Born Digital: From Archives to Maps

Below are links to the tools, data, instructions, and examples I mentioned in my talk on building digital humanities projects, given at SUNY New Paltz on December 3rd in the Honors College.

Digital Archives:

Tool: Omeka: https://www.omeka.net/

Data: “Civil Rights—A Long Road”: http://tinyurl.com/civilrightsimg

Instructions: http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/up-and-running-with-omeka

Example: 19^th Century Disability Studies: http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/

Digital Editions:

Tool: Juxta Editions: http://www.juxtaeditions.com/

Data: The Strand Magazine: https://archive.org/details/StrandMagazine9

and Sherlock Holmes full text: https://sherlock-holm.es/stories/plain-text/advs.txt

Instructions: http://sherlockholmeslondondh.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/juxta/
Example: “The Five Orange Pips”: https://www.juxtaeditions.com/documents/304

Distant Reading:

Tool: Topic Modeling Tool: https://topic-modeling-tool.googlecode.com/files/TopicModelingTool.jar

Data: State of the Union addresses: http://tinyurl.com/stateofunionzip

Instructions: http://sherlockholmeslondondh.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/topic-modeling/

Example: Mining the Dispatch: http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/

 Visualizations:

Tools:  Voyant: http://voyant-tools.org/

Data: “Scandal in Bohemia”: https://sherlock-holm.es/stories/plain-text/scan.txt

 

Tool: Google Fusion: http://tables.googlelabs.com/

Data: NCES Education Data (2013): https://inventory.data.gov/dataset/032e19b4-5a90-41dc-83ff-6e4cd234f565/resource/38625c3d-5388-4c16-a30f-d105432553a4

Instructions (for Fusion): https://support.google.com/fusiontables/answer/184641?hl=en

Example: https://sites.google.com/site/fusiontablestalks/stories

 GIS:

Tool: Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps

Instructions: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3045850?hl=en

Example: Mapping Ulysses: https://sites.google.com/site/notesonjamesjoyce/map

Digital History: Archives, Mapping, and Visualizations

Below are links from my 10/22 talk on Digital History.

 Archives:

Papers of the War Department: http://wardepartmentpapers.org/index.php

Emergence of Advertising in America:
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/eaa/
Votes for Women:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/naw/nawshome.html

Victorian Dictionary: http://www.victorianlondon.org/index-2012.htm

Proceedings of the Old Bailey: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

 Mapping:

Locating London’s Past: http://www.locatinglondon.org/

Mapping the Republic of Letters: http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/

Invasion of America: http://invasionofamerica.ehistory.org/

Slave Revolt in Jamaica: http://revolt.axismaps.com/project.html

Spread of Slavery: http://lincolnmullen.com/projects/slavery/

Visualizing Emancipation: http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation/

Voting America: United States Politics, 1840-2008: http://dsl.richmond.edu/voting/

 3D Models:

Rome Reborn: http://romereborn.frischerconsulting.com/gallery-current.php

Virtual Paul’s Cross Project: http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/

 Multimedia Archives:

Roaring Twenties, historical soundscape: http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/index.php?project=98

Library of Congress, Recorded Sound Reference Center: http://www.loc.gov/rr/record/onlinecollections.html

 Resources:

Doing DH: http://history2014.doingdh.org/readings-and-resources/sites/

Programming Historian: http://programminghistorian.org/

Spatial History Project: http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/index.php

ARC: http://idhmc.tamu.edu/arcgrant/nodes/

Digital Anthropology Links

Here are the links from my 10/1 talk on Digital Anthropology:

Archives:

DAACS (Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery): http://www.daacs.org/

Digital Himalaya Project: http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/

Inuvialuit Living History: http://www.inuvialuitlivinghistory.ca/

Rome Reborn: A Digital Model of Ancient Rome: http://romereborn.frischerconsulting.com/

Chaco Research Archive: http://www.chacoarchive.org/cra/

World Oral Literature Project: http://www.oralliterature.org/

Digitized Diseases: http://www.digitiseddiseases.org/alpha/

3D Printing:

West African Pipe Bowl, Model: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:184617

Cornell Creative Machines Lab: http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/cuneiform

Pedagogy:

DART: Digital Anthropology Resources for Teaching: http://www.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/research/dart/dart.aspx

eFossils: http://efossils.org/

Tools for Creating Digital Projects:

Omeka: http://omeka.org/

StoryMaps: http://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/

MapBox: https://www.mapbox.com/

Google Fusion Tables: http://tables.googlelabs.com/

Google Maps: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3045850?hl=en

Digital Humanities in English Departments: Beyond the Boundary of the Book

Here are the links for projects and tools from my 9/30 workshop at the Honors Center at SUNY New Paltz.

Mapping:

Mapping Ulysses:

https://sites.google.com/site/notesonjamesjoyce/map

Mapping the Lakes: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/mappingthelakes/

Map And Plan Collection Online: http://mapco.net/

Visualizations:

Visualizing Heart of Darkness: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/analytics/manyeyes/visualize/joseph-conrad-heart-of-darkness-wi/versions/1

Voyant: (Shakespeare): http://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=shakespeare&stopList=stop.en.taporware.txt

Archives/Editions:

Women’s archives:

Orlando Project: http://orlando.cambridge.org/

Women Writers Project: http://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/wwo/

Multimedia archives:

Global Shakespeare: http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/

PennSound: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/

Individual archives:

Willa Cather Archive: http://cather.unl.edu/

Walt Whitman Archive: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/

Archives of Journals:

The Making of America: http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/

Modernist Journals Project: http://modjourn.org/journals.html

History:

Old Bailey Online: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

BRANCH Collective (Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History): http://www.branchcollective.org/

 Resources:

Juxta Editions: http://www.juxtaeditions.com

ARC: http://idhmc.tamu.edu/arcgrant/nodes/

Digital Pedagogy Workshop

Below are links to the tools, projects, and resources I presented in a workshop on Digital Pedagogy at SUNY New Paltz.

Updated:  Here’s a link to a video of my talk: http://sites.newpaltz.edu/tlc/2014/09/go-to-recording/

Tools, Projects, and Resources

 Online discussion:

Google Docs: http://www.docs.google.com

Annotation Studio: http://www.annotationstudio.org/

NowComment: http://nowcomment.com/

Visualization:

Voyant Tools: http://voyant-tools.org/

ManyEyes: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/analytics/labs/manyeyes/

Prism: http://prism.scholarslab.org/

Mapping:

Placing Literature: http://www.placingliterature.com/

Assigning Online Archives:

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

Library of Congress, Recorded Sound Reference Center: http://www.loc.gov/rr/record/onlinecollections.html

Branch Collective: http://www.branchcollective.org/

Victorian Dictionary: http://www.victorianlondon.org/index-2012.htm

Student Projects:

Following the River (by Adi Fracchi): http://tinyurl.com/followingriver

Additional Resources:

ARC nodes (for peer-reviewed digital projects): http://idhmc.tamu.edu/arcgrant/nodes/

DiRT (Digital Research Tools): http://dirtdirectory.org/

Digital Humanities Questions and Answers: http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/

DHSI class on Digital Pedagogy: http://dhsi.org/courses.php

Blogs/Journals:

Hybrid Pedagogy: http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/

Twitter, #digiped: https://twitter.com/hashtag/digiped

Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy: http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

New Job, New Blog

For the final two years of my time as a graduate student at the University of Virginia, I  blogged about digital humanities, Victorian literature, and sound studies at http://anglophileinacademia.blogspot.com/.  I really enjoyed using the Blogspot framework, but now that I’m no longer in graduate school, I wanted to create a new blog that will also function as my academic portfolio.  So, welcome to the new incarnation of “Anglophile in Academia.”

For those of you new to my work, here’s some information about me.  I’m Annie Swafford (although I publish under my full name, Joanna Swafford), and I’m the Assistant Professor for Interdisciplinary and Digital Teaching and Scholarship at the State University of New York, New Paltz. It’s a great college in the Hudson Valley that focuses on undergraduate education and research.  I’m teaching two sections of an interdisciplinary 19th century Digital Humanities class (see http://sherlockholmeslondondh.wordpress.com/ or @DHM293 for details) in the Fall, and I’ll be teaching it again alongside an interdisciplinary Victorian literature and culture class in the Spring.  For more specific details on my educational background, publications, and other information, check out my Curriculum Vitae.

As a graduate student, I built two digital humanities tools to facilitate music and literary scholarship:  Songs of the Victorians, an archive and analysis of parlor and art song settings of Victorian poems with an interactive framework that highlights each measure of a score in time with its music, and Augmented Notes, a tool that lets users build their own interdisciplinary websites like Songs of the Victorians.  (To find out more about these tools, see https://annieswafford.wordpress.com/digital-humanities-projects/).

I’ll be posting updates about the development of these tools, my experiences teaching an undergraduate intro to DH course, and my time as a new faculty member on my blog, so please follow me here and on Twitter (@annieswafford).  Also, please comment! I’d love to hear from you.

 

"Songs of the Victorians" at the MLA

I presented “Songs of the Victorians” and “Augmented Notes” at the MLA on Friday on panel 207, “Diversifying the Victorian Verse Archive.”  Phyllis Weliver, who organized the panel, presented first, and Yopie Prins concluded our session, with Meredith Martin moderating.  Phyllis spoke about audio recordings of Tennyson reading his poetry and on how his wife’s musical settings of his verse can give modern readers a sense of Tennyson’s desired meter, since both musical settings and audio recordings expand our conventional understanding of Victorian verse.  I built on Phyllis’ justification of musical settings of poetry as legitimate grounds for scholarly inquiry and explained how traditional print media is insufficient for discussing musical settings or archival preservation by demonstrating what “Songs of the Victorians” and “Augmented Notes” have to offer (you can read my paper here).  Yopie then presented on musical settings of Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break” using “Songs of the Victorians”:  an updated version of her article on these settings, originally published in the excellent collection Meter Matters, was added to “Songs of the Victorians” for the presentation, and she used it to demonstrate the need for new publishing platforms to examine the expanded Victorian verse archive.  She plans to ultimately add this article as a permanent part of “Songs of the Victorians.”

This leads me to my new update:  I have decided to begin the process of turning “Songs of the Victorians” into a 19th century sound studies journal.  If any of my readers are interested in submitting content to be considered, please contact me (jes8zv@virginia.edu).

Our panel had an enthusiastic and invigorating question and answer period in spite of the hour (the panel began at 8:30am), rounding out our session.  Overall, it was an excellent experience, and I’m grateful for all the feedback we received and for the interest in nineteenth-century musico-literary studies.

On THATCampVA and Augmented Notes

On Friday and Saturday, I attended THATCampVA held here at the Scholars’ Lab in Charlottesville, VA.  It was a wonderful experience!  In case anyone is unfamiliar with the idea of THATCamp, it’s an “unconference,” where people who share an interest in digital humanities come together to share ideas and projects in an informal setting.  Rather than conventional conferences, where people read papers and attend pre-scheduled panels, at an unconference, people pitch panel ideas both online in the days before the event and in person, and the panels are then scheduled on the spot.  The panels often have someone leading the discussion or demonstrating a tool, but the majority of the time focuses on everyone sharing their ideas:  essentially, everyone is a panelist.  I attended a very informative session on digital pedagogy on Saturday morning in which we discussed such tools as NowComment, class wikis, class-wide digital projects, and helping undergraduates cultivate their digital presence.  At another great session, we learned to make twitterbots, and I created my own based on one designed by Wayne Graham.  During lunch, we all heard some #dorkshorts, in which attendees have three minutes to demonstrate a digital project.  We heard fascinating presentations on the new design and features of the Collective Biographies of Women project and QLTP, a project that helps people create editions of Latin texts.  I also presented on “Augmented Notes” and “Songs of the Victorians” during this time, and got some great feedback.  In the afternoon I attended a really interesting panel on tools to analyze audio.  THATCampVA was wonderful, and I’m glad I was able to participate.

In other digital news, the code for “Augmented Notes” is now up on GitHub. If you want to look at how it works and to play with it, you can fork it and make any changes you want!  Also, I added a new feature:  on the “Box Drawing” page, users can now click on the “Align Boxes” to make all boxes the same height.  This should help produce a cleaner archive page for those who wish their boxes to be uniform.

Augmented Notes Has a Sandbox

I have two important pieces of news regarding “Augmented Notes“:  first, I have straightened out the domain name glitches, so visiting http://www.augmentednotes.com will no longer redirect you to http://augnotes.appspot.com.  Second, I have added a sandbox feature so that users who want to try “Augmented Notes” do not have to have their own files.  Simply click here or go to the “Augmented Notes” homepage and click where it says “Click here.”  Users will be taken to a site with sample files of Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C major (BWV 846) (audio recording performed by Martha Goldstein).  Users can then draw a box around each measure, set the exact end time for each measure, and then click “download zip file” to get a zip file with the html, css, and javascript files necessary for an archive page like those at “Songs of the Victorians.”

Please try it out, and let me know what you think! I’d love to hear your feedback!

Invited Talk on Augmented Notes

On Friday, I had the honor of giving a talk, called “From the Parlor to the Laptop: Victorian Lyrics and Digital Tools,” at Columbia University about Songs of the Victorians and Augmented Notes.  Alex Gil, the Digital Scholarship Coordinator there and fellow Praxis Program alum, invited me as part of Studio@Butler’s digital humanities speaker series.  I really enjoyed the format of the afternoon:  first, I delivered my talk and we had a question and answer session, and then, after a short break, we reconvened for a workshop in which I walked the participants through making their own website with Augmented Notes.

In my talk, I first explained the purpose and rationale behind building Songs of the Victorians, demonstrated the how archive and analysis pages work, and explained the design principles that governed the project.  Then, I shifted to a discussion of Augmented Notes.  I explained that I wanted to help other scholars build sites like Songs of the Victorians without needing the programming experience that I had to develop.  I demonstrated how I took my initial project and built a generalized, public humanities tool to help further scholarship and pedagogy.  I also gave a brief demo of the tool, which I showed off in more depth in the workshop.  The tool has changed slightly since I last wrote about it on this blog, so here is the new order of the steps:

1. Users upload three things to make an archive page: ogg and mp3 audio files (an ogg is necessary because firefox can’t play mp3 files) and pages of the score. Users can optionally upload an MEI file.
2. The site then takes users to a page where they click and drag to draw boxes around each measures (they can also edit the sizes and order of these boxes); these boxes are what highlights each measure in time with the music.

Box Drawing Page: Boxes are red as they are being drawn (through clicking and dragging) and grey once they have been created.  Users can edit the boxes by changing their size and order and also delete them.

3. The site then takes users to a page to set the time data:  they hit the “save” button at the exact second each measure ends to record that time.  The site brings together the measure and time information, which enables each measure of the song to be highlighted in time with the music.

Time Edit: Users click on the “save” button at the exact end of every measure, which records that time in the open boxes at the right.

4. Users then click “Download zip” to download a zip file with the html, css, and javascript files necessary for a complete archive page, which they can then style themselves. A sample resulting html file is below:

I was very grateful for all the fascinating suggestions and feedback I received in the question and answer period.  Some people suggested that I should consider altering the box-drawing tool to let users draw any shape they want:  this would let users circle individual notes and entire phrases.  At some point, I would love to add this functionality, although I will not have time to build it until next fall, because I am currently teaching, finishing my dissertation, and going on the job market.  I was also pleased to hear that some people are planning to use my tool for the classroom, especially in music appreciation or introductory music classes to help beginning music students follow along.

If you have any comments on the new features in Augmented Notes or ideas for future features, please do let me know! I’d love to hear your feedback!