DHM 280

When we started this week I had a lot of questions about what the point of a Digital Humanities project was and how people made them. I learned that people use digital humanities projects as a way to condense information or sources in order to get a better understanding of the topic or info they are trying to find out about. It’s a great tool for research purposes because the projects do all the “hard lifting” for you, you don’t always have to go looking for more sources on a topic if a project exists that will summarize and present multiple sources in a coherent way. One way I see myself gaining from learning about these projects is by bettering how I do my research. Now instead of losing myself in one or two sources, I can try to find a digital humanities project to kick start the research process. One question I do still have though is who comes up with the ideas for these projects, what makes them want to create the project and what makes them do it a certain way? Like why specifically use T-SNE and a Bokeh Model, what makes that the best option for the project?

In class this week, we watched a large part of Miriam Posner’s video How Did They Make That?, in which she discusses the concept of reverse engineering digital humanities projects. According to Posner, any digital humanities production requires understanding three basic elements: the sources used to research and create the project, the processing of this information, and the presentation of the results to the audience. Thinking about the Salem Witch Trials through the lens of such a project gave me a deeper insight into both the historical research and the digital humanities.

For a researcher who wants to study the Salem Witch Trials using a digital humanities project, the most important sources of information would be the transcripts of the court records and the topographical maps of the town. Since the original documents are in handwriting, it will be necessary to digitize them and edit the electronic versions. However, as Posner points out in her lecture, such mechanical processing of information is not enough. To create a digital representation of the Salem Witch Trials, it will be necessary to manually edit the digital versions of the court records, marking the names of accused people and cross referencing them with the locations on the topographical maps. Finally, presenting this information in a digital format will also require specific software to build a visual representation of the material. From this example, I realized that digitizing old manuscripts is only the first step in creating a digital humanities project.

I think that the biggest lesson that I got from Posner’s lecture was that creating any digital resource about history is a laborious process of extracting and compiling the necessary information. The researcher who wants to present their findings in a digital format must first decide which historical sources to use as the basis for the project. Then, they have to edit these sources so that they can be processed by computers, which means converting any non-digitized documents into electronic format and tagging them. Finally, the researcher has to edit the processed data so that they can be presented in a digital format that will be understandable to the audience. Next time I visit a digital history resource, I will think about the laborious process of its creation.

Learning what Digital Humanities actually is has made me realize perusing DH projects is one of my biggest hobbies. Jon Bois, who created the project highlighted in class “What Football Will Look Like in the Future”, has been one of my three favorite YouTubers and creators for literally over a decade. He used to create a series on his personal channel called “Pretty Good” which used digital tools and data to chronicle obscure Football stories and retell them in ways they’d never been told. Nowadays he does the same work but for Secret Base using increasingly absurd charts, graphs, and data. I still watch his DH projects whenever they come out. Another one of my favorite people/things to watch is the YouTuber Cambrian Chronicles, who corrects online and written Welsh history by connecting pieces scholars didn’t know were connected. He often strings together tens of online sources that refer to different Welsh events as separate, but links them together as the same event, just passed down through generations of Welsh families that was accidentally changed or exaggerated. He creates maps and diagrams showing how, where, and when the event actually happened – similar to the Salem Witch Trials project we looked at in class. Aside from this realization, learning about different “tricks of the trade” within Digital Humanities projects was very useful for understanding them. For example, I had a rough understanding of what metadata was, but fully delving into how everything on a project used metadata to link things together, tag them, etc. made the experience of appreciating various projects much better. I now have a deeper understanding of the less obvious work that goes into some of these projects, rather than just the surface-level data collection. Similarly, things like the t-SNE algorithm and how it can transform data presentation by turning unplottable data into a “simple” two-dimensional graph is fascinating, and I could see it being important for future projects of my own. I can also now recall different YouTube videos or informational articles that I am retroactively realizing have used t-SNE or something similar to chart their ideas. Overall, the first few weeks of this class have seriously ignited my interest in Digital Humanities, and I am looking forward to the rest of this semester and beyond.

The Digital Humanities projects that were looked at in class gave useful insights on how they used their data and presented them to their viewers. A lot of the projects that were focused on were archival projects, and as a bit of a history nerd that is an interesting area to look at. The project on immigrants in Philadelphia was fascinating because of how it put these people’s stories out there on the internet for all to see, giving it more reach than if it was confined to a physical book or a DVD. The archival work is quite literally preserving history that might otherwise be lost and that kind of work often goes underappreciated.

The process of digitization is something that museums have done with documents, photographs, or other objects in their collections and creating metadata to categorize them and provide further information on what something is. For example, metadata can be used to give further context to a picture.

Even non archival projects can tap into my interests. The “Who Reads What” project that scraped GoodReads and using algorithms to project that data on a map that displays how popular a genre is and how it correlates with other genres could be recreated for other forms of media. Instead of scraping data from GoodReads how about doing the same for Letterboxd and seeing what genres movie goers enjoy? Or maybe Steam could be scraped and take a look at what kinds of video games correlate with each other.

This week, we learned about the steps to investigate a digital humanities project, including analyzing the sources, process, and presentation of the document. I believe I can apply this skill to my professional internship as a Marketing intern.  

For my internship, one part of my job is to analyze Facebook and Instagram insights and create diagrams of the company’s growth and where things drastically change. To do so, we use the Meta Business Suite, which grabs data from both social media sites, transcribes the information, and presents the info in graphs and charts.  

It’s important to find a company that is trustworthy and can hold private information. From the start, I know that the Meta Business Suite is a trusted company, with thousands of people who use the tool. Furthermore, the company is well established and doesn’t require a payment. This means they aren’t trying to hide behind a subscription or block users from the use.  

Applying what we learned in class, I learned how to analyze what a document is composed of before using it. For instance, looking at the sources of the Meta Business Suite can teach me where the website is getting its information, either building credibility or showing where it lacks information. I know that the website gets information from both Instagram and Facebook. Meta Business Suite is upfront with this information, not hiding where it gathers information from.  

Then, how the sources are processed on the website can show me how the program analyzes and presents its data. I can learn if the marketing insights are backed by credible sources, based on how Meta processes data into their system. Lastly, recognizing how Meta Suite presents its data helps me understand if it’s easy to understand and accessible. I can determine if the program is helpful, with breakdowns of analytics and visual graphs.  

This process helps me as a marketing intern, as I can develop an understanding of a website based on a quick digest of its sources, process, and presentation. I can learn whether a marketing website is useful and can benefit the company or lacks credibility and foundation.

For this week’s blog post I have decided to connect the idea of digital mapping to my future career since I see a connection. I hope I get the opportunity to work in the film industry and digitial mapping can be very useful in that field in many ways. One way is when location scouting for film locations, filmmakers can use digital maps and 3D maps to find the best location to fit the scene before physcially visiting it. Along with it helping find the best shooting location it can also help production teams map out the parking areas, trailers, equipment, entrances, and crew areas are loacted. Also, digital maps can help out if a drone it being used in the process of the filmmaking by planning out the pathway and lookout for any potential ariel shots. A digital map can also be helpful during the filmmaking process by helping the crew keep track of where characters, vehicles and other important locations are positioned from scene to scene. Filmmakers can use the map to really test out scenes and see how they work without actually physically creatying the scene. Also, looking at it from a movie lovers side, the digitial maps can be useful in a way. The maps can be used to create interactive maps showing where famous movies and TV shows were filmed. The interenet is a open place now a days and as I was doing some research on how to use digitial mapping in the world of filmmaking , I was able to find some example of maps that pointed out famous on set locations. Before this I was not sure how digitial mapping could be useful in the world of filmmaking but after doing some research I see that it can be helpful in many ways. I am glad that I was able to learn something that maybe down the future could be useful in my career.

the source utilizes a t-SNE algorithm display method which plots readers as x-y coordinates allowing for easy viewer visualization of relationship links using Euclidean distances. The algorithm takes the totals of someone’s reading reviews and relates them to 11 genres, makes their #1 genre their icon and groups them by totals in relation to other genres. The more someone reads of each genre the closer they are to it. The tool of t-SNE makes 11 dimensional data (for the 11 genres) and smooshes it down into 2 dimensional which allows for easier human visualization for the relationships between the genres rather than a one dimensional graph, just a report of the most read genres, or 2 dimensional plots of only 2 genres by their popularity for readers. this allows for many different genre’s relations to be seen all at once and their interconnected relationship to one another

The goal is to see relationships between genre readers in relation to other genres visually. This poses questions in a viewer for the specific relations between different genres and why. Allowing the viewer to see these relationships visually opens for curiosity as to why certain distances and distributions exist (i.e. the distance between romance, mystery, and literary fiction). Perhaps there is a larger societal factor influencing a large amount of space between 2 specific genres(romance and literary fiction), or how certain singular genres can be divided on the other genres a reader tends to drift toward (fantasy).

I thought something that was interesting with the website that we didn’t really touch on in class was the “Readers Mapped by Network” page. The page shows a similar distribution to the “Readers Mapped by Genre-Mix”, however instead of by genre it is by actual book. This allows the viewer to see the relationship between different readers and their most read genres to one another by the actual books they are reading. It connects readers on a 2d plane with Euclidean distances and allows a slide view form the original graph to show the relationship between the two. I think this allows for some great expansion and further thinking on the questions posed by the original graph. However, this expansional graph allows for more data and points to be taken into account with the real connection readers have to one another with the specific book titles. Particularly interesting I think is the greater intermingling of mystery with historical fiction, fantasy, and partially romance. Just looking at the original graph it looks like mystery readers are all out alone, when in reality they are one of the most middle and diverse readers by title to other readers other than fantasy readers. It extracts the skew of the sheer amount of mystery novels some read and allow expansion on the question of how different genres are interconnected and why. It also enforces arguments like we talked about in class with the stigma against romance novels and for literary fiction posed as opposites as on this graph as well they are at distinctly different ends of the graph here as well.

We researched and discussed what genres and books people chose to read and what genres and books they tend to not read. We could more easily determine this by using the interactive graphs that were pictured on the webpage. The graphs consisted of colored dots where each area of dots was colored showing that genre group of readers and their interest. However, there were two graphs being shown one being a map labeled as “Mapped by genre mix” and the other being labeled as “mapped by network”. The genre related map showed what genres readers liked to use the most by using general data from shelves and reviews. The network map more so showed the specific books that readers choose to read, not the genres. The map better shows how readers can be become more connected through actual reading overlap and not genre labels.

We also learned about a new tool called t-sne which can easily turn complex data into dots and a graph and give the observer a visual perspective. After researching both areas of information it was nice to see how the different genre readers chose to fade away from the other certain genres. For example, as we saw and discussed when viewing the first graph, the readers that were mostly mystery – genre oriented seemed to have avoided the romance genre. A major point that was made which I remember is that since most women are the authors of these romance books, they don’t get much credit for them and are heavily ignored all the time. Knowing that this is true, it drives a community to back the romance books and become steady dots on the maps.

On Tuesday I was busy and distracted all class trying to set up my WordPress account so I missed some the points put out there. I do know that we discussed the Salem witch trials points of interest and how different areas spread of accusations depending on the m month plus the area. I also missed class last Thursday so I do have some catching up to do.

In Tuesday’s class we discussed how sources can be more than just links. It  can be images, textbooks, letters, and maps as well. We all also connected on how in order for it to be a digital humanities project they need to have clear sources,  process  and presentation.  And the only way you can find out all of those is doing deep research within the article. From what I learned this  past week, I did some research  on a sports injury I didn’t believe happened and it then showed clear images on how his hip was fractured. Such as xray images on his hip. In the bigger picture from reading articles online you do not know what is true or false in today’s day and age which is why learning how to find out good sources can play a huge role determining where and when this could have happened and now we have clear evidence to back up the situation. Such as they can display links within the reading that shows another point of view or factual information within the statement made. One question I had was that I didn’t know the difference between the process and the presentation. So I did a little research on my own and figured out the process of how the digital project is created, such as collecting rather than presentation which means how the finished information is displayed to us such readers through graphs, images and many more. In media literacy they used tiktoks for sources on how the media tells us how we should react such as positive, negative or neutral to tiktok. This is more of listing to the videos rather then us trying to find out where and how csn we get to these videos and are they trust worthy sources. We learned how railroads back then had a huge impact on transportation to work and other things. This is big in today’s world because  we keep adding train stops because we are building houses with not many roads and people need to get to and from work. They are the same because we all need to get to work somehow. I get the fact that not everything said is true, make sure you break it down and check the three  things.

What is digital mapping? In class today, we looked at a website called “Who Reads What?” We had to read through it, pick terms that we were unfamiliar with, try to understand what the general idea of the site was, and look at a map. There were three terms that stood out to me that I was unfamiliar with. One being an algorithm called t-SNE. Turns out, some of my classmates were also unfamiliar with this term. Together, we researched this term and learned what it meant. I got the general understanding of what this website was about when I read over it for the first time. I knew it was about readers, their genres of books that they enjoy, and how similar some readers are. Then we looked at the map. When I first looked at the map on my own, I saw a bunch of colors and little shapes, placed around randomly. Some were clumped together, others were scattered. From a glance, I didn’t understand how to read this map because there are a lack of labels and names. Just colors, shapes, and a key for what each shapes genre represented. But as a class, we figured out together how to read it. We discussed what digital mapping was and got a better understanding. Digital mapping is when you collect data and create an interactive image. In this case for the site “Who Reads What?”, they gathered different pieces of data about what genres different people enjoy, and they compiled it to create a digital map for viewers to look at. It made much more sense to me after learning how to use it. Digital maps also make it easier for people to understand. Some people are more visual learners, so seeing a map laid out of all the data can make it more simple for some to view.