Author: Collin Swed

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.

Introduction to The Salem Transcripton Project 

Sources:

• Salem court records (950 documents)
• The Salem Witchcraft Papers
• Digitized and re-transcribed manuscripts, mostly borrowed from Boston area archives and museums
• “Church Book Belonging to Salem Village? of 1692-3 written by the aggressive witch-hunter pastor of Salem Village, the Reverend Samuel Parris.”
• Geographic maps of the town of Salem in 1700, a separate map of Salem Village in 1692, and a map of the house locations of 17th century Andover
• Letters and personal notes (and even a couple books) from various villagers of Salem

Process:

• Created a dynamic map showing locations, dates, and names of the accused and the spread of accusations
• Archived, transcribed, and/or digitized as many known Salem documents as possible from the period, including court docs, maps, books/notes, etc.
• Geologically located the execution site in Salem with help from other scholars and previous written information about it (It was originally lost to history due to Salem’s erasure of its past)
• Created a searchable list of all 1400-ish names mentioned to be related to Salem during the time period

Presentation:

• Books and letters (both images of them and typed transcription)
  • Same with transcription of court documents
• Digitized maps/images of maps from the period
• Profiles detailing the lives/contributions of Salem residents during the period
• Links to archives from libraries/archivists across the nation