Tag Archives: DHprojects

Collaborative Opportunities

The Travelogue team has been exploring how other sites are using maps as digital pedagogical tools.  We are also connecting with possible collaborators, including other mapping projects, educational institutions and libraries.

In an effort to be participate in the conversations happening on social network platforms, Travelogue has been monitoring how Twitter is being used by similar projects.  We have explored hashtags that are being used in reference to maps, are concerned with literature, teaching, English, History, Social Studies, high school teachers, lesson plans etc.  We have also been following the conversations/posts on the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) site.

On the development front we are playing with several WordPress Child Themes to see which will best work for the Travelogue site and the ESRI Storymap we will be using.  Research wise, we have completed a workable draft of the Ernest Hemingway content spreadsheet which we will use to construct Travelogue’s Ernest Hemingway StoryMap.

The Travelogue Commons site has a Research section that is categorized and features helpul resources, compiled during the progression of the Travelogue project.  For example, Esri Storymaps for Education.

Thank you for following our journey.  We look forward to sharing our connections with others in the GIS world.

If you want to contact us please do. Our project blog is at  travelogue.commons.gc.cuny.edu. Email us at dhtravelogue [at] gmail [dot] com or follow us on Twitter @DhTravelogue

Finding a Home: Travelogue Picks a URL

The Travelogue team has been navigating the URL waters (travel puns abound but URL names do not).  By Monday, March 17th the URL had been decided upon and purchased.  Details soon to follow (we will let you know when to begin the drum roll).

Other updates: On the Travelogue’s Commons page the Twitter feed has been updated removing the icons and making it more text based.  The team is also choosing between paper texture images to be used for the Travelogue’s Commons site background, consulting with guides on 2014 web design trends.  We have been actively working on the Zotero citations for the content that will be featured on the Travelogue site.  Meet-ups outside of normal class hours have been scheduled.  We have been outlining the research that has been done so far and what needs to be worked on.  Zora Neale Hurston and Ernest Hemingway are the two American authors that the Travelogue project will initially focus on.  Research wise, we are currently working on historical context, researching what was going on in the locations that they traveled to during their time there.

If you want to contact us please do. Our project blog is at  travelogue.commons.gc.cuny.edu. Email us at dhtravelogue [at] gmail [dot] com or follow us on Twitter @DhTravelogue

It’s a Two-Fer!

Travelogue group members
Sarah – Project Manager
Amy – Technology and Design
Melanie – Outreach and Communication
Evonne – Research
Adam – Technology and Design

Last week, due to illness, the Travelogue’s outreach and communication person was ironically silenced.  However, that means this week there is twice as much Travelogue team blog fun to catch up on!

Travelogue’s Twitter page has a great new logo courtesy of Adam.  Initially, we had encountered an issue with the size of the first Travelogue logo not looking great sized down for Twitter.  Adam also created the Travelogue logo that appears on the Travelogue’s Common’s page.  Throughout the design process, Adam shared drafts for input from the group.  Amy has been hard at work on the design and content of the Travelogue’s Common’s page.

Last Monday on March 3rd the team, sans one under the weather outreach and communication member, presented an update on the project status to the DHPraxis class.  In preparation, Sarah created an action plan outlining how each team member could explain the progression the team has made so far.

Sarah met with our DH Praxis professor Matt Gold to go over the scope of the project and get his input on the current ideas the team has.  Sarah is working on the Travelogue website’s wireframe and created a mock up of the layout.  Also, she is continuously working on the project plan.  The team has been actively communicating, to organize the communication and each team member’s responsibilities, Sarah established an Asana page for the team.

Evonne has been compiling research resources, organizing the research conducted, what needs to be further researched and maintaining citations in a Travelogue Zotero page.  Using Evonne’s extensive research as a guide and the Gale database Directory of Special Libraries and Information Centers, Melanie has been reaching out to multiple academic institutions.  The preliminary goal is to introduce the Travelogue project, request info on the usage of content (for example from the Library of Congress) and building relations from there.  Through the Travelogue Twitter account Melanie has followed organizations working on mapping projects  and will be actively working creating engaging content in the pursuit of followers.

The team has been exploring ArcGIS Story Maps as the mapping tool for the project.  A schedule of meetings outside of class is being established as to best collaboratively brainstorm face to face.  The team is looking into whether Travelogue will be paralleling the travel narratives of the chosen authors (Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston), literally displaying the travel trajectories of both on the same map?  Or, will each author’s journey be depicted on a separate map?  The website’s URL is also currently being decided upon.

If you want to contact us please do. Our project blog is at  travelogue.commons.gc.cuny.edu. Email us at dhtravelogue [at] gmail [dot] com or follow us on Twitter @DhTravelogue

DH Box: Tackling Project Scope

We have this great Digital Humanities project idea, but what happens between now and launch time?

With an idea like DH Box (a customized linux OS with preinstalled DH Tools and the flexibility to operate on a computer as cheap and portable as the Raspberry Pi) there are a number of directions we could take, and will certainly consider for further iterations of DH Box beyond the Spring term (this blog currently documents the experiences of a project team enrolled in a graduate course in Digital Humanities Praxis at the Graduate Center, CUNY).

In order to refine the scope of our tool, we asked ourselves some questions:

  • What approach will we take around educating users about coding, the infrastructure around the DH Box software, hardware, and operating system?
  • Which DH Tools should we include? See Alan Liu’s curated list for more info on the scope of DH tools out there
  • What user(s) are we building this for?

The success of our project hinges on our ability to carefully model the scope of the tool by shaping the answers to these questions . . . all by May 12th (public launch date)!

Educational Value

Beyond providing a collection of accessible DH Tools, we want DH Box to help bridge knowledge gaps by delivering a strong educational component. We’d like for instance, undergraduate English students to gain exposure and develop proficiency in Digital Humanities inquiry through the kind of guidance and practical experience DH Box will offer. To that end, we will begin an interactive textbook to provide instruction about the specific tools included in this first iteration of DH Box. We are most inspired by the Learn Code the Hard Way interactive textbook series by Zed Shaw.

Tools

We are gearing this version of DH Box to bring Topic Modeling and Text Analysis to Humanities students!

We began by considering the most popular DH Tools out there and quickly realized it made a lot of sense to whittle the list down for this current project phase. We’ve made choices based on optimal software performance with the Raspberry Pi. We also want to provide DH Tools that haven’t yet had the level of proliferation like some of the more popular content management systems such as WordPress.

Users

Undergraduate Humanities students currently have little familiarity with terms like tokenizationsentiment analysis, etc., and how these components of text analysis can open expansive modes of textual inquiry. As part of its mission, DH Box will work to make these methods accessible to a broad audience!

Stay tuned for exciting updates on implementing the install scripts, using IPython Notebook, and more!

 

Questions? Comments? Tweet us!

DH Thesis

This is a message from my friend Anderson who was handing out a paper about his thesis during our last class:

Well this is embarrassing…

Everyone who attempted to access my app, I really appreciate it, but Amy Wolfe was kind enough to let me know that I had incorrectly transcribed the URL.

The correct URL for the site is: https://boiling-wildwood-9939.herokuapp.com/ or http://boiling-wildwood-9939.heroku.com

I hope you all will check it out.

Thanks again, Anderson Evans e-mail: jevans@gc.cuny.edu twitter: @Anderson_Evans

The Gentle Introduction Resource

boiling-wildwood-9939.herokuapp.com

The G.I.R. is a Rails based web app that hopes to collect a specific collection of crowdsourced academic resources. This app is maintained by Anderson Evans as the core of his thesis for the MALS degree in Digital Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center.

Catching Lightning in a Bottle

It’s interesting to reflect on the discussion channels pouring out of Tom Scheinfeldt’s presentation about One Week | One Tool. It seems we’re contending with how to infuse the energy and spontaneity characterized by some of the One Week | One Tool ethos into our yet to be, semester long projects next Spring. The attraction I, and certainly others see in a short term, intensive program like One Week | One Tool is exactly the phenomenon Tom Scheinfeldt remarked upon- this freedom within constraints, this ability for the clear (just the right kind of spooked) mind to shepherd in powerful concentration and creativity.

We make very fuzzy visualizations about what next semester’s project might really look like or turn into- and we’ve had plenty of time to let our imaginations run rampant without the ability to put any of this energy into doing the project itself. And I think this speaks directly to another of Scheinfeldt’s points- stress creeps in when we don’t know what’s expected of us. We haven’t gotten there yet, so we certainly aren’t able to grasp the expectations.

One Week | One Tool aims to catch lightning in a bottle by giving willing attendees the opportunity to collaborate and produce results under extreme pressure. How can we leverage that ‘camp’ like energy and combine it with more traditional project timelines for the better of our projects?

Perhaps we can start with an approach similar to how Scheinfeldt described this summer’s One Week | One Tool participants’ working process. First, a rapid brainstorming session, followed by a few rounds of viability and assessment discussions. Projects would be conceived in a short amount of time, and there would be an emphasis on developing and testing the tool quickly. I think it’s crucial to be really strategic and cognizant, yet make haste on the design and development side of things as often the concept and reality can get conflated and cause distortion- really putting a wrench in the project’s momentum. We could then take the results to our constituents: the end users and ‘funders.’ This would give us more of an opportunity to interface with crucial stakeholders beyond project participants, and hopefully enable reworking phase(s) in order to work out some kinks.