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Event on campus Project Update Undergraduate Fellows

A Whole New World: Digital Projects with a Global Perspective

A Whole New World

Thursday, April 7, 2016
Center for Global Learning
Room 211
12pm-1pm


Join us for project updates from three students conducting independent digital humanities research this term. In this poster presentation-style forum, students will present on the content of their research – 1920s Africa through Western eyes, the refugee crisis in Germany, and a Franco-Italian romance epic – as well as their methodology – HTML, CSS, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Javascript. Refreshments provided.

Lions, Jungles, and Natives
Arlette Hernandez ’18
Mellon Digital Humanities Undergraduate Fellow

The Refugees of Germany
Matt Carl ‘17
Mellon Digital Humanities Undergraduate Fellow

Huon d’Auvergne Digital Edition
Sara Schaffer ‘16
Independent Study with Prof. Steve McCormick


This program is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a Dean of the College Cohort Grant.

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Undergraduate Fellows

“What’s a ‘Digital Humanities’?”

If you would have told me a couple months ago that I would be building a website, I would’ve probably laughed. I have the utmost respect for people who work in computer programming, software, web-design, etc., but I also know my place as a scholar and that’s as an essay-writing, theory-reading, English major whose most creative project was a non-fiction short story about her mom’s best friend.  A few months ago I would’ve probably asked you, “What’s a ‘digital humanities’?”

All this is to say, my experience on this project has definitely opened my eyes. While I still love traditional humanities methodology, there is something really compelling about the Digital Humanities–for me, probably the idea of projects rather than papers, and the possibility of sharing ideas at a level beyond you and your professor or you and your classmates.

My project is nowhere near being done, but considering what I started with–an empty page painted by a theme I didn’t really care for–I’ve come a long way. My main focus so far has been on appearance and functionality, involving heavy manipulation of codes I had never even heard of before. I’ve been working closely with my supervisors to change a lot of the elements that make me unhappy and I’ve learned a lot about what elements work for web design and which don’t. I’ve also been picking up on the coding language. Now, things that would’ve taken me several days to accomplish only take a couple of hours.

Screen Shot 2016-03-21 at 12.10.29 PM

This is an example of a page I’ve been working on. A few months ago, I wouldn’t have put much thought into what it takes to achieve this. I would have taken it for granted. To get to this point took hours of digitizing files, cropping and straightening images, transcribing captions, fiddling with the CSS, playing around with the PHP, and countless trials and errors. And then of course there was the occasional aggressive sip of water and the $1.50 investment in stress-relief chocolate from the library vending machine.

I think the biggest take away has been the realization that it’s one thing to want something for your website, but it’s another thing to actually get it; and getting it involves some frustration, but even more importantly, determination. Almost anything is possible so long as you’re put the work in.

For the next couple of weeks, I’ll be working on getting the website looking and functioning the way I want. I think the goal is to get the general container looking as good as possible, then once that’s finished, I can focus on actually filling it up. Another goal is to start building the map. As I upload more and more photos onto my website, I’m going to start connecting them to different points and locations so that by the end, I’ll have at least one exhibit completed.

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Undergraduate Fellows

Wikipedia: telling history in real-time

Wikipedia has always been one of those “off limit” online resources. For years, I have been discouraged in using it as a reputable source. In constructing the timeline of the refugee crisis, however, and understanding that any source is subjected to a bias from the individual who reports the information, I have found Wikipedia to be remarkably helpful and profound in its own unique right.

At the most fundamental level, history is a collection of information. An objective perspective of telling history would be to discover and relay the Truth of events transpired. While information itself certainly exists objectively, it is only through the subjective processes of human interaction and experience that Truth becomes information. At the point of translation from Truth to information, the objectivity of Truth is thus subjected to the unique experience or interaction of its observer. It is thus possible that a number of “true subjective truths” exist. History is the result of assigning information (i.e. subjective truths) meaning through a variety of media, thus compounding the nature of the subjectivity through which information is filtered.

Wikipedia is one of the most effective media in bridging together a vast network of information while simultaneously offering its own narrative with immediacy. In doing so, Wikipedia allows for quick access to information (whether “reputable” or not), and produces a story that accounts for many subjective truths. To me, this seems to be the most powerful tool that history has at its fingertips: a platform connecting a vast array of networks and experiences in real time.

In my research, Wikipedia’s citations have been extremely refreshing. The starting point in understanding a story perhaps starts with a literature search. Where does the non-journalist begin, however, as events transpire around the world? The Internet has allowed for the almost simultaneous transmission and communication of information. Thus, understanding historical events from a variety of perspectives is increasingly important. With a google search of “Syrian Refugee Crisis,” a browser ends up with these options. Selecting the Wikipedia story, one immediately has a variety of hyperlinked options, one of which directs the user to a timeline of the refugee crisis. From here, the course of events is plainly laid out. The short descriptions are layered with citations and hyperlinks connecting a variety of historical accounts.

Consider the day that is largely considered to have sparked protests that led to the Syrian Civil War: March 6, 2011. The Wikipedia page reads:

6 March, in the southern city of Daraa, fifteen[6] teenagers were arrested for writing “the people want the regime to fall”[7][6][8] on walls across the city. Supposedly the military police tortured them,[7][8] or had carried them handcuffed out of their classroom.[6]

Note that each statement is verified and linked to source(s) (6, 7, and/or 8), most of which derive from news agencies in the U.S. (e.g. NY Times or Washington Post) and around the world (e.g. Spiegel or BBC News). In considering Wikipedia’s narrative, one is forced to contemplate the validity of numerous other narratives. In the passage above, three different articles are used which have coinciding accounts of teenagers having been arrested by Syrian authorities and subsequently harmed on March 6, 2011. Ultimately, as I have emphasized in a previous discussion, in constructing my own narrative, I am less concerned with discrepancies in numbers and statistics, and am directing my efforts towards understanding what happened and what did not happen. What is striking to me about this historical account is that it was a group of teenagers standing up for a cause in which they fervently believed who incited an egregious civil war that has witnessed the greatest migration since the end of the second World War. This profound determination may never make its way into a history book.

Finally, while a major component of my experience in Germany will entail reflecting on the current sentiments of refugees and their transition to Germany, I am also interested in mapping the crisis. To do so, I intend to utilize a digital story mapping tool that I will employ on my website. This component of my project will likely be the final of this term before I leave for Germany.

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Undergraduate Fellows

Storytelling

Working on my project the past weeks has been eye-opening in many respects. I found that operating within WordPress’s framework, my ideas were reduced and confined to preexisting templates and themes. I have since spent time learning the basics of HTML, CSS, and have collaborated with a good friend and computer science student at W&L, Mitch Olson, to begin the structuring of the website from “scratch.” Thus far, the website has been written in the web application framework Ruby on the Rails, however, we are in the process of transferring this into Python, a programming language with which Mitch and I are both more familiar.

In the meantime, I have begun my investigation of the history of the refugee crisis, focusing my attention primarily on the roots of the Syrian Civil War. The art of telling history is profound, and using the internet as a medium through which to tell history is of particular interest to me. I began my research by reviewing articles written during the start of the uprisings in Syria in March of 2011. By cross-referencing articles from major newspapers, I have begun to uncover events which are of great significance in the history of this crisis.

In piecing together the historical puzzle of the Syrian Civil War and the refugee crisis, I have been prompted to contemplate the purpose of my endeavor in telling this history. What is the purpose of history? In my initial approach, I gravitated towards a history of “truths”, or facts, and of numbers and figures as a means through which one can best tell a convincing story. I have come to realize, however, that objective truth in history is a moot point, in part because I concur that the only truths that exist are subjective and unique to each individual’s experience. Thus, I will tell a history of personal experience, focusing on occurrences rather than numbers, and using the the internet to unify different virtual media through which a viewer can begin to understand the reality of the transpired and transpiring events.

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Event on campus Speaker Series

Diane Jakacki to speak March 29

Time for a another Speaker Series event!

Tuesday, March 29, 2016
12:15-1:15pm
Hillel 101
Lunch provided. Please register.


Diane Jakacki

There Is No Spoon: Overcoming the Digital Pedagogy Imposter Syndrome

As Digital Humanities finds strong roots across the curriculum, even instructors who have used sophisticated DH methods in their research worry about how to successfully incorporate DH assignments into course design. How do we experiment with new methods in our classrooms? How do we balance subject learning goals with those related to digital literacy? How do we evaluate and assess new types of assignments in line with those that seem more traditional? How do we maintain our confidence in the classroom when we’re not necessarily feeling so confident? How do we use DH tools and methods to find new ways to engage with our students without making ourselves crazy?

Diane Jakacki
Diane Jakacki is Digital Scholarship Coordinator and Affiliated Teaching Faculty in the Comparative Humanities program at Bucknell University, where she explores and institutes ways in which Digital Humanities tools and methodologies can be leveraged in a small liberal arts environment. Her research specialties include digital humanities – particularly spatial analysis through text, early modern British literature and drama, and the ways in which pedagogy can be transformed by means of digital interventions. She is an assistant director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, Program Chair for the DH 2017 international conference, Technical Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, a member of the Executive Board of the Records of Early English Drama and the pedagogical advisory board for Map of Early Modern London project. She has published widely on digital humanities pedagogy as well as on the intersection of DH and early modern studies.

This program is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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DH Undergraduate Fellows

Construction, Digitization, and Future Plans

A lot has happened since my last blog post. All of it progress, though some of it slow.

So far I have a developed a general appearance for my website, a semi-completed home page, a completely digitized diary, and a digitized photo album.

Before experimenting with the CSS, I drew sketches of how I wanted certain pages to look. In general, I wanted the website to follow a minimalist design that was also functional. I wanted the homepage to have a floating navigation bar with the title underneath in bold letters, a banner image, a short description of the project, and then boxes lining the bottom of the page which would take you to central parts of the website. The idea of the boxes was partially inspired by the Prism website developed by the Praxis team at the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab.

Currently, I am using a simple black and white color scheme with shades of gray and navy. I think this structure sets up the color scheme for the photo albums and ensures viewability. Yet, as I continued to edit, I realized that while I got my colors right, other pieces of the puzzle were not quite falling into place. The specific layout I wanted for my homepage hindered the user experience of the rest of the website. Part of this is because I want a banner image on the top of the page that gives the user a sample of the collection. But when navigating the rest of the website, this image often gets in the way.

We fixed this problem by creating a separate HTML page that would house the homepage while the rest of the website would work with the same Omeka appearance, sans banner. Here is what the top of the page looks like so far.

 

Screen Shot 2016-03-03 at 3.21.48 AM

Our next goal is to add an efficient navigation bar that lines the top of the page throughout the entire website.

Regarding the collection materials, I have scanned all 50 pages of the mother’s diary and cropped the photos. I have also scanned, straightened, and cropped the first photo album which consists of 96 black and white images.

The next step is to begin uploading the materials as items to Omeka. The individual photos will fall into their own collection and the same goes for the diary pages. However, thanks to a plugin called Scripto, the website will also give users the option to interact by transcribing the pages.

Moving forward, we plan to edit the webpage’s layout for the diary pages because the default Scripto structure is confusing. The ultimate goal is to produce a set-up similar to that of DIY History.
Furthermore, I am halfway done scanning the photos in the second album and should be able to upload those photos very soon.