Author: sophiarh

Over the course of this past week, we have analyzed digital humanities projects that have either archived or documented pieces in history and programmed them digitally. It was very interesting to see how projects decided to format the data and present it on their website. Each project had a different way of organizing information, which made it easier to understand the history or topic that was presented. An example is the Salem Witch Trail Archival website. The website included sources of every person linked to the Salem Witch trials and also included a map that showed when and where the accusations spread. This type of formatting, processing, and presentation can be a useful tool for the future profession I plan on pursuing. After college the desired profession I plan to pursue is Public Relations. In Public Relations, a major part of the job is to research the company you work for’s target demographic. Then breaking down that data to help brain storm ideas on how to maintain a positive reputation with that target audience. Learning about the processing of archiving physical information into digital could be useful knowledge for researching a companies target demographic. Such as marking the target audiences interests, median income, environment, and age range and programming them in digitally will be organize the data and keep the information saved for future use. By making that digital it helps keep the pr professionals organized. It could also help companies make better decisions on their social media posts, advertisements, and other forms of communication out to the public. Over all, after analyzing different digital humanities projects, it has shown me how technology can be used to preserve information and make it easier to understand. Digital humanities projects have helped me see how digital tools can be used for not only history and educational purposes, but can also be used toward public relations as a resourceful tool.

The project I decided to look at was the American Theatre Archive Project. I found it on Lehigh universities page underneath the performing arts section. The purpose of the project is to protect archived pieces from American theatre and preserve American theatre’s. The project does this by running 4 different committees that help to seek funding, partnerships, etc. The website has a page dedicated to all the sources used towards their site. The sources include different documentaries, case studies, papers, museums, etc that help support their cause. The sources are used as a way to show their audience the importance of preserving archives in the theatre and also show the some theatre’s they have helped. Now the processing done on this project is confusing. The project’s website never analyzed the sources, instead they just listed them on the sources page. Now the website does have a monthly newsletter that you can sign up for and I am assuming that the sources could be discussed in the newsletter. The project discusses the importance of archiving pieces in theatre to preserve the history in the theatre and will help their audience understand the importance of funding and keeping theatre around.