Hello all,

This may be the wrong place to put this quick bit of information, so please point me in the right direction if I am lost. That said, I just finished Miriam Posner's video on deconstructing digital humanities pieces, and it was very interesting. I found it to be a very simply explanation of methodologies going into digital history projects - simple in the way that Posner says that the methodologies of digital history are the exact same as regular history. One can see this more clearly when they break down the project into three steps - sources, processes, presentation. I think, however, that this framework in which to view DH projects only works extremely well when related to projects that don't make an essentially new scholarly interpretation through traditional scholarship techniques, but instead rearrange already available information to show off a new trend - incidentally, that is a trend in digital history. This point may be way off, but I'm writing it down so that I may be corrected and pointed in the right direction if that is the case. In thinking that, I thought of the reading we had a bit ago about the perpetual sunrise of methodology. In thinking of doing some of these projects, though, I was interested by the second last one on philosophical references to each other and how that shows off something new. It could easily be redone in any subject area to show off the trends in, for example, German or Russian history at different times, or any subject really. In discussing Swag Histories, the creator of that piece talked about the need to standardize all of her information in order to use different mapping and analysis programs. That highlights the tediousness that is a necessary evil in a lot of digital history, and is ironic in my opinion. It connects immediately in my mind to the tediousness involved in XML labelling a primary document or a transcription. All in all, this piece definitely reinforced within me the similarities between good digital history and more 'traditional' history, in the sense that both can be exciting, both can be very informative, but they both require decisions and a lot of hands-on work and tediousness as a necessary evil to achieve a complete and effective project.

Cheers,
Ryan

Major thought is that this is a good intro to DH for first/second year students to interest them in a different side of history. Other thoughts are contained here: http://git.io/bKyE.

Hi All,

Firstly, apologies to Professor Graham for the lateness of this comment. Apparently I missed the memo regarding the time-frame in which you wanted this completed...

I must say I found the video quite interesting. The projects that I felt most drawn to were the two mapping projects (Negro Green Book and Moya Bailey's project). I think that the method of visualization she chose was an excellent choice for the point that she wanted to get across--debunking the idea that African-Americans are 'confined to the space they occupy'. This is a far faster and more immediately compelling way of getting a lot of information across to the reader/viewer than would be reading a number of books, each of which may only talk about a few individuals. I love reading, and books, and so a project like this peaks my curiosity and would be an excellent starting point for finding out more about a subject I may never have thought about, rather then necessarily being a replacement for reading the biographies/autobiographies she mentions.

I think that the method chosen by Rachel DeBlinger is an excellent choice for the point she wanted to get across as well. I checked out the project on her site and it is something that would take a lot of time to really get into and explore--all sorts of different paths here and there leading off from each of the three people, and you seem to be able to explore them in whatever order you want. To me this is a great way of presenting data about individuals' life stories since they are (from a humanist perspective), far more than just a straight-forward, linear chain of events, and are complex and rich; you can know a lot about one aspect of a person and nothing about another aspect of them, in the same way that you could explore DeBlinger's site and could choose to explore some, but not all of the links about an individual, and learn only half their story. I find this non-linear way of presenting a life-story interesting in relation to the Kindred Britain project (which in some way is the exact opposite of DeBlinger's project, although we all know how erroneous comparisons can be) and guy's (forgot name) comment about how each birth can be understood and operationalized as an event that involves three people. I find this a far less compelling way of understanding people's lives, but then, the goal of his project was not to explore a few lives on a very deep level (as was DeBlinger's), but to show an analysis of the connections of many, many lives through time.

Posner's way of breaking down the projects really made sense to me, and helped me clarify some things. I do frequently look at examples of digital projects and hear myself thinking 'Yes, it's awesome but HOW DID THEY DO THAT?', feeling certain all the while that it would be far too complicated for someone 'like me' (whatever that means...). Now that I'm learning a bit more about how we obtain and maneuver data into useable formats, it makes more sense and seems far less intimidating.