Category: Weekly Blog Assignment

This week during Digital Humanities we had finished with our scrapbooking in the special collections room at the library. We met back in class on Monday and learned about maps and how we can use them. I believe we are trying to get more practice with techniques and tools that we collected from doing metadata on our Omeka collection. Basically, we are trying to find out what would it look like if we used our images and texts from Omeka and placed them directly on a map and how is would be done? Over the week, I learned there are many different ways we could use our metadata on maps. For instance, creating a map by timeline could be very efficient. If everything is in chronological order, it will be easier to find information because it is so organized. We also learned that a timeline organizes a single dimension, so starting with the earliest occasion or date and ending with the last is the easiest option. One thing to notice is when the person you are researching encountered all of these artifacts. Another tool you could use is transportation artifacts. For example, bus and train tickets, other forms of transportation that students engage with. We could combine the idea of chronological order and transportation routes/patterns to see if they line up with any new information or centers around anything specific. On Wednesday, we were given a google checklist to fill out. We were instructed to input our information from Omeka that we did on scrapbooking and see if we were able to pinpoint a location for the images or texts we chose. This was a cool activity to do to get us to become familiar with mapping and how it can correlate with metadata.  Professor Famiglietti also gave us links to powerpoints that give a more in depth look at how beneficial mapping can be and how we can use maps for our metadata on Omeka. I am excited to see what we can learn moving forward in class and see how we can really use our metadata and place it on a map.

When we first started discussing mapping this week, I never realized how much research goes into finding the correct location of the artifact. I was under the impression the item either had an obvious location or no location of importance at all. While figuring out the locations of my items during class though, I realized that one needs to research to make sure it is accurate as possible. The one item in particular that required more research was a ticket to a football game a Temple University Stadium. When you search that on Google now, Lincoln Financial Field shows up, however I knew it might have been wrong to put that address because the street names on the ticket did not match up with the address for Lincoln Financial Field. In order to find the correct address, I searched “Temple University Stadium 1949”, which led to a Wikipedia page about the 1949 Temple Owls football team, which then had a link to the Temple Stadium embedded in the page and took me to the wiki page that had address I needed, which is not the same as where the current Temple University Stadium is located according to Google. Just this one example shows how important it is to fact check your addresses because locations are always changing. There were some items that I was unsure what location to put because I know it has one, but I’m unsure if the items provides enough information for me to figure out the location. These items consist of Joyce Murrow’s room inspection card, as I’m unsure which dormitory she was living in, and a Lafayette vs Gettysburg basketball game program, because it doesn’t state where the games were held. Some items also may hold no location at all, like a tissue paper bow in Joyce Murrow’s scrapbook. From what I’ve gathered, it’s something she or a friend made, and has no location tied to it all from what I can gather. By looking at the map of collective metadata, I noticed most of it was centralized in one place for both Joyce and Beryl, which is what to be expected. I did notice that Joyce had a few items on the West coast, which could allude to her having traveled there or a friend brought them back for her. Beryl on the other hand stayed basically just in the North East. I also noticed there were no physical objects mapped, which could either mean a lot of the objects could be artwork the two created or it’s hard to ascertain location from objects because they don’t provide as much information as text without more knowledge.

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!

During week 3 of Digital Humanities, I feel that I already have a better understanding of what this course is all about. This week, we focused on inputting information into our Omeka website for scrapbooking. We met as a class this week in the special collections center on the 6th floor of the library to engage in metadata through scrapbooking. We learned how to properly record and insert the information we had, whether it was just a picture or a postcard from a certain family. It was really cool and interesting to be able to understand how writers and researchers use metadata to find valuable, personal information. When creating your own item on Omeka, it is important to make sure that we follow the item level Metadata sheet that we were given. This was such a helpful tool and insight to guide us when recording our scrapbook images. We also learned on Wednesday the proper ways to write down our information from the scrapbook. On Omeka, we are given a whole bunch of categories to fill in about our scrapbook. Some of these categories include a title, subject, description, date, rights, and so much more. All of these elements are beneficial to creating metadata, especially for scrapbooking. I learned that being too vague in those descriptions can cause other readers and researchers to be confused and they may not be able to find what they are looking for. This is why it is important to take your time when inputting metadata. Overall, I learned a lot more this week about metadata and the general use of the Omeka website. I am excited to do more this upcoming week.

Throughout this week, we’ve been working in the digital humanities for the first time, at least for me. During this experience, I’ve been thinking back to the first week of class when we were trying to define what the digital humanities really is. I was brought back to one definition I got on the website that basically stated that DH wasn’t a real area of study. If I’m being honest, I was beginning to think along this track of mind during the beginning of week when we first started working in Omeka. We were really just documenting artifacts through photos and descriptions, which one could say is simply just a means of research for say the humanities in this case as well look at a West Chester student from years past. However as the week went on, especially after Wednesday’s class, I began to return to the idea that the digital humanities really is it’s own area of study. The work that goes into documenting these artifacts isn’t as simple as one might think. There is a certain method that comes to documenting artifacts in terms of how we describe them, date them, photograph them, etc. Learning the process that goes into documenting artifacts like we are doing is an area of study in its own right as there is so much to learn in order to be beneficial to education and research. It’s not just the process that makes it an area of study either, but also how this process itself will be a learning source and even an artifact itself in the future. People in the digital humanities will look back at this field in some years to see how the field as changed in terms of documenting artifacts and that will become a research topic of its own.

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!

When metadata first came up in this class, I would be lying if I said it didn’t confuse me immensely at most. I think I was overthinking what it could possibly be, but by watching the intro to metadata video, I realize the definition of metadata isn’t the confusing part, but the application of it can be. Trying to figure out how to tag the subjects of an item takes a lot more thought then most would think. When I was coming up with the subjects for my own item in Omeka, a parking permit, I found myself overthinking if a subject was too similar to another or if it didn’t even describe my item correctly at all. This process sort of reminded me image descriptions, which is something I learned how to do in a digital publishing class I took a couple years ago. Similar to the process of inputting metadata, I think a lot of people would believe image descriptions are extremely easy, but they actually take a lot of thought. For people who don’t know, image descriptions are really just an explanation of what an image is depicting and it is coded into an image; it’s often something you will see on Twitter or other social media if the poster has used that future. When it comes to image descriptions, one has to realize what the purpose is for—people with vision impairments. Something I remember my professor specifically pointing out is that a descriptor like color is useless in an image description because it is useless to blind people who are the main users of this feature. When writing an image description, you really need to take the time to think about what is essential to describe and what is able to translate to the audience it is for, and I found metadata to follow the same criteria. When thinking of subject tags, you really need to think about the most important identifiers of your item and make sure the tags you do use are as accurate as possible so as not to confuse users who are looking for a specific subject.

For this weeks activity of collecting and publishing metadate I learned a lot in terms of what to expect when it comes to working on and complete our scrapbook project. At first the process of metadata cataloging seemed daunting at first with all of the needed information but after a quick explanation and analysis of the two intro videos and metadata attributes requirements listed on Omeka (publisher, creator, description, format, etc…) I found the process easily done and memorable which will come in handing for any upcoming metadata gathering. I for one am very interested in digging deep into the objects provided so I can effectively give credit while also learning about the history of the object I chose to catalogue. Hopefully from using Omeka and from what I do on the upcoming scrapbook page I can learn a overall theming of history from item to item and gather some sort of overall message brought upon all the items provided in the library and potentially uses this type of theming in the future writing I plan on making.

This week during our digital humanities course we learned a lot. I feel as though we were taught a better understanding of what digital humanities is and the different parts of it. In class we were shown the complete letters of Willa Cather. On the website we were able to see a whole range of things. We could search for a specific letter that was sent by using all these different features and filters such as date ranges, annotations, letter ID, etc. Date ranges are very useful when scholars and writers are interested in Cather’s life history and how she develops as a person as well as an author. They can use this to find information like what she did towards the beginning and end of her life, important dates, where she lives, and change in status. In class we learned that this allows us to do a date based search for someone’s life. We also talked and actively went through the annotations that were available for the letters. Annotations can include other writers’ thoughts and ideas. Therefore, depending on the kind of research we are doing, we might be interested when Cather was using literal language. For example, we searched “red cloud” in the search box and included annotations, which allowed us to find something we never knew about. After doing this activity for a little while, I realized it all comes down to what kind of research question we are asking and what we are looking for (either literal language or just topics). Throughout this week we also talked more about metadata and defined what that is. Metadata is information about another piece of information. For example, letters are a piece of information because it includes texts, words, and meaning. If we have information about that specific letter, then it is considered metadata. 

During our first week of Digital Humanities I learned a lot of valuable information so far. Going into this class, I had absolutely no idea what digital humanities was, nor did I ever think it was something that was surrounded in my everyday life. Although I am still learning the meaning of Digital Humanities, I do believe I have some knowledge of it. Humanities is the study of all languages, history and human culture in society. Digital humanities is the domain of researching and studying to develop digital technologies. In simpler terms, digital humanities is the field where information and research is given in an electronic form. Social media has become a huge deal in society today, which makes it easy for workers to advertise. In 2020, the Black Lives Matter campaign began circling through society and soon became one of the biggest and most conflicting campaigns. This movement specifically blew up over social media, considering everyone in this generation nowadays has some sort of online communication and knowledge. It is very effortless to go online and post or see information digitally that is trending in our generation and suddenly become up to date with it. Most influencers and campaign leaders use social media as their main platform, to reach the largest audience they possibly can to ensure they are getting their message heard. In today’s world, digital tools are being used all over those who are interested in arts or history of something. The power to be able to share information to others outside of the computer science field is a major factor of digital humanities today. In my Pop Culture Literature course, we were instructed to write a personal narrative on what we think Pop Culture is in today’s generation and how it affects our daily lives. I continued to write about how social media is a major factor in pop culture today and how easy it is to be influenced by someone who has a million strangers liking and resharing their digital content. I think there is some connection here between pop culture and digital humanities and how posting information online can reach a bigger audience and have a better outcome than any other source. I still believe there are many more concepts and details about digital humanities that I will learn throughout this semester.