Category: Project

PROJECT: Selfiecity

Selfiecity “investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods.” The project, led by Lev Manovich, Mortiz Stefaner and several others, is a collection 3,200 “selfies” collected from five cities around the globe that critically examine a particular type of new media to reveal demographic and other patterns. The site includes an interactive interface allowing users to quickly browse the photos based on certain characteristics as well as three essays that theoretically ground the project in the history of photography and cultural analysis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

PROJECT: Calling All Walt Whitman Fans

The Chief Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, issued a call to assist The Walt Whitman Archive at the University of Nebraksa-Lincoln  in discovering new Walt Whitman documents. In 2011, the Archive discovered 3,000 documents penned by the famous author during his years working as a clerk in the Office of the Attorney General, and there are believed to be more of these documents hidden in archives and special collections across the country:

Please check your files for documents coming from the Office of the Attorney General from July 1865 to December 1871 and from the Office of the Solicitor of the Treasury from December 1871 to March 1873. Whitman’s handwriting is quite distinctive. Examples of his handwriting can be found in the “scribal documents” section of The Whitman Archive.

PROJECT: Mapping Books: Charting Former Owners of Penn’s Codex Manuscripts

Mitch Fraas shared his project leveraging library data “to visually display networks of provenance in our manuscript collection” at the University of Pennsylvania. Fraas offers insights on how he was able to transform MARC records into a visual map to learn more about previous owners of some of Penn’s manuscript collections and shares some of his future plans:
Finally and perhaps most exciting of all, I’m just now in the process of working through the data and the visualizations to suggest manuscripts which, in the absence of visible or recorded evidence, might have been owned by a particular person or institution based on similar chains of provenance. I hope to make all of this data available through our institutional repository at some point and I’d love to hear from others engaged in similar projects – and I hope this piece will encourage others to begin taking a look at how they might be able to use the detailed metadata created by generations of librarians.

PROJECT: NYPL Labs Building Inspector

The New York Public Library Labs team launched Building Inspector last week, an app that extracts, corrects, and analyzes data from fire insurance maps from the 1850s and 1860s. The Building Inspector presents a computer-generated outline of a building and asks the user to decide whether the outline matches the actual building. This user input allows the app to better process map data, which is, according to Wired, “part of a bigger strategy to make the library’s awesome collection of maps a gateway into its other collections.” In an early review, Ed Summers (Library of Congress) describes how the app represents a clever way for cultural heritage institutions to use the web to engage users in fun and interesting ways.

PROJECT: The History Education Pilot Takes Off

The European Association of History Educators (EUROCLIO) is collaborating on a project aimed at re-using the digitized cultural heritage resources of Europeana.

The history education pilot will offer history educators easy-to-find and free-to-use educational resources (sources, learning activities and tools) that are designed to stimulate historical thinking, multiperspectivity and active learning.

The focus of the history education pilot will be on the re-use of content that is relevant for the First World War. Material will be selected from Europeana projects, such as Europeana1914-1918 and the European Digital Film Gateway and used for the development of learning activities. The sources and learning activities are organised around content areas that highlight different aspects of the war, such as “Experiencing and Reporting the War” and “Remembering the War”.

The project is part of Europeana Creative, which “sets the stage for fascinating collaborations between content-providing cultural heritage institutions and creative industries stakeholders in the education, tourism, social networks and design sectors.”

PROJECT: Suppose There’s Some Connection: Visualizing Character Interactions in Ulysses for Bloomsday 2013

Amanda Visconti, Rhonda Armstrong, Regina Higgins, Steven Hoelscher, and Pamela Andrews have used Gephi to create visualizations of the network of character relationships in Ulysses. Each person examined 10 pages of the text for seven types of character interactions, such as “character thinking of another character” or “character observing another character.” Visconti also provides a useful list of “areas for further study” as well as links to the data used for the project.

POST: Bringing Hidden Collections to Light with Viewshare

In an interview on The Signal conduced by Camille Salas, Julie Miller, historian at the Library of Congress, discusses her work creating a Viewshare “view,” a project that examines 18th and 19th century maritime documents. As a collection, these clearances, bills of health, receipts of payments of customs and lighthouse duties, bills of lading, and ship passports can reveal larger stories about war and empire, diplomacy, slavery, epidemics, revolutions, privateers and pirates. Miller explains how Viewshare assisted her exploration of the documents:

When I built a map and created tag clouds and lists, the dominance of Baltimore became obvious, as did its trade with Caribbean ports, especially the French colony of Saint Domingue, today, Haiti. Viewshare made it possible to see that these documents were not miscellaneous at all, but instead constitute a rich and meaningful collection.

Miller’s discussion of her work and process in preparing the project is a useful case study for one way that that libraries and cultural heritage organizations can use relatively simple digital tools to connect collections with new users and provide new ways of looking at materials.

PROJECT: The Dinner Party Wikipedia Project

Alexandra Thom of the Brooklyn Museum discusses her experience with The Dinner Party Wikipedia project. The Dinner Party is an installation by Judy Chicago featuring the names of 1,038 women in history, and the project aimed to provide Wikipedia citations for all 1,038 women. Thom discusses the challenges she faced in the project, both in the existing historical record and resistance to her efforts to amend the record from her fellow Wikipedia editors. She states, “I would argue that there is very limited information on many of these historical women because in their lifetimes, their accomplishments were probably deemed unworthy of recording for the sake of posterity. Their accomplishments were also often attributed incorrectly to men…Now, we have the opportunity to give these women their due by recording what we know about their lives in Wikipedia, the most public, accessible source available today.”

PROJECT: Founders Online

The National Archives has beta launched Founders Online, a collection of over 119,000 transcribed and annotated documents from six of the major shapers of the United States: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton. The site, a cooperation between National Historical Publications and Records Commission and the University of Virginia Press, allows users to perform full text searches across the corpus, as well as to browse by author, recipient, and time period. The site is built on a MarkLogic database and application server.

Founders Online draws on the tremendous transcription and annotation undertaken by “the editorial staffs of the six Founding Fathers projects at the University of Virginia, University of Chicago, Princeton University, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, and Yale University.” Printed volumes were digitized, rekeyed, and marked up in TEI by the University of Virginia Press. For more information, see the site’s FAQ section.

PROJECT: Current Happenings in Digital Humanities

What’s new in Digital Humanities? Matthew Kirschenbaum tasked his undergraduate English class (ENGL668K) at the University of Maryland with a critical curation assignment “to provide primary and secondary documentation answering the question, ‘What has happened in digital humanities that hadn’t yet happened on January 22, 2013 (the day before we started our class)?'” The resulting website brings together myriad resources and interpretations, including a timeline of “significant events that took place in the history of libraries, archives, and museums” in early 2013 and a Zotero group library.

As Kirschenbaum comments: “This site strikes me as a “cabinet of curiosities” in the best tradition of the Web, that is rather than a unified, coherent body of content it is willfully (and necessarily) partial, eclectic, diversified, and subjective.”

PROJECT: Museums and the Web

The 17th annual Museums and the Web, an “annual conference featuring advanced research and exemplary applications of digital practice for cultural, natural and scientific heritage,” was held in Portland, Oregon, April 17-20, 2013.

The winners of the MW2013 Best of the Web contest are posted, and feature an excellent selection of sites and applications that make use of narrative, animation, audio or video, and complex interaction with content that “move museum experiences out of the institution and into the realm of the user.”

Proceedings are forthcoming, and videos from the conference are being posted to the MW YouTube channel, including the Opening Plenary by Larry Friedlander, “When the Rare Becomes Commonplace: Challenges for Museums in a Digital Age.”