Author: caseycostigan52

This week we talked about mapping things and on Friday we started mapping things. Honestly I thought it was going to be a lot hard than it actually was. I just had to do some research on Google Maps and look some things up on google and I found the answers. Overall I actually enjoyed this. There were a few places I couldn’t map because they didn’t have any identifiers of where they were and only a date or in some cases they didn’t even have a date. I think there were one or two that said West Chester State Teacher’s College but did not say where on the campus they were located. I had one store that wasn’t there anymore but when I looked it up it said the current store that is there now. I just put the point there because the original store seemed to be there. This was in the town of West Chester. There was an old stadium in Philadelphia that belonged to Temple but it wasn’t there anymore but when I looked it up on Google Maps it showed where it was and what is there now.

This week we went up to the collections center on the sixth floor of the library and we entered in the data of old pamphlets and scrapbook pages from West Chester’s past. We learned how to enter the data and after we entered it we were told how to fix any mistakes we had made when we were entering in the data initially. My opinion on all of this is it wasn’t hard to put in the information, it was easier than I had originally thought, it was just kind of time consuming and a little boring at times because really all you are doing is taking pictures of the documents and entering in the information onto the website and giving them descriptions. It doesn’t excite me to do all of this but at least it’s easy to get through.

This week, we listened to professor lecture about finding different kinds of data in the WCA archive and what each point of data means. We talked about how data is found and what the date is for, the number of the entry and the purpose and the writer is. We also talked about starting our first project of entering in a scrapbook into the archive. We also watched a video about how to enter an item into the west chester data base. I entered a helmet into the database after watching parts of the video which showed me how to enter it in. It was very informative and helped me learn how to put all of the data into the database, including sources, dates, the subject, description and relation. I can assume this is going to be similar to how the next project will go that we are going to talk more about hopefully next week. This week was a little bit more clearer as for what this class is and I am starting to understand what digital humanities is. I will probably have more questions as the class goes on but I am a little curious as to what we will do throughout the class.

This week we had Ron from the library come and tell us about the scrap books, we talked about the scrap book project, we watched parts of a video, and the professor talked about a few different topics concerning digital humanities. I am going to be honest. I did not understand a lot of what the professor was talking about. I am very confused about what was going on about that page that we looked at today and I just am confused about this class in general. If things could be explained a little more thorough that would be great.