Author: IronyPoisoned

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.

The Digital Humanities project that I found interesting to look into was a project from the University of Toronto: Mississauga titled “Visualizing the America’s”. The project is based on the history of capitalism and wealth extraction from Latin America by pointing to the history of the banana, a fruit that we as Americans generally take for granted thanks to this economic imperialism. The project claims to “decolonize knowledge” by presenting research on Latin America in “simple and compelling terms”. On the home page there is a condensed timeline of the history of banana cultivation in Latin America and the webpages under “Themes” and “Key Moments” provide more in depth articles. Its’ sources on the historical events can be found at the bottom of the website’s articles and generally uses secondary sources, photographs, and United Fruit Company documents to construct its’ narrative.

Something the project is currently working on is the digitization of documents, letters, and photographs from the United Fruit Company that was found in an attic of one of their plantations by Philippe Bourgois. They are also working on the digitization of the photographs of Rafael Platero Paz’s who documented the lives of the working class in a banana town in Honduras. Currently the documents are not freely available to the public without a login, however it does state its’ intention to make them publicly available to all once the digitization process is complete.

https://visualizingtheamericas.utm.utoronto.ca