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.
