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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...