bonding community that will always be supportive of each other.

This time being in the DSSF program, my perspective at values of DH has changed a bit, or I would say have evolved a bit. In the beginning of the first week of the program, I was more focusing probably on my self working and being passionate at your work, and all that matters is not the result but the process and how much of your heart you have put on your work throughout your project. I still think that it is important and without loving what you are doing, you cannot achieve the perfectness (if it is even possible) of your project. Being ambitious, passionate and never giving up makes you and your work stronger as you are confident of it and in the end you will enjoy what you have achieve and you will proudly present to others.

But apart from these values, while spending time at DSSF, being part of the team, I have put more focus on a group/ community rather than individuality. As living with DSSF fellows and spending time with DSSF librarians, we have built as I said earlier a bonding community, which matters to me more than myself. I alone am very weak, but in a community I can get a support from anyone when it is needed. However, it is also important that you are equally supportive to others so that you can build stronger bonds together and have a trusted community. So my values of DH has evolved, which means they have increased, I do not only look at being passionate but also at building a community. Of course, the community is supportive of your work, but you do not have to focus on community, you can have stronger bonds by doing creative and fun activities outside work, where you can learn each other more and understand each other even better.

Now even if you think you failed at doing your work, you have not! Because, if you have built a strong community, they will not let you fall down, and they will support you until the end and help you to find other solutions for your problems.

I think that community is build on trust, so never lie to each other and be honest with yourself, your work, and your colleagues!

Best wishes!

Thank you for reading my reflections!

Have a good summer!

JHA

 

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Community Help

Hi Everyone,

Today I will be talking about my community of practice during my time at the DSSF this summer 2019. As I know community is a very important, inherent part of Digital Humanities and DH without a community cannot survive. For me community is also important, especially because my project that I am working on is directed to the community of Gettysburg College and I want to connect with the community and strengthen the bonds of the community.

During the time of doing my project I was trying to engage with my community of practice, where I gained a lot knowledge and help me to develop my project and be closer to my goal. My main biggest help was R.C. Miessler, who was the assigned librarian for my project during DSSF. I was coming to R.C. all the times when I needed help and I got help every time. I was asking for help in technical support and how to start my project, R.C. showed me various possibilities of Augmented Reality platforms. Also, he supported in providing different devices so that I could develop my application on both iOS and Android and not be worried about lacking any resources. Moreover, he helped in getting a direction on my research of the history of Gettysburg College and R.C. pointed me to Special Collections, which was a perfect place for me to get plentiful resource for my project.

I met people in Special Collections and College Archives who were always willing to help me in my research. About the historical facts of Gettysburg College, Ron Couchman, the Special Collections Assistant, was the person who provided me with his knowledge of our College and he pointed me the historical works where I could find all the information about the College buildings. I was asking him any questions about the College and he could answer all my questions. It is very valuable for me to be able to talk with an alumni of our College, who was also a student as I am right now, and be able to look into his student life and now carry his past to the presence. I also got a very big help from College Archivist Amy Lucadamo who provided me information about the College buildings and also showed me to images of the buildings and pointed me to the resources where I could use them.

Also, during PCLA Digital Scholarship Student Symposium at Lafayette College I got also many helpful hints for my project that pointed me to a better solutions for my project. I was learning about other projects of so many students and I tried to learn what I could get from those projects and I also tried to provide them any help, but they almost finished their projects at that time. Also, the exchange with Bucknell University DSSFR was also fruitful in pointing me in a better direction and I once again tried to help them in their final step of their project.

For the technical support, I have got a big help from the Director of Education Technology, Eric Remy, who provided me computers with different operating systems, so that I would be able to develop my project on both iOS and Android. Furthermore, I also came to my computer science professor, Clifton Presser, who also provided me some helpful clues to start with AR.

I feel that in community of DH I am be the one always asking for help, but as I have worked on my project this summer, I am able and willing to provide help to DH community about the research of Gettysburg College history and also provide some technical support in starting with Augmented Reality development.

As being in a DSSF team, my cohorts have given me a lot of support and are always with me (we live in the same apartment) and I appreciate their help.

Thank You Everyone for Everything!

Have a good weekend,

JHA

 

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Unite Past

Hi Everyone,

 

Today I will try to answer our main question:

In what ways does your project leverage the affordances of the digital tools you selected—in what ways is your project soundly engineered?

As you know the digital tool that I have selected is the 3D multi platform engine, called Unity, where I am able to build content for the Augmented Reality project and export it to the mobile phones. In addition to Unity, I am also using a software that enhances Augmented Reality usage, which I will be talking later, called Wikitude SDK for Unity.

In my project, I want to use Augmented Reality to make a mobile application to show the history of Gettysburg College Campus, and show how the campus has changed over time, especially during 1890s to 1920s. Because I want to engage my audience with the history, I want to use a lot of interactivity with the user and Unity is allowing me to do it.

First of all, in Unity I can make interactive buttons for the user and make user decide what they want to see and Unity has a very big collection of User Interface (UI) Design options, which I can use. For example, I am able to not only put text to talk about the historical facts of the campus to the application, but I can also put many images to show how the campus was looking in the past and the user can compare it with the campus in the present, with which the user can interact.

Secondly, Unity allows me to connect the user with past (history of the college), present (the current college campus), and future (the modern technology that is still evolving.) In Unity, I can present the history but also I can engage people through using mobile phones that they are using in their daily life, so it will be an approach toward present people to interest them with history with a modern digital tool. Also, because I want my project to reach as many people on campus as possible, Unity allows me to enlarge my audience by having a multi platform development, which means that I can create my project in Unity and then build my application and export it to both Android and iOS phones, which is what a majority of people on our campus are using. So now I do not have to create two separate projects for Android and iOS, but I can only make one and then can easily build applications for both platforms without any changes.

My project also demands the application to be able to recognize buildings of the campus in the real world with the camera of the phone, so I am using the Wikitude software that has a function of 3D object recognition and scene recognition that helps me to recognize the objects in the real life. Because of the scene recognition, the new function of Wikitude, I am able to recognize the buildings on our campus and then combining with Unity, I am able to let the user interact with the history through using the modern technology.

Have a good weekend,

JHA

 

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Transform College

transform

Hello Everyone,

Today I will be talking about how my project can be transformative. For me the word “transformative” itself has a very broad meaning and I can talk about almost every part of project that relates to “transformative.”

First of all, my main topic of the project is the Gettysburg College Campus Change over Time. I am working on how our school campus has changed in the past and now my current scope are the years 1890s to 1920s. I am mainly focusing on external appearance of the campus and what affected the changes of the campus and how it resulted in after the transformation.

Secondly, the way I am presenting history is not through a traditional paper, but I am using a digital tool to present my results. My project includes a website where I am presenting my data and I will also be talking about my process throughout the 8-week work, during which I have encountered many difficulties and how I tried to resolve those issues. Moreover, I am presenting my data using a mobile application connecting with augmented reality, where I will try to provide more information (facts and images) linking to each specific building using the camera of the mobile that is pointing to some building on campus.

Thirdly, what I am aiming to transform is the general audience. I would like to both transform and increase the audience. Because of the choice of developing an application on the mobile, I try to reach out to a broader audience. Almost everyone on our campus possesses his/ her own mobile phone, so I try include everyone on our campus to be able to access my application. Moreover, people who are also not from our campus, but are visiting our campus can access the mobile app and also use it on campus during the stay and have their own personal campus tour. Furthermore, having developing an application on a mobile, I want to increase the interest of my audience to just to even try the application as the technological novelty, rather than just having on a traditional paper. Next, my project can be transformative concerning the content of my project. As the history of the campus is very unlimited and always increasing, the project is flexible and more data can be given to the project to be more cohesive. For example, the scope of the project can increase in time, more interesting facts can be added, and also the changes of the interior of the buildings can be included.

The DSSF program does not have to transform at all as I do not feel that DSSF is limiting itself in any ways. The only thing that DSSF can improve is to trying increase its reach and have even more people be interested in being part of DSSF and being interested in DSSF project. As I really do not like to differentiate gender or sex, but DSSF this year in a group of 6 fellows, only 1 person is a white male. This program is really open to anyone and welcomes everyone.

Have a good weekend,

JHA

 

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Neoliberal DH?

Hi Everyone,

Today, we have been challenged to answer the following question about Digital Humanities:

To what extent do you think the Digital Humanities (inadvertently or not) embraces neoliberal values in higher education?

It is quite a difficult question for me to answer as I am very new to Digital Humanities community and I am just learning more about DH. Honestly, I will try to answer it with my best knowledge, but I will try to divert the question a bit (maybe on purpose) by talking a bit more general (of course, including DH.)

If we talk about neoliberal values in higher education, we can generalize about every academic discipline as a whole, without excluding DH. (Yes, DH, for me, counts as an academic discipline as equal as “traditional” humanities and probably it would be another essay to talk about it.) So now we want to answer a new question:

To what extent do you think higher education embraces neoliberal values?

This question is also tough to respond, as I do not know how to estimate the extent, but I will first talk about how higher education does embrace neoliberal value, and then I will provide examples when higher education does not.

One of the main value that comes to my mind is that higher education is about money. Firstly, in order to get higher education you have to pay and nowadays, the higher education is very expensive. Many universities (public and private) demand very high tuition and you have to pay high amount. Because of today’s standards many people have higher education degrees, so it is one of the modern era necessities to get a higher education degree. Next, one of the main aims of higher education institutions is not to learn the knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself and growing as a person, but the main aim is to get the diploma to get a better job. It is coming both from people who are seeking higher education and from people who are providing higher education. People are often now thinking about what they can do with their diplomas after graduation and what kind of jobs they can get and how high they can earn. It makes people now learning not because of the fascination of the subject itself, but about what they can achieve afterwards with that degree. For example, I know many people from my major department and those people are majoring in it not because they like it or they find it interesting, but because they think that after graduation they can make more money and have a higher chance for a better job. But, it is ‘free market’ I guess and people can do whatever they are doing, even if they do not like it. Moreover, because this is neoliberal era and this is free market, universities can demand whatever they want and it is people’s decision whether they want to follow higher education and pay the tuition or they can give up higher education.

On the other hand, there are people who are fascinated in their discipline and really want to learn more about it. They are learning about the discipline and they are also willing to contribute to the discipline, without any physical gains. There are still many people who are doing research for the sake of the discipline and because of fascination about research and it is about all disciplines in higher education, including Digital Humanities.

At the end, I still cannot estimate to what extent higher education embraces neoliberal values but I know that it is still growing and getting more of neoliberal values.

Have a good weekend,

JHA

 

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Let’s share knowledge

Hi Everyone,

Recently, I have read Chapter 3 of Digital Humanities by Burdick, Drucker, Lunenfeld, Presnet, and Schnapp and I have been engaged with many questions by the authors, which one of the questions was very interesting:

What happens when anyone can speak and publish? What happens when knowledge credentialing is no longer controlled solely by institutions of higher learning?

Firstly, I think it is a bless that humankind is able to speak. Speaking has helped humans to communicate and allowed humans to talk and share their own thoughts. People were able to share their problems and through speaking people could understand each other even more and be able to help each other better. When a baby is crying, we cannot really understand why it is crying, we can only guess why that baby is crying. But once that baby grows up and learns the language, that person (baby) does not have (only) to cry to address the issue to the other person, it can now speak and tell what it is happening, and we can help that baby more accurately.

We, humans, now can speak and talk with other people. Nowadays, with the coming of the Internet, people can share their thoughts with a greater audience and can publish anything online. I think it is even better that people can now talk about whatever they want and can share whatever they want to, because it is a human right for a person to express themselves freely and be able to share their thoughts.

With these circumstances, nowadays, any human thoughts can be shared freely and is not really “controlled” by any organization. Especially “knowledge credentialing is not longer controlled solely by institutions of higher learning.” Knowledge is shared with anyone freely without any organization controlling it. That means we now have access to even a bigger pool of knowledge of others.

Because of lacking a institution of higher learning that controls the credibility of the knowledge, we, people, have check the credibility of the knowledge of our own. Of course, everyone is free to share any knowledge they would like to, so that knowledge might “correct” or “incorrect”, and it is the responsibility of the recipient of that knowledge to whether accept it or not. That recipient is can accept the given knowledge without any hesitations or if have any doubts, then the recipient can try to test it to check its credibility.

Even if this might pose more challenges to us, humans, at least we can now really freely share our own knowledge with others, and we have a bigger access to a bigger knowledge, without having any institutions filtering the knowledge and giving us only limited knowledge, the given pool of knowledge by the institution will have a bias, having chosen only some knowledge, and rejecting other knowledge. I think that is our right to freely speak and share and it is also our right to really decide what we accept and what we decline, as of knowledge.

However, I do not know much, I really think that we should try to know rather than not to know.

Have a good weekend,

JHA

 

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Wireframes – Hoang Anh Just

I will make an introductory website to talk about my project and give necessary instructions to how to use and install the Augmented Reality application on the phone. I will make a WordPress website, where I could either scroll down to go through the whole website or use the scalar linking pages that can go from one site to the next one. I will have a simple ‘ABOUT’ page, where I will talk about my project motivation and about project itself. Then, I will go to ‘BUILDINGS’ page, which contains all my content for the AR app and even more detailed information that the AR app could not contain. After showing all the content, we will go to the ‘CREDIT’ page with credits and bibliography. At the end, the user can read the instructions about the AR app and install it on the ‘DOWNLOAD’ page.

WEBSITE:

AR APP:

 

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Unity

Uinty

Hello Everyone,

Today I will introduce one of my digital tools that I will be using for my project. The digital tool I am using is called Unity. Unity is the real-time cross-platform development engine that creates 2D, 3D, VR, and AR contents. There are different AR engines, but I chose Unity for many reasons.

One of the main reasons is that I already have experience in developing programs in Unity. I have taken a class with Unity development in Gettysburg College and also I have worked with Unity last year to create a VR content during the DTSF Fellowship. Of course, some might ask why have not try to diversify my skills and try other tools. I have looked at other tools and I have checked that Unity has a very good support to create AR content, so that will help me to easier build my application. Also, because of time constraint of 8 weeks, I know I do not have a lot of time, so I can not waste time on just exploring tools without working on my main project.

Another important reason is that Unity is free for developers who are not earning money for building the Unity project for $100,000 per year. For my project, I am able to use the free version of Unity and still be able to use the full capability of Unity. Because Unity is free, then this tool is open and  accessible for anyone to use it, without excluding anyone. Unity is also sharing collaboration value, as you can share your project with other users and collaborate with them using the Unity Teams function under Unity Collaborate. However, the downside is that for the free version, only maximum of 3 users can collaborate with only 1GB cloud storage, you can increase the cloud storage to 25GB for $9 per month.

Furthermore, many software development kits (SDKs) for AR development are used in Unity. Unity is a platform that is hosting diverse tools that I can use to create AR content. So I am not limited to only what Unity is providing, but I can also implement different projects to Unity.

There is, however, a limitation to my tool as AR is still a new product, so there are not many tutorials out there for me to watch and learn. So I will have to learn on my own. Fortunately,  Unity has a big community that is willing to help and provide hints once I need any help. I can use the Unity Forum and one of the Unity experts can help me with a problem.

Another limitation is that if I would like to create my own scripts, I can only use 3 scripting languages: C#, JavaScript, or Boo. Unity is very up to date and is updating almost every month. However, there can also be problems when creating a project in different versions of Unity, because they might be not compatible, so then the projects might not load in different versions, so I have to be careful with that.

But as I said, I will use this digital tool for my project, because of many pros (and cons)  that I have provided. I hope after experimenting with Unity, I will be able to master some skills essential for my project.

Have a good weekend,

JHA

 

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Project Charter – Hoang Anh Just

Project Name

  • The Change of Gettysburg College Campus over Time

Project Owner

  • Hoang Anh Just

Project Summary

  • My project is a development of Augmented Reality mobile application with a content of Gettysburg College Campus. The application will recognize college buildings and will provide the specific information/facts about corresponding buildings and will show the changes of the buildings at a given time.

Research Question

  • How has the Gettysburg College campus has changed over time? What were significant changes for the campus that affected its members?

Scope of project

  • I intend to start very small. I will start with Pennsylvania Hall, and once I will be able to do it and be comfortable with my tools, I will increase the scope of my project to more buildings.

Audience

  • My main audience will be members of Gettysburg College (mostly students, staff, and faculty). For people who are interested in Gettysburg College campus and would like always to learn more about it in a fun way.

Deliverables

  • Photos/Videos of College Campus
  • Information/Facts about Gettysburg College Campus
  • AR application for IOS/Android
  • WordPress with TimeLineJS or StoryMapJS
  • StoryMapJS

Timeline

  • Week 1:  early research about GC campus and best AR app platform
  • Week 2: starting to learn AP platforms and starting to researching on one buildings
  • Week 3: finding more specific information and photos, make simple ar applications
  • Week 4: finish researching and understanding research, make more advanced ar apps, halftime re-checking goals
  • Week 5: starting application and adding historical content
  • Week 6: finishing up the application and work on design
  • Week 7: test your application and work on presentation
  • Week 8: presentation practice and done?

End of Life/Future Plans

  • As I know this project is very big to make on my own. So in future, I would like to improve the application to increase the scope of the project. I would like other members of our school also be involved and to contribute to the project so it will be even more complete. The project will not only focus on buildings but also on different aspects in our school.
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