Review of Kim’s Presentation

In our final Digital Humanities class of the semester those who had not presented their final projects yet had the opportunity to do so. In this blog post I will be reviewing the presentation that was done by Kim that focused on Scottish Migration to Canada. From what I could tell it was very obvious that Kim had spent a great deal of time researching this topic. Right at the beginning of her project she showed the class the page of her website which gave a brief rundown on where many Scottish immigrants came from, why they left, and where they went. On top of that she made it clear that her website was targeted at teenagers who were beginning to show an interest in history. Kim also mentioned that in building her website she tested it out on her roommates who were not history students. I think that this was a great Idea because it allowed her to discover what would and would not work when trying to relay her information.

 

                The website was broken down into areas of the country to where these Scots traveled.  Based on the information that was available, Kim decided to break each section down to Ontario, Quebec, Eastern Provinces, and Western Provinces. Because Ontario and Quebec were the most popular destinations for these travelers the two provinces were able to support their own section. While Scottish settlers did travel to the eastern and western provinces it was not in as large of numbers which is why Kim felt it was easier to bunch them together. I definitely agree with this tactic.

 

                Finally, once students have explored the website fully, Kim offers a resource page which contains a fantastic amount of digital sources that can be used to further someone’s interest in this topic. To help make the search easier Kim was able to find digital newspaper archives and break them up by province. Furthermore, many of these sources link to the library archives of Canada which again helps to continue ones learning.

 

                Overall I thought that Kim did a very good job with her presentation and I am excited to see what the final product of her website will look like. The website was very heavily researched based and the effort she put into this was very evident. As a resources for students just beginning to be interested in history I feel that this could be a great resource.

Crunch Time

Hey everybody!

 

So today the chapbooks group did our class presentation on what we have accomplished so far. The last 48 hours have been very hectic as can be imagined as we all tried to meet with each other as much as possible and make sure that we were all on the same sort of page. At this point we have all completed our scanning and we all have ideas on how we want the exhibit to be displayed. The work that must occur now is making all of those ideas a physical reality. For myself I feel that I have finally been able to get a solid grab on Omeka and what it can offer. While I am not able to do everything that I originally had intended to do, I have been able to manipulate Omeka in some way or another to my liking. I believe this is an issue that is plaguing the group as a whole as many of our original thoughts and ideas of what this exhibit should look like are slowly fading away as we realize the limits of Omeka. Regardless, we will manage and work through this.

 

What’s left for me is a great deal of post processing my jpeg images of the chapbooks.  I know what my website pages will look like, and I have a pretty solid idea of what text will be put in place. What I do not have is aesthetically pleasing images. The process I have created is as follows:

–          Using MS Paint I crop out the section of text that I plan on highlighting in my overall theme

–          I than open MS Photoshop CS6 to rotate the image so that the text becomes straight. Unfortunately many of my images did not scan out completely straight.

–          Once I have done that, I input the image back into MS Paint to draw in my border

–          Next is to upload the image to Omeka and input the metadata

My plan right now is to leave the inputting of the metadata for these images to the very end as it will be a simple task of copy and paste. While time consuming and tedious, it is in no way very difficult. Furthermore I would like to have the physical website ready for Saturday when our group presents at the Scottish Colloquium at the University of Toronto. To make sure that happens I feel that the metadata can be put on hold.

 

We are in crunch time, and the next 3 days leading up to our presentation in Toronto is going to be a whirlwind of group meetings, frustration, and post processing. As I mentioned before, this is my very last assignment which luckily allows me to dedicate as much of my free time as possible to its completion which is something that I am very grateful of because I know some of my other group members are not as fortunate.

 

Until next time.  

It’s Been A While

Hey Guys!

I realized today that it has been close to two weeks since my last project update so I thought I would make a quick little post tonight. The last couple weeks have been very hectic, as I can imagine they have been for everyone as it’s that time of year. In between writing papers and finishing up final projects I have done my best to set aside some time for the Chapbooks project but it has been difficult. The group has continued to have our weekly Thursday meeting which has been incredibly helpful and I can say with confidence that we will be prepared for the Scottish Studies Colloquium at UofT on April 6^th. Tomorrow is going to be a big day for me in terms of this project. I handed in my final paper of the semester today which means I will be able to dedicate all of my time to completing this project. Melissa has been great in terms of her dedication to getting our scanned images onto our shared Google drive. As the library does not want anyone else to have ownership to the master TIFF files that we are creating we must wait for Melissa to convert them to jpegs before we are able to utilize them.  I have booked out the scanning room for tomorrow morning and as long as everything goes smoothly I should have all of my chapbooks scanned by noon. From there I plan to begin uploading my jpegs into Omeka along with the associated metadata. That will be a large chunk of work to complete and once I have done so I can begin focusing on further analyzing my chapbooks and beginning to build my exhibit. There will be a lot of work to complete between now and the time our group presents next Tuesday so I should be kept rather busy.

Until next time.

The Joys of Scanning Chapbooks!

Hey all! Just making a quick update tonight as to how the scanning of my chapbooks has been going. As I mentioned in my last post this week is being dedicated to the scanning of my chapbooks and it is certainly taking up a bit more of my time than I first imagined. Yesterday I spent close to 5 hours in the scanning room and was able to fully complete five chapbooks. Four of the chapbooks were 8 pages long with the last one being 24 pages. Luckily by the time I had reached the longer of the chapbooks I had created a process that made things quicker and had become a lot more comfortable with the tools that I was using. While the scanning process isn’t particularly difficult it is certainly time consuming and I will blog about the few difficulties I ran into:

Firstly, as I mentioned in my last post, these items are very fragile and they require some patience and care when handling them so as not to cause damage. It is hard however to not have flakes of the pages fall off, which going unnoticed, can be seen on the scanned images. When this occurs the scanner must be cleaned down and the image re-scanned.

Another issue that occurred came when attempting to scan chapbooks that have been bound into a collection of multiple chapbooks. These bound collections are about an inch in width and do not flatten very well onto the scanner. This makes it much more difficult to capture a useable image and a great deal of readjustment is sometimes necessary.

My final issue applies more to the larger chapbooks, as I ran into this problem when scanning the 24 page chapbook. Once an image (page) is scanned it is automatically saved into a folder with a specific filename. If you aren’t paying attention when choosing a file name (Each chapbook as its own file name with only the pg # changed) it is easy to get lost and lose track of what exactly has been scanned.

Again not all of these issues are too big of a deal but they certainly add to the “time consuming” aspect that I mentioned earlier. I have about 5 chapbooks left to scan and unfortunately they are all 24 pages long with two of them being in the problematic bound collection. As of right now my hope is to have these done by Friday as long as I spend both Thursday and Friday working on it. Unfortunately I am not the only one in the group who also plans to use this time so some collaboration will certainly be necessary.  

Anyways, so much for the short update. I guess I had more to say than I originally thought. Good luck to everyone this weekend with moving forward on their projects. It blows my mind that the semester is almost over.

Chapbooks Update (Scanning Images)

                Hey All! Today was a busy week for the Chapbooks group as we had our in class presentation on Tuesday, and a very lengthy meeting on Thursday. Having the presentation at the beginning of the week had much of us busy over the weekend putting the finishing touches on our ideas for what we want this chapbook project to be. Each of us had a specific component of the project that we were to discuss in the presentation while also discussing what each of our themes were going to be. It was my responsibility to present Omeka which is the website that we will be hosting our online exhibit on. Omeka has been discussed quite a bit throughout this course and one of the reoccurring comments about the website is how easy it is to use for even the most novice of computer techies. For our chapbooks group however this was not our experience. Thankfully Mellissa once again came to our rescue and was able to give me a brief tutorial on Omeka and I discovered that it was in fact very simple to use, once you got the hang of it. I am excited by what Omeka can offer and the group was informed on Thursday that the library has approved us to upgrade our Omeka page which will supply us with many more themes, gadgets, and space to help us create the most comprehensive exhibit that we can.

 

                After out presentation on Tuesday the group got together in the archives Thursday morning for our weekly meeting. The goal of the meeting was to become familiarized with the scanning process which is going to be an essential part of our project progress this coming week. While the scanning seems rather simple, we have to be reminded that some of the documents we are handling are well over 200 years old so the care and attention that needs to be put into this work is very high. The last thing we want to do is destroy the artifacts that we are trying so hard to preserve and digitize. After we had all become a bit more comfortable with the scanning process it was important to decide on times in which we would all need to book out the room. The scanning room is very popular and we do not have priority over any other project so this may be a problem moving forward with conflicts of timing.

 

                The goal this week is to finalize my pick of chapbooks and begin scanning them. I have booked out a couple hours in the scanning room for Monday afternoon and hope to get the majority of my scanning done during this time. Once I have my scanned images I will be able to begin analyzing the chapbooks and their stories which will allow me to begin building my exhibit. On top of that our group will continue to meet during our regular scheduled class time on Tuesday, as well as at our weekly meetings on Thursday. The goal for the group is to have the majority of our scanning done by the time we meet back up on Thursday.

Chapbooks Project Update (From Feb. 28th)

So after a couple weeks of confusion, frustration, and searching I can comfortably say that I now have something new to write about regarding our class’s final project. I found myself debating for the last few weeks on what I wanted my final project to entail and after sitting in on a meeting for the Scottish Chapbooks project I found my decision to be even harder. While I was excited to create my own digital humanities project I was very intrigued by the Chapbooks project and what it had to offer not only me, but others as well. I knew I would be learning a fair bit about Scottish History (something which I don’t know much about) and I would still have the opportunity to use many different tools and methods which I previously had very little, or no experience of. Also the idea of being part of the beginnings of something which potentially could continue to grow long after I’m graduated intrigued me quite a bit. After coming to these realizations the decision to choose the Chapbooks project was much easier.

Over the last few days I have scoured through the online directory of chapbooks that are held in the Guelph Archives looking for some sort of pattern. I wanted to be able to take a number of articles and be able to compare, contrast, and essentially analyze them. What I discovered after getting to the bottom of the list was that there were a number of categories to choose from. I could look at chapbooks discussing domestic life. I could look at religious pieces, or collections of songs (something which probably makes up over half of the collection). There were a number of chapbooks which looked at battle histories, “true stories”, and biographical life and death stories of a number of different members of royalty. While all of these options were very interesting, and had loads of potential, I eventually settled on focusing of chapbooks that focused on comics and comedic stories. Humour is something that is timeless and I am looking forward to seeing what is contained in these chapbooks and what 18^th and 19^th century Scotland considered to be humour.

This morning a few available members of the chapbooks group met with Melissa McAfee who is the Special Collections Librarian at the University and is heading this project. I feel like we all were able to grasp a better understanding of what is expected from our research and what the final project should essentially look like. While I have no doubt that problems will continue to arise, and more questions will be needing answered by all involved, I am confident that we are all currently on the same page and on the right track to the completion of this project.

After spending most of reading week considering further direction on my final project I have yet to report anything new or exciting so this week’s blog post will pertain to our last class. Social media is something which has completely taken over our society and changed the way people act and behave using the internet. Websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr have allowed people from across the globe to connect to one another with the click of a button. While these sites are great for friends and family who want to connect with each other I feel that the academic community has somewhat ignored the phenomenon. One of the greatest uses that I believe academics could take from such sites as Twitter and Facebook is data collection. On Facebook surveys and questionnaires can be taken by participants and then shared with their friends who will in turn follow the same procedure. By using this method data collectors would be able to obtain large amounts of data in a fraction of the time that has been taken in the past. Twitter would also be useful for researchers by taking advantage of the hashtag function by collecting thoughts and ideas of thousands of users by following a certain hashtagged topic.

Sticking with the topic of Twitter, I decided after our last class to follow the twitter feed @RealTimeWWII for the last two weeks. I was unaware that such feeds were prevalent on Twitter and was even more surprised to go through the list of similar accounts. Twitter is a vast machine that pumps short pieces of information to user’s laptops and smart phones throughout the day. I know myself I sometimes find the amount of information overwhelming at points as it is impossible to keep up with. With the @RealTimeWWII feed however I found myself slowing down, and actually taking a second to acknowledge the tweet that I had just read. In between the sports news, general interest stories, and world news, this feed provides real time updates as if it were still 1941 which had far more of an impact on my twitter experience than I originally thought it would. I’m looking forward to finding more historical feeds to follow which will have a similar impact and I feel that anyone with an avid interest in history could benefit from following accounts like this as well.

My Experience With the CASP

When I first began to look over the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP) (http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/index.cfm)  I was a bit confused. In no way am I involved in theatre or know much about it but when I think of Shakespeare, I have never once thought about his relationship to Canada. This immediately drove an interest in me to discover how and why the two were related. After searching through a few pages on the sites home page I came across the database which gave a very thorough description of what the project was all about with over 530 collections of plays that have been identified as Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare. This blew me away completely. Because of my lack of knowledge on the subject I had expected this number to be low, maybe somewhere around 50, but to scroll through over 600 items was a surprise to say the least.

 

I continued to search throughout the site and came across the multimedia section which contained a great deal of audio and visual material. I have come to realize after almost 6 weeks in this course that these multimedia options are almost essential for any digital humanities project on the internet. The CASP even addresses this issue when they mention that multimedia offers “a more three dimensional sense of the contexts and performance techniques”. Regardless of what type of digital humanities project you are trying to convey, multimedia is an essential tool in the teaching process. For the CASP it is videos and audio from the plays themselves. For a project that focuses on World War II the presenter may want to make available videos, images, and maps of battle. While the content of multimedia may changes from project to project, its importance in use does not.

 

Finally I moved on and explored the App which has been created from this project. One important issue that seems to be constantly readdressed in this course is the idea of survivability of a project. Technology is constantly changing and improving. This statement is especially true for a tool like the internet which is being enhanced on a daily basis. Because of this, it is necessary for digital humanities projects to keep up with this quick pace so that they are not left behind as a website that has not been altered in four or five year will look incredibly outdated to a website of today. It seems that the CASP is aware of this which is evidently shown in the production of this app. Created for the IOS platform (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/romeo-juliet-the-shakespeare/id465502527?ls=1&mt=8), this app demonstrates how digital humanities projects are doing their part to stay relevant in an ever changing world of technology. By browsing through the Apple store it is evident that the CASP is not the only one who is attempting to break into the app market and it is my guess that this number will continue to grow.

Possible Final Project Idea

              Since this course began I have been juggling some ideas on what exactly my final project should entail as the possibilities seem like they could be endless. Very early on I thought that it would be interesting to incorporate some sort of website into the project. I had done some website design for classes in high school and for an online course my first year here at Guelph and while I’m definitely no master at html and web design I thought it would be something fun and challenging to pursue. The next decision to make however was what type of website I was going to design. I’m a pretty avid sports fan and thought that revolving a website around sports could be a possibility yet I didn’t just want to make another fan site that would be no different than the countless amount that are already on the internet. I also wasn’t exactly sure how I could attack the idea in a historical sense. I thought about possibly creating a web site that tackled the ’72 Summit Series between Canada and Russia. I mulled over the idea of doing a website revolving the history of a league or storied franchise. Every idea I came up with however brought me back to square one with the problem of how I could make it original. Following yesterday’s class on the use of Google Earth however I was struck with a new Idea of somehow incorporating a website that would coincide with GIS and Google Earth.

 

                The idea came to me when I was searching for KMZ files that could be downloaded into Google Earth. While there were countless of options I choose to download a file that would show key battles in Europe during World War II but was disappointed once I began to explore what I was looking at. While the file did indeed plot on Google Earth key battles that occurred during the war that was about all that I was given. When I would click on any particular plot it would just tell me the name of the battle and nothing else. No information on the winner of the battle, no key historical points, no statistics on lives lost, nothing. It dawned on me that if I were to create something similar to this on Google Earth I would want to be able to direct interested searchers somewhere on the internet that would give them more information should they feel a need to look. If I were able to create a website or webpage that could link with the plot on Google Earth I would be able to provide a great deal more of information.

 

                As I continued to look for different downloadable KMZ files based around wars and battles I noticed a great deal of variety for World War II and conflicts that the Americans involved themselves in but not much concerning Canadians. I than thought that it would be cool, were I to continue with this project plan, to possibly create a Google Earth KMZ file and Website that would focus strictly on the War of 1812 with battles that occurred along what is now the Canadian and US Boarders.

 

                While this is in no way a definite plan quite yet it is the first real serious idea that I have come up with and would be more than happy to hear about any comments or ideas that you guys had.

Blog Post #3: My Introduction to GIS

When getting started on this assignment I wasn’t quite sure where I should begin. I had not really encountered GIS mapping all that much in an academic sense and felt that it was going to be a daunting subject to understand.  I decided to start by looking at Josh MacFadyen’s (http://niche-canada.org/node/10564) article on the NICHE website regarding remote sensing and historical GIS and was immediately impressed with how well he was able to  explain the connection between mapping and how it can be used to help historians. I was surprised to discover that Canada was in fact considered a leader in aerial photography and had a collection of 6 million images that were mostly accessible online. After continuing with my research I began to get a better understanding of how useful aerial photos could in fact be. By looking at a collection of photos from a certain city or region historians are able to see the progression of the landscape over time. The Example that MacFadyen used was of Prince Edward Island and the rate of erosion on a specific area due to the construction of a causeway.

After exhausting my search efforts with Macfadyen I began to look for information on Anne Kelly Knowles which led me to this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X4Kesl7NnU) and this article from Smithsonian Magazine (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Looking-at-the-Battle-of-Gettysburg-Through-Robert-E-Lees-Eyes-180014191.html). Knowles seems to be one of the leaders in the field of historical GIS and her work on General Lee and Auschwitz immediately jumped out at me. While MacFadyen and Knowles are both attempting to take GIS and use it for historical study, they are doing so in two very different ways which to me shows how diverse and useful these tools could be in certain aspects of historical research.

Now that I felt a bit more comfortable with the whole GIS concept I went to search for other projects in humanities that have used GIS. I have always found it interesting to look at old satellite images to see how areas and regions had progressed over time which is why I found MacFadynes article interesting. At the end of his article he provided a link to a collection of images from the University of Waterloo and their Air Photos Digitization Project (http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/locations/umd/project/index.html) so I decided to begin exploring there. The website was very easy to work as users just had to pick a particular part of the region to receive satellite images from different decades spanning quite a few years.