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Neatline

Like every Digital Humanities (DH) project there must be a platform used, Neatline is the most common at Create Caribbean and other digital humanists organizations. Neatline.org describes the platform as, “A geotemporal exhibit-builder that allows you to create beautiful, complex maps, image annotations, and narrative sequences from Omeka collections of archives and artifacts, and to connect your maps and narratives with timelines that are more-than-usually sensitive to ambiguity and nuance.” This simply means that neatline is used to create and organise maps while plotting the necessary information. Also neatline is a an add-on to omeka which is a free, open source information management system. The key features to consider when choosing neatline for a project are maps, plotting and narrative.

The most important of the features is maps. However, the type of map chosen depends on whether the project information is historical or modern. Each map must have a base map because it depicts reference information for the actual maps. Curators can either create their own base map or choose a base layer. There are over 8 layers to choose from including openstreetmap, google (physical, hybrid, streets or satellite) and stamen (watercolor, toner or terrain).

Plotting is a technique used to represent data on a graph, chart or map. When plotting on a map points,polygons or custom points can be used, however it is based on the type of information. Points are used for specific places such as a church, but polygons are used for areas like a community or city. For custom points .jpg image files can be used to replace points. In the event that person's are unsure of the accuracy of the content, a date ambiguity widget is offered by neatline.

The narrative is a report of related events that can solicit an argument. Creators must be careful when directing the audience as it is directly related to the content presented. Also, setting the map focus and the organisation of the data will also influence the direction.

The most vital features of a neatline based project are the maps, plots and narratives. While each feature is important, their level of importance may differ based on the data being presented.

Source: Neatline by Iman Salehian 

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Hi Geal! I must say, you did a great job at reviewing and summarizing the chapter. I also appreciated how you identified each feature of  digital thematic research collections. Overall great job!

Blog Post 4: “Thematic Research Collections” by Carole L. Palmer

In an effort to find a more convenient method of research for projects, digital humanists created digital thematic research collection. According to the article, a digital thematic research collection may be defined as “digital aggregations of primary sources and related materials that support research on a theme.” This means that digital humanists began finding and grouping a wide range of works like texts, artwork, photographs, films and sound recordings, and commentary under one theme. The article focuses on the function features like scholarly contribution, contextual mass, interdisciplinary platform and activity support and content features such as the digital, themed, coherent, heterogeneous, structural and open-ended aspects of digital thematic research collections.

Primarily, there are some distinct function features that all digital thematic research collections have. The first of these is scholarly contribution, refers to the contribution that digital humanists make to the convenience of research for many.

Contextual mass is the second functional feature of a digital thematic research collection. This feature emphasizes the importance of scholarly stands, values and work practises. Contextual mass is about picking out priority information and adding it into the collection. It is important to note that collaboration is between scholars and libraries, museums, and publishers is required to collect information to create contextually rich thematic collections.

The third feature is interdisciplinary platform. Digital thematic research aids in bridging the gaps between different fields of study and different disciplines. Thomas MacGreevy Archive is given as an example in the text. This thematic collection breaks down the boundaries that separate the connections between fields of literature, culture, history, and politics. Digital thematic research collections are able to serve as an interdisciplinary platform since they use a variety of different sources.

Activity support is the fourth feature presented in the article for the function of digital thematic research collections. In the article, it is presented that digital thematic research collections support research activities. Ways in which this is done include the reading of collections, searching the content of collections, hypertext and mapping and modelling tools.

Subsequently, the list of distinct content features that digital thematic research collections include begins with the fact that they are digital. Thematic research collections are made up of all types of sources including text, audio and visuals but all of these are formatted to a digital form to facilitate collection.

Digital thematic research is collected under a specific theme. According to the article, ‘a research collection theme may be an event, place, phenomenon, or any other object of study’.

These themes aid in sifting through the information, and selecting only what adds to the uniformity of the collection which contributes to coherence, another content feature of the thematic research.

The mixture of different sources, primary, secondary and tertiary as well as different types of sources define the heterogeneous content feature of thematic research collections.

Additionally, being open-ended is another feature of digital thematic research collections. This is because thematic collections have the ability to grow, be improved and be modified.

To conclude, digital thematic research collections have become the ideal laboratory for digital humanities. As opposed from the traditional forms of information collection, digital thematic research collections have function and content features that make them especially convenient to digital humanist and facilitate retrieval of a variety information for a successful project.

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Designing Sustainable Projects and Publications.

We have established how to get and understand our audience. We’ve also explained the different type of digital humanities project. But how do we make the site or project attractive? How do we develop the design for a site? How do we organize our sites and projects for easy use? The Companion to Digital Humanities explains this perfectly in chapter 31, “Designing for Sustainable Projects and Publications”.  

All projects need to be encoded, since most Digital Humanities require some form of digitization. The digitized version of texts such as a manuscript require OCR software. This allows the computer to read the scanned images and detect words from it as if it was a typed document.

The components of a project such as the archives, artifacts,manuscripts and textual data must be coded as well. Database and markup technologies can be used, although are very different from each other, both in favour of rational interrelating and structuring of the data components.

Databases are best used for documenting and connecting people,places, events, artifacts and more. The most common types include hierarchical, network, relational, and object-oriented.

The most common markup language is Extensible Markup Language (XML). This is a descriptive approach to encoding textual in computers, whereby rendering and querying are most common uses of this language.

Creating categories of rendering, querying and navigating always users easy access through the project. Also, it provides creators with a more defined audience per category, hence reducing the load of topic to ones that are more specific.

Furthermore, descriptive, administrative, file, and relations or structural data are another set of essential categories. It also allows facile navigation through project, however there are important activities that must be considered with this category. Ensuring academic integrity of sources and digital files, managing agents, technology and methods of obtaining files must be done and so on. These few activities will ensure that the project is being sustained effectively and honestly.  

In a previous blog about audiences we learned that it is important to know those in the same field as you and to collaborate with them.The same behavior applies here even more since the design of the project can altered the level of effective partnerships.  Also, work on the same project with others will be advantageous since a wealth of knowledge from each person will be added to the work.

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Digital Humanists Projects: Types

Now that we are aware of how to build an audience in my previous blog, we will be learning how to about what digital humanists do. The Center of Digital Humanities (CDH) states that, “Digital Humanities (DH) interprets the cultural and social impact of new media and information technologies, as well as creates and applies these technologies to interrogate cultural, social, historical, and philological questions”. Therefore the digital humanists are the scholars and researchers behind DH. Theses scholars create a wide variety of about 9 project types based on Paige Morgan’s article, ‘What Digital Humanists Do”.

A knowledge site is a simple site with information on a topic/s within the same subject area. This project is not the largest, however in order to keep it long-term it must be updated and the relationship between the audience through forums, question and answer system must be established. Also, platforms such as Omeka, Wordpress, Scalar which are ready made or HTML/CSS that is bespoke can be used.

A digitized version of text/s based project may require the help of colleagues according to the amount of information. In addition this project is especially important as we move toward the digital age, access to ancient and historic work can be difficult to find online, but this project makes it accessible.

The database assignment is a collection of data usually consisting of images, bibliographic and numeric information. MySQL program and PHP script language can be used, but the magnitude of it depends heavily on contributors knowledge of the various programs.

One may consider this next project as the ‘Variety Project” however Paige Morgan describes it as semi-linear, customization narrative that includes text, images, audio, and/or video. It give readers more options and welcomes an audience with numerous learning modalities.

Large-scale text analysis and topic modelling projects aim to improve scholars perspectives on text. This project is time consuming since it requires a lot of analysis, however people gain much knowledge from such tasks.

A geographic mapping project is always fun to work with, where creators plot information about a topic in relation to it’s location. Neatline and ArcGIS are convenient software to use. An example of such is Carisealand, a conservative and environmentally friendly project, invented by Create Caribbean Research Institute.

The digital 3D model, gives readers and scholars the opportunity to experience areas based on archaeological/historical data in real time. Most of these projects are immense, such as Digital Karnak, however, a massive supportive is usually backing it.

An online event can be compared to a facebook live session but more efficient and professional. The creators must have a captivating topic of discussion to keep the energy and conversation slowing.

The final project is a crowdsourcing project such as wikipedia. This project is  developed and supported heavily by the public. While being a massive project, staff members must ensure the accuracy of the content published.

Every project type has it’s own audience despite the sizes, all can be successful. Success can be acquired by ensuring that contributors are aware of the various software and updates. Also, Digital Humanist deal with a variety of project and each one has a unique feature.

Source: ‘What Digital Humanists Do’, Paige Morgan

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How to build an audience

The previous blog titled ‘The 10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books’ simply describes the advancements and technology that led to e-books. Though this blog is not about reading it highlights the key pointers that help build an audience, hence it can be thought of as the ‘Revolutionizing the Internet Audience’

In every presentation, whether it be a speech, blog post or a website there is always an audience to attract. In order for there to be an audience the author/creator must develop a main objective for their writing. However, the so called ‘wrong’ audience can be engaged, but is it really the ‘wrong’?. No, simply an unexpected crowd and in that case the author can improve their writing to a more direct topic rather than a broad one.  In the case of a website, the crowd will be much more difficult since there is a plethora of other sites with similar content. The size of the audience should not intimidate the writer but the community and purpose should be focused upon.

In focusing on the community of a site one must know how to connect with their audience. Connecting means reaching out to that crowd, by going to the place they are and being a part of their interests. Also, in order to connect effectively with the audience the author must collaborate with their ‘competition’ and participate in forums that will help to improve and attract a larger audience. Another useful way to connect to the audience is via Mass Marketing where the site is published on social media, television and radio. However, the site must be marketable, hence authors must ensure that their work is news worthy. In addition, understanding the secrets of search engines such as google can better the chances of your website showing up on the first page. As authors build their audience it is extremely important to keep their audience via return traffic. Web creators can update the site regularly while keeping the main theme, as well as current posts, discussion forums as well as contact information so that readers and followers can develop a relationship with the creator/s of the site. These simple enhancements will definitely keep followers and bring more! Moreover, as traffic increases on one’s site it is necessary to get an understand of how many people really visit the website. The use of ‘server logs’ help to record these numbers, multiple log software are available online for downloading. However, technology is subject to misinterpretation and a more direct approach through questionnaire, guestbook and other material will give the author a better response.  

Source: Cohen and Rosenzweig, “Building an Audience“

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This is a great review. I also liked the industrial revolution due to the change from work with much human interference to very little with the use of machines. However my favourite instead was where the change from scrolls to codes occurred. This a much needed switch so that more people are encouraged to read due to its simplistic codex manuscript.

10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books

German Historia Rolf Engelsing made famous “reading revolution” which was shift from intensive reading to extensive reading which he called “Lesenrevolution”.  Many historians displayed their own idea of “reading revolution” but its “real” meaning is let to discover.

 Johannes Gutenberg introduced the “print revolution” which proved to a difficult piece of equipment but print changed and improved readers’ expectations of texts.

 Scripts allowed the exchange of symbols for sounds. The first decent alphabet was brought about by Greeks, every single alphabet and abjad can trace itself back to the same Semitic roots.

The ‘rolled scroll to the folded codex’ shift were cheaper, easier to read and carry.  Anagogic readings were easier, thus, Christians spread the codex all through the Roman Empire.

Papyrus was swapped for parchment but later paper was popularized.

My favourite revolution being the industrial revolution, brought about steam powered presses were invented and papermakers improved paper quality as time went on.  This is when technology was booming.

The time taking to create what was needed for reading and parchment was just plain heavy and difficult to get from place to place there was paper, radio, and television became a more favourable means of communication.

In the electronic age an entire new family of audio-visual media turned out to be more important to culture even as content kept on multiplying. The change of alphanumeric content to binary languages, content written to be “read” by PCs instead of people, and increasing the reading amount and writing. we perform on screens.

The vertical way of writing was not always popular, in the past horizontal writing became famous. Many experiments were conducted to perfect or improve the reading revolution.  Numerous revolutions took place to perfect reading which many people do not see its worth and importance. This is a revolution which contains the history of the book, from manuscript scrolls on papyrus, graffiti on the walls all the way to texts and image on one single screen.

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The effect of the Reading Revolution on the Digital Age

As the years go by revolutions are constantly occurring whether we’re aware of it or not. We are currently in the digital age where almost everyone has a smartphone, tablet, laptop or just some device. But have we ever stop to think of the revolutions which led up to the digital one? I certainly never did, however I recently read an article about the “10 Reading Revolutions before E-books” as class requirement. I believe that this revolution started when our ancestors used symbols and drawing to communicate, even the Mayans and Aztecs used this method. Now we've advance to a universal alphabet. There was the print revolution whereby words and symbols were printed on papyrus or large sheets of paper. In fact they progressed from papyrus to parchment to paper. We have improved further as we now have digital books better known as e-books. Our ancestors were happy to move away from scrolls which were often difficult and messy. Imagine using a scrolls in this age to simply find the definition of words, one may have to go through 10 scrolls, reading each one thoroughly hoping that the definition is somewhere. However the change from scrolls to codex was seen as necessary and much easier. This made reading more encouraging due to its simplicity. But what would our forefathers’ reaction be to an even simpler technology, like the internet? We complain that books are heavy but our ancestors were grateful for such materials. How would we react if went back in time to the centuries of such technology? To some extent have reversed centuries, but we've merely upgraded the system. You are currently scrolling down to continue reading this blog, just as how you would have to open up a scroll. The industrial revolution also occured where massive steam presses printed newspapers and books that was a time consuming and dangerous job. Nonetheless it existed, but in the 21th century there are machines the will print material with little to no human interference. It is truly amazing how every revolution impacted the digital age, because without the alphabet and hieroglyphics there would be nothing to read of the screens. The size of a revolution does not affect the influence. Source: 10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books by Tim Carmody