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!
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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 The Library of Virginia’s Transcribe project is a user participation project that aims to transcribe historical documents that are important to Virginia’s history.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 |