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Collections Reading Response
The process of finding the sources and uploading it to Omeka proved to be not a simple task. Not only did you have to find primary sources but you also had to make sure that you described it correctly to the best of your ability and in a standard way. I learned this in more detail through the article, “Metadata: An Introduction” by JISC Digital Media. By doing that exercise, it not only help me to prepare for my project by having some sources but also have me think more deeply as to what sources I want to show my audience. I knew that I wanted to collect newspaper articles,…
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A Summary of Audience, Dialogue, and Co-Creation
In this past module I have learned concepts that will help me improve my final project in the upcoming weeks. For example, in the article, Creating a Dialogic Museum : The Chinatown History Museum Experiment by John Kuo Wei Tchen, I learned that it is not only important to know what the historical topics that you wish to show your audience but also how to engage and include them in the exhibit. Tchen discussed the importance of engaging the correct audience whether it’s Chinese New Yorkers, non-Chinese New Yorkers, East Side, Upper West Side, etc. To know your audience is to know how to engage them. Making it interactive will…
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User Research Findings
I am still trying to figure out what exactly my final project should be on and how I’m going to do it in terms of software. I do know that I would like to do some kind of historical reenactment game. Even though I’m smoothing out the rough edges of my final project ideas, this exercise of interviewing subjects was beneficial in my thought-process. I was able to interview two 20-somethings from the background of history and computer science/computer games to get their opinions about the two fields and why. Their responses proved valuable as I am now taking away comments that will help me build a better project. A…
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Physical/Digital Site Comparative Review: Ford’s Theatre
For this assignment I traveled to Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. and went to the Museum inside. I decided that this would be a good place to study for this project because of its historical content and fame but also what it’s digital presence is currently. The audience could be identified as persons wanting to know more historical background of Lincoln, his life, the Civil War, and his assassination, and death. They could very well be audience member who was able to have a free ticket to the museum with their purchase of a show performance and it is available to them one hour before the show starts. I was…
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Survey of the Field
The field of Digital Public History (DPH) has changed dramatically over the past twenty years. With the rise of the Internet and all the new technologies and software being developed, it has made the DPH field reevaluate how they are displaying their information to the public. Based on the activity of comparing digital exhibits from the late 1990s to 2014, one can see how the format and finding the right audience and has changed. The era of all text and reading page after page has become extinct and in favor of more interactive pages that the audience can get more excited about. The qualities that I believe should of markers…
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Response to “Whose Public? Whose History?” Reading
In Ronald J. Grele’s “Whose Public? Whose History? What is the Goal of Public History?” Grele makes various arguments as to how and why the history profession in the sense of academia to public history has evolved over time. The field of history has changed from a person studying historical events and people to oneself or to a group of students only to sharing that historical knowledge to a variety of people and in different ways. Grele makes a clear succinct definition of public history towards the end of the article by stating, “[t]hus the task of the public historian, broadly defined, should be to help members of the public…
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Roots of Public History Introduction
I am currently in my second semester at George Mason University in the Masters in History program. I’ve had some experience conducting digital humanities work, by taking the HIST 680 Intro to Digital Humanities course offered in this certificate and my work as a student aide in my undergraduate career at the University of Mary Washington in the Digital Archiving Lab. My interest in digital public history is that with my background in both history and computer science, I want to learn more about combining the two fields to the public’s benefit. I’m still learning what digital public history is so in the next few weeks I can’t wait to…
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Doing Digital Humanities
Looking back at this digital humanties project that I completed at the end of my first semester in graduate school has proved a positive but at times challenging learning experience. I used the Watergate Special Prosecution Force Transcripts from the years 1971 to 1973. Imported the transcribed PDFs into Voyant 2.4. During my initial take at this project, I thought that it would be a simple idea of just importing the transcript PDFs and see what I get as an output. As I used the Voyant tool more, I realized two important lessons:1. I needed to rename the PDFs so that I can understand what day the transcript is referring…
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Circling the drain Project:1971 Watergate Transcripts
To look at the whole view of the 1971 Watergate transcripts visit here. This first image below is of an unfiltered/unaltered world cloud of transcripts from April to October of 1971. On initial glance of the graph below, notice that the words “president,” “ehrlichman,” “haldeman,” “unintelligible,” and “uh” are larger than the other words. This could mean that in the transcripts, these people are talking or they are being talked about. Two words mean that the words that were spoken were unintelligible to the transcriber and thus written down as such and the “uh” is a word that was spoken during these conversations many times. From this moment on, I took…
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CIRCLING THE DRAIN PROJECT:1973 WATERGATE TRANSCRIPTS
If you wish to view the whole Voyant GUI for 1973, click here The StreamGraph shows the frequency of the words throughout the corpus. In the Reader view below, you can see the frequency of the words by hovering over the words. The bar graph at the bottom shows how long the documents are and can be compared between each other. In the TermsRadio visualization below, it shows the frequency of the words throughout the documents in this case over time. You can click on a word to see how the word fluctuates over time.