I really enjoyed this course. There was a lot of content, but it was broken up into very manageable pieces. Additionally, it was cool to use blog posts as our way to post assignments. It allowed me to explore the thoughts of my fellow students in a much easier way than it would have been if I could only see the things in their discussion posts.
My suggestion for an improvement for the course would be to provide more resources for the some of the assignments, as well as a suggested time period to work on them. Some weeks, the assignments were easy to do in one day, while others needed more days to work on.
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For our final project in this course, some of my fellow students chose to do a transcription project just as I did. One such was Susan Moore, who chose to transcribe a part of the Library of Congress's Walt Whitman collection. Her transcription was very well done. She did a fantastic job deciphering some things that I could not, and followed the guidelines to a T. I think I'll be browsing this collection in the future, so it's great that she chose to contribute to it.
The Library of Virginia has a project called Transcribe. Transcribe is a user participation project in which volunteers help to transcribe documents from Virginia’s history. I chose to participate in this project and transcribe some grave records.
I chose this project because it seemed pretty straightforward. I looked through lots of different projects, and a lot of them had handwriting that was really difficult for me to read. Although this project was still quite difficult to read, the fact that each row had consistent data, it was much easier for me. Each row had the following information: month and day of death; name; age in years, months, and days; address of death; cause of death; number of section and grave; undertaker; price in dollars and cents; and expense in dollars and cents. I honestly didn’t understand what all of the information meant. For example, I have no idea what the difference between price and expense were. However, I don’t think it’s all that important. I checked over what I typed a few times to make sure everything was correct. Not only did I want to make sure I was transcribing things correctly, such as correct spelling, but I also know that I have a tendency to mistype when I’m typing quickly. Furthermore, for the causes of death, I double-checked with google to be sure I was listing things correctly, as many of the causes of death were diseases that I wasn’t exactly sure of the spelling of. I found this project to be rather challenging, but I enjoyed it. I think I may do more in the future with this specific project, as I know many people find data entry to be tedious, but I rather enjoy it. I think the project benefitted from my work for that same reason. This week I read Donna Vojvodich’s timeline on the history of Spar Officer Company 10. I personally previously knew nothing about Spar Officer Companies. I found this timeline to be very interesting!
User participation projects are projects that are driven by volunteer participation. Famously, Wikipedia is one such project. With over 100,000 contributors each month, Wikipedia would collapse were it not for the volunteers. Lots of user participation projects, especially online, exist. Two such projects are the Old Weather project and the Library of Virginia’s Transcribe project.
The Old Weather project was a user participation project that aimed to transcribe and document old weather observations from ship logs from the 19th century through World War Two. Although this project is completed, the entry page for volunteers is still accessible. Volunteers would have to transcribe dates, longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates, and weather data, from several pages. This project was incredibly important, as it allowed 14 million new pieces of weather data to become accessible to weather and climate scientists. This is extremely beneficial to potential projects surrounding climate change. See the results here. The Library of Virginia’s Transcribe project is a user participation project that aims to transcribe historical documents that are important to Virginia’s history. The current projects include the identification of individuals in photos, transcription of court documents, and records from a church. This project is super important because history was documented on paper, but paper won’t last forever. This story map was incredibly informative. With extensive research and clear definitions in the introduction, it was easy to understand and experience what was going on.
The use of a story map was a very effective medium for this project. With each section focusing on a different aspect of the fight against fracking in a different part of the world, I felt connected to people I've never met. Some of the things that stood out to me were as follows:
The idea of visualizing data is something that's been beneficial for all of time. Although most people can read numbers, understanding a bunch of numbers in a chart can be confusing and rather difficult. Visualizing data also allows people to draw comparisons more easily.
One such comparison that I would consider interesting to create a visualization of is the data presented by Virginia's Department of Elections and Arlington's American Community Survey Overview. Arlington's data set is from 2005-2009, and encompasses many things such as education, employment, income, poverty, family size, race, and more. I think the comparison between this data and data from elections could be interesting, because it could give insight into what types of people voted in what ways over the course of time. A visualization that I found to be particularly interesting was one I found on the World Bank website. This visualization, shown below, display the gender disparity in school enrollment for primary and secondary schools. A darker blue means the ratio is closer to 1:1, while a lighter blue means it is less. It would also interest me to compare this with other visualizations to see if any factors correlate to a higher disparity. As a student in a course, I have the privilege of exploring the work done by my classmates. Our most recent project, an online exhibit on a topic of our choice, allowed all of us a lot of freedom to create an interesting look into something new. In exploring the work of my classmates, I happened upon the “Nobel Prize Winning Women” Exhibit.
With extremely in depth explanations of the backgrounds and legacies of these women, Ms. Bires’s exhibit was amazing. It’s clear an extensive amount of work was put into each page of the exhibit. As a writer myself, I particularly enjoyed the page on Selma Lagerlöf. I’d not known anything about her before reading, but I’m really interested in looking into her works, specifically “The Miracles of Antichrist.” Ms. Bires also put together a Pinterest board. The descriptions of the images in each category are equally as descriptive and informative as the exhibit. I highly recommend checking out both of her collections. I’ve personally not often thought about the non-reality that’s present due to the digital world’s existence. In our previous project, creating a digital exhibit, however, it did strike me. Compiling images of newspapers, especially, felt unfulfilling compared to how it would feel curating them and being able to touch them physically.
It was very interesting to see this brought up in this week’s unit. I particularly enjoyed the article about “old book smell” and “new book smell”. (As a book collector, I adore both scents… It’s a shame I don’t have cologne in their scents.) In past neuroscience classes, I’ve learned that unlike the other senses, the olfactory gland (smell) bypasses the frontal cortex for the amygdala. This means that scents are more likely to evoke emotions and emotional memories than other sensory experiences. I wonder if there are museums curated around a scent-based experience. (Note: Post writing, I found these two articles on museums with scent experiences. One Two) The physicality of museum experiences is something I take for granted, living so close to the Smithsonian. It’s very interesting to explore how deficient the online experience is, in terms of its representation of physical objects. |
DescriptionThis blog will aim to capture the many projects and ideas that occur throughout this Digital History course. Specific focus on the impact of the digital world on the recording and changing of language will be noted.
AuthorHello, welcome. I'm Asher. As a linguistics and language focused student, I aim to track the ever changing nature of language through digital history in this blog. Enjoy your stay. ArchivesCategoriesFurther Reading |