This week, we focused on digital mapping and how we can make our items. I started this process by finishing uploading my Omeka items. This was a little difficult at first because some of my items had little context for the item itself. For this process, I started by finding all the locations for my items and writing them down, focusing on Joyce Murrow’s scrapbook. The items with little context were challenging to map and find information about. The process revealed some exciting locations that shed light on her life. I carefully placed pins on the map for significant spots like 206 Marine Avenue in Balboa Islands, California, and 123-131 Pennsylvania Avenue in Atlantic City, Atlantic County, NJ. These locations were either explicitly provided on each item or discovered through the Library of Congress website. It was essential to remember the question, “What does this item reveal about Joyce Murrow’s experiences?” Keeping this question in mind helped me choose what location to pick. However, not all items were easy to pinpoint. Some items, like those referencing West Chester State Teacher College, proved too broad geographically. Others lacked adequate information or were simply notes without location details. In total, I mapped around five items out of sixteen. Exploring the Omeka mapping tool was very cool. The ability to search by various criteria, from ID #s to geographic addresses, added depth to my research. Joyce Murrow’s scrapbook took me from Philadelphia to far-out destinations like New York, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Each item clicked on the map unveiled a picture and a description. This reminded me of what we discussed during the first lectures. The mapping has been my favorite part of this process, allowing me to visualize Joyce Murrow’s journeys. Overall, this week highlighted the power of Omeka in showing historical narratives!
Author: saharrahheidrick
Week 3: Working with Omeka
This week, our classes were filled with new materials; our class embarked on a trip to special collections, where we got our first page from the Scrapbook of Joyce Murrow, 1946-1950. We were handed a page from her scrapbook, showing just a tiny snippet of her college life. Our task was to capture each page as a whole carefully and also to capture each item individually. The items ranged from vintage photographs to intriguing artifacts. I captured thirteen images and collected the metadata to document these items into Omeka. This process involves gathering a plethora of metadata for each item and carefully inputting them into Omeka, creating a digital archive that helps us study and easily observe artifacts from the past. Each item involved carefully gathering metadata, from the title and subject matter to the creator and associated rights. The intricate process of filling out DC Elements such as descriptions, dates, and image size brought us a better understanding of each piece, highlighting its historical significance. One item that caught my attention was the Surf N Sand Room picture at the Seaside Hotel in Atlantic City, NJ. This vintage image allowed me to see the hotels during that period. The photograph illustrates a large dining room where people gathered and dined, offering a snapshot of the social life. I loved the dining room look and thought it added a lot of content and detail to the overall page presence. Navigating through the metadata fields and piecing together the narrative of each item helped provide me with a clear understanding of each item. I found inserting the data into Omeka challenging. However, after organizing my data, I found it easy to input data efficiently. Overall, this week was tough initially, but it allowed me to practice and improve my understanding of metadata and the use of Omeka!
Week 2: Learning the basics
This week, we focused on exciting topics ranging from metadata to our first project example. We discussed metadata, and an easy decision we talked about was how it is information about another piece of information. Think of it as the info that helps us find what we’re looking for; an example in class was Project Gutenberg, where each text had data about the author when it was published, and more. This semester, my science courses are filled with topics on data and metadata, alongside my geospatial class that focuses on studying data related to specific places. Combining these areas seems fascinating, like picturing where an author like Willa Cather wrote her letters and to whom she sent them. It’s like drawing a map between information and locations. It was fascinating looking into the letters and the different search aspects. Amazingly, we can go back and look at these pieces of history and find information about what it was like during the 20th century, especially women’s suffrage. Using the different search methods, we talked about how we can find specific letters with the letter ID and dates, and you could even find specific words. We also discussed how adding different details to our work, called metadata, can help keep things organized. This makes it easier for others to grasp and explore our work, and it’s handy for citing sources correctly and finding connections across different subjects. An easy way to organize is by tagging our research with something like #1234Research. I am excited to start getting into the class and jumping into our project. Exploring special collections and starting our research has me very excited and intrigued. Sorting through journal pieces and organizing them into Omeka for our first assignment sounds like a hands-on and engaging way to dive into digital humanities, and I’m super excited!
Blog Post Week 1: My Biggest Takeaways
Saharrah Heidrick
This week, my biggest takeaway was the overall meaning and impact of Digital Humanities. I will focus on three questions that come to mind when looking into digital humanities. How might digital humanities help me succeed in other classes, be relevant to my goals, and help me understand our society? As we discussed in class, digital humanities is what you get when you add tools that manipulate data as ones and zeros to the study of human meaning-making, culture, and history, which is called “the humanities.” Another take on digital humanities is that it combines digital tools and methods with traditional humanities disciplines to conduct research, analyze data, and present scholarly work. It uses computational techniques to expand the study and interpretation of cultural artifacts, literature, history, and other aspects of human culture and society. After reflecting on the importance of this course, I discovered that digital humanities can provide valuable skills such as data analysis, visualization, geographic information systems, digital mapping, and digital storytelling in several ways.
My major is Business Marketing, and digital humanities skills can help me better understand consumer behavior through data analysis. Digital Humanities will help me learn valuable skills for my career by showing how digital platforms are crucial in reaching and understanding target audiences. Learning about digital humanities is essential in learning about digital access. This concludes that more people can review, see, and learn from your project. Thus, it is possible to search the data more efficiently, combine different data sources, hyperlink to relevant materials, etc. Digital Humanities will help me better understand society by delving into historical artifacts and information and finding the importance and impact of it. Through this process, we can uncover new information and findings while reflecting/dissecting completed research. Throughout this course, I will better understand historical findings, research decisions, and thought processes behind these projects.
sources:
https://whatisdigitalhumanities.com
Kaplan, F. (2015). A map for big data research in digital humanities. Frontiers in Digital Humanities, May 06, 2015. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2015.00001
https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/14b686b2-bdda-417f-b603-96ae8fbbfd0f
