jdigitaltools

[jdigitaltools]

Blog Post #10: Progress Report

In this week's blog post, I will show the beginning of the project for the end of the class.

Working Title: YearBooks showing the story of the Hungerford School and the Eatonville Community

Abstract: This project will show how the 1951 and the 1965 versions of the Hungerford School Yearbooks can establish a relationship between the Hungerford School and the Eatonville Community throughout these years. Also, while showing the financial support that the Eatonville community gave during these two years, I will show how the Eatonville community uses the Hungerford School as a community center and culture center during these years of school operation. The resource I will gather from the two years' books will be a Patron list, members of the community that sponsor individual classes from the 1965 version, and stores that provided resources to the Hungerford School during these two years. Other questions can be answered with this project: Does the Hungerford School grow or decrease over the years? What role did the Eatonville Community take in support of the Hungerford School? What events did the Hungerford School host for the community?

Principal Data Sources: The 1951 and 1965 versions of the Hungerford School Yearbooks

Visualization Platforms: PowerPoint or Scalar

Notes/Comments/Reflections: This project will help humanize the Hungerford School and the Eatonville Community over these two years. We could get more Yearbooks from the community with this project.

[jdigitaltools]

Blog Post #9: Structure, Envision, Represent, Tell a Story

In this week's readings in Digital Tools, we learned how to structure data points in projects to present to the public and other historians so they can understand the data we collected throughout our project. By structuring our data, we can create arguments on different histories of a place or time that has not been explored before, and this can help show new histories and tell more stories about the subject that our project is about.  

In the book Interactive Visualization: Insight Through Inquiry, Bill Ferster explains in chapter 4, Structure the Information, that information and data that we gather for our projects are in raw forms that need to be defined and shown to help show the story that you are telling in your project.1 Structure Information is an organized form of your data that defines the data for your project so that the public can see which data is used and how it ties into your project.1 We can structure data into different sets and groups that vary from project to project. The applications we can use to organize data can change from project to project because some applications can work better for some projects than others.2 While we are selecting the data that we are going to use for our project, we will elevate some of the data over other data points to show trends, and we need to explain why we do this in our project.3 Bill Ferster writes, "These omissions and exclusions can have dramatic effects on the story reflected by the data, particularly with smaller datasets, so care must be taken to ensure that these defining decisions are explicit and consistently applied.", and this sections of the chapter is important because we are dealing with a lot of data.4 While we will show some of the data that agrees with our telling of the history of our project, we need to explain to the public and other academic members why and how we show our data to them and be open with the sources that we use so that they can go and check our data in our project so that they know that we did the work in collecting the data and showing that data in our project fairly.5

For my project that I am planning to create in this class that ties into the history of the Hungerford school and the Eatonville Community, I am planning to show how the Hungerford school was used as a community center for the area and how the citizens funded and supported the Hungerford school throughout 1951 and 1965. I will show how I will show the data and project from this class by using the ASSERT model to explain my plan for my project. In the Ask section of the Model, the questions I want to explore in my project are what was the community involvement in the Hungerford school, and who gave money to support the school between 1951 and 1965? Another question I want to explore is how we can use Yearbooks from the Hungerford school to show class sizes from k-12 and what the school provided for the students and the community during these two years. In the next section, Structure, I am structuring the data into graphs for the data about community support, activities, class sizes, and company backing that the school had during the two years we have the yearbooks for in the project. I need to explain why I am only showing the 1951 and 1965 versions of the Yearbooks of the Hungerford school because that is the only available information I could find during the search part of the project. As Bill Ferster stated in chapter four, I must explain this section about limited data and show the data in projects. I envision the answer to these questions to compare what is already written about the Hungerford school and deliver the actual state of the school between 1951 and 1965. I am still determining how I will represent the data for my project, and I hope to get more insight from tonight's class. Lastly, I want to tell the story of the Hungerford school and the Eatonville Community from their experiences and voices versus the story that OCPS tells to advance their goals and visions of the community, which is misleading to move on to their goals overall. 

Overall, I am happy with the work that I am doing and the project that I will produce at the end of this class. I plan to clean up today and start shaping the project to its final form. 

Footnotes:

1. Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization : Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Accessed February 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. 75

2. Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization : Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Accessed February 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. 76

3. Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization : Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Accessed February 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. 78

4. Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization : Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Accessed February 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. 78

5. Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization : Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Accessed February 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. 79

Bib

Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization : Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Accessed February 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. 

[jdigitaltools]

The Project as a Basic Unit / Institutions & Pragmatics / Creating Advocacy

In this week's reading in Digital Tools, we are learning how to incorporate a project base education with the  Hungerford School and Preserve the Eatonville Community Project. Having a  project base education allows us to know how to use Digital Tools on real-life projects that can help further the community of Eatonville. I like this method of learning how to use the available Digital Tools that we know from the class and new ones that we will find out how to use throughout creating the final product for the course that could help the future of the Eatonville Community.

In the reading, A Short Guide to the Digital Humanities, the authors created a handy quick guide for Digital historians to check while working in the Digital space and producing digital projects for their research.1 The first question in the short guide is What is the "Digital Humanities?" They answer that Digital Humanities is a new form of scholarship that uses elements from multiple academic fields to create a project.2 I like this version of defining Digital Humanities because we use different elements from Compture Sciences and History to create a usable digital project for our research. While the guide explains what Digital Humanities is, it goes into what isn't Digital Humanities and writes that the project needs to show the understanding of a community culture and the actual relationship between the artifacts and the people in the community.3 This is a good base of understanding to start this project, so we know how to create an actual Digital Humanities project for this class and the overall project.

In the next section of the guide, the authors write about the project as the basic unit for class. They answer the question, "Why projects?" by noting that people learn the scholarship by working within it by creating projects.4 This question leads to the next question, "Who is involved in Digital Humanities projects?" the answer is that it involves multiple people from different backgrounds, like the science and the humanities, to construct a digital humanities project.5 Also, these projects would be organized by the students, community, or faculty that want to understand a community history or events in a location worldwide.6 Another question that they bring up in this section is, "What are prevailing crediting and attribution conventions and authoring models for DH projects?" the answer is that people would receive roles, and the roles of the project would be the crediting they would get in the project when it is completed.7 This needs people outside the academy because you need people that know different subjects that can benefit your project.8 To check "What does the project contribute to the cultural record, how is this record legitimated, and by whom?" it is the community and other research outside the project.9

In the last section of the guide, a question that they write in the guide is, "How do Digital Humanities projects interconnect the classroom with libraries, museums, and archives?" the answer is that Digital Humanities projects would use archives to collect data and process the different topics that the archive have to find helpful information on their research topic.10. Another question that comes in this section is "How can Digital Humanities projects involve inter-university collaboration?" and the answer is that you can have different departments work on various themes of the project like a computer science working on a database to find out the topics that were researched before the project.11

Overall, this guide helps us understand Digital Tools and is a quick guide to remind us what Digital Humanities is and how to use it in the online world. 

Footnotes:

1. Burdick, Anne, et al. "A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. 121-135. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

2. Burdick, Anne, et al. "A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. 121-135. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

3. Burdick, Anne, et al. "A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. 121-135. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

4. Burdick, Anne, et al. "A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. 121-135. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

5. Burdick, Anne, et al. "A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. 121-135. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

6. Burdick, Anne, et al. "A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. 121-135. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

7. Burdick, Anne, et al. "A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. 121-135. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

8. Burdick, Anne, et al. "A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. 121-135. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

9. Burdick, Anne, et al. "A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. 121-135. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

10. Burdick, Anne, et al. "A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. 121-135. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

11. Burdick, Anne, et al. "A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. 121-135. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

Bib

Burdick, Anne, et al. "A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. 121-135. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

[jdigitaltools]

Blog Post #7: Distant Reading: Text-Mining and Topic-Modeling Tools in the Age of Big Data

In this week's readings, we learn how Text mining has grown and become a core tool for understanding texts and articles about topics. The Text Mining Digital Tool allows historians and anyone to analyze and skim different articles to find common words that correlate with each other. Also, Text Mining will enable researchers to find trends in various aspects of society. For Example, a historian can look for papers and articles about specific events that happened during a timeframe of 10 years to see what trends are up or down in the use of terms and ideas. Text Mining can be used for mass projects dealing with many articles and papers or can be limited to one piece to examine every word to see the term used in the paper.

In chapter 1, The Joys of Big Data for Historians, in the book, The Historian's Macroscope: Big Historical Data, the authors write about how historians started to use big data and how they analyzed it using the help of computers.1 The start of the chapter by painting a picture of how historians use small amounts of data as research in their topic because they could not calculate and examine all the works and data on their subject.2 With the creation of computers, historians are now allowed to become Microhistorians, creating a new sub-field in academia called Microhistory.3 Microhistory allows historians to search through any timeframe and see what trends were created and what were the cause of topics either going up in use or down in use in the public and academia fields.4 While there is still a need for historians to understand microhistory and specialize in different topics in history, there is now a need for a group of historians to look at the impact of the microhistory to see the overall cause of these events so that future historians and students can see the impact of events over time in the field of history.5 The rise of Microhistory with the rise in captures during the 1960s helped historians answer the overarching questions that span through time and space while having the microhistorians look at each aspect of history like they did without the creation of computers. 

An example of historians using different digital tools for analyzing and understanding mass data is the project "The Causes of the Civil War, 2.0.", where the author,  Edward L. Ayers, writes about the history of the causes of the Civil War and see what topics that historians used to show the grounds of the civil war. He also sees why historians would use the slavery reason for the war and how the Civil came to be.6 He analyzes the Virginia side of the Civil War and the documents that lead Virginia to move away from the Union. This Example shows how historians can only a significant conflict like the civil war and display the data throughout the project.

While learning about the digital tools used for projects, I saw the value of using these digital tools in my project and thesis. While I am studying Early Maps of the World and finding the cultural aspects of them and how they relate to that time, I can examine text and journal entries on these cartographers and use text mining to understand the concepts that they were using and how community of cartographers set goals for creating maps during this time. While maps have some words on them, there needs to be more information in the text that would be useful in creating a practical text map or graph that would display the data. The questions that come up with understanding Text mining and using digital What is "distant reading"? And this question is complex because, as historians, we want to read and gather all the information from the book by reading the whole book. However, time and effort are the key factors that lead historians to skim the books and find the essential information that the book has on its pages. By reading the book's central concepts, we, as readers and historians, can understand the topic with limited reading and effort. But, with this "distant reading" on the rise, we can lose imprinted information that the author found in their research. We can misuse that information in our study, so we as historians use digital tools like Google Books, Ngram Viewer, VoyantTools, and command F to find topics inside a 300+ page book that writes about different issues that we need for our research. 

Footnotes:

1. Graham, Shawn, et al. Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope. World Scientific, 2022. pg.1

2. Graham, Shawn, et al. Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope. World Scientific, 2022. pg. 2

3. Graham, Shawn, et al. Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope. World Scientific, 2022. pg. 3

4. Graham, Shawn, et al. Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope. World Scientific, 2022. pg. 4

5. Graham, Shawn, et al. Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope. World Scientific, 2022. pg. 5

6. Ayers, Edward L. “The Causes of the Civil War, 2.0.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 28 Apr. 2011, https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/the-causes-of-the-civil-war-2-0/?_r=0.

Bib

Ayers, Edward L. “The Causes of the Civil War, 2.0.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 28 Apr. 2011, https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/the-causes-of-the-civil-war-2-0/?_r=0.

Graham, Shawn, et al. Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope. World Scientific, 2022.

[jdigitaltools]

Blog Post #6: Getting Started: Visualizing the History of Eatonville's Hungerford School Property

In this week's reading on Digital Tools, we learn how to create Interactive Visualization for digital projects so that the public can interact with your project while learning about the subject that you are studying. While Digital Historians and people were using the internet to create their projects for their organizations and specific research questions that they wanted the public to see and support their cause, there was no standard for presenting their work, and that is what Bill Ferster set out to create. 

In the book Interactive Visualization, Bill Ferster dives into how Digital Historians produced and showed their work on the internet and what the project looked like when presented to the public. In the book's preface, he writes about how Interactive Visualization is a growing subject in how Digital Historians create their work and show different emotions while presenting their cold data and calculations in their project.1 He writes that his team has created a model to help new and old Digital Historians present their work, which is called the ASSERT model.2 So, while we are learning what interactive visualization is for digital projects, a couple of questions arise from this topic that Ferseter answers throughout the chapters of this book. One of these questions is, "What is information visualization?" Ferster writes that information visualization uses computer-supported, interactive visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition.2 While we now know what is information visualization is, another question arises and that question is "Why is visualization valuable?" the answer is that interactive visualization is the process of letting primary sources of information communicate directly with a view to support inquiry in a visual, compelling, and interactive manner.3 This helps the viewer of the project to see your data, understand your findings throughout your project and can tell what the process and goals of that visual and project were. Some key examples from the history of visualization are Dr. French's "Notes from Virginia," where he and his team created a timeline of letters from Thomas Jefferson and an organized- template of how to interpret the letters during the timeframe.4

The three different models that Ferster writes about are Theoretical, Descriptive, and Prescriptive. Theoretical models try to provide insight into the issues that the project talks about; descriptive models create calcifications of their research in their projects; and prescription models offer a framework to the project that the viewer and people can see.4 Ferster's ASSERT Model for interactive visualization stands for:

Ask a question

Search for evidence

Structure that information 

Envision ways to answer the question

Represent that evidence

 Tell a story

And the first two can be applied to the study of the Hungerford School property as a cultural/historical landscape by establishing a theme for the project by having a central question. With a primary question, we can begin to collect evidence to answer and create a project to show the world about the Hungerford School property. Three examples of questions that we can ask are " How did a segregated education in the American South affect the students at the Hungerford School?", "Did the desegregation of education cause the end for historically Black communities and their schools like the Hungerford School?"

The kinds of information (spatial/temporal/network, etc.) we might extract from archival materials assembled (so far) in the Hungerford School Digitization Project Resource Bank are First Person accounts of how the Hungerford School changed before and after desegregation and the impact that was felt across the community. We also can create an ArcGIS map of the whole of Eatonville and show the before and after pictures and descriptions of the entire town during and after the Hungerford School. These Ideas can show visually how the town has changed over its history and the effects of national events that impacted the town during the mid-20th century. Also, having an ArcGIS Map of the town provides an Interactive Visualization of the town so people all over the country and the community of Eatonville can see and interpret the changes and how they impact their community overall.

We can learn in terms of research, contextualization, periodization, and argument from scholarship that recovers the history of African American schools in other places, such as Booker T. Washington Elementary School in Franklin County, Va., and Jefferson High School in Charlottesville, Virginia is how to approach a topic like this and the different methods that give the most voice to the community and the people affected by these events. The thing that made those sites historically/culturally significant is how the people examine the social changes in the community and how national policies change local communities in Virginia, and this provides a new historical view from the people's effect because now they have a voice in what happened to their community.

Footnotes:

1. Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization : Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Accessed February 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. i

2. Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization : Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Accessed February 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.2

3. Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization : Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Accessed February 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. 3

4. Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization : Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Accessed February 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. 7

5. Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization : Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Accessed February 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. 26

Bib

Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization : Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Accessed February 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.

[jdigitaltools]

Week 6 Blog Post

For this week's readings, we as a class are diving into Digital Tools and their uses that are used in Digital History. Digital Tools are the cornerstone of any Digital History research because without them, presenting their research would be difficult and require people and communities to invest in people who understand computer science and history. This would leave out different neighborhoods that couldn't invest or spend the money on these people to tell their community's story for the world to see. Digital tools were on the rise during the early 2000s. Within the past ten years, some of the organized online digital tools have stopped working for the public and caused new and better programs to replace these digital tools in future research and data collection.

In the article, Arguing with Digital History: Patterns of Historical Interpretation, Stephen Robertson and Lincoln A. Mullen talk about how Digital History needs to show arguments in their projects to be considered historical scharloship because early works in the digital field have been historical archiving and expanding the digital archiving area and they argue that this exploration of how we can use digital tools and digital history has already been using and created with other earlier project during the 70s-1990s.1 They say that we, as historians using the digital space, need to create work that furthers ideas and discussions in the history field so that we can expand the uses of Digital history in the historical conversation vs. what it has been using as data collection and storage for archives.2 Providing this type of scholarship to the historical world will cause other historians to create digital arguments so that this field can grow and show that other historians can see the benefits of digital history and digital tools. They write that while historians use these digital sources to create a new scholarship in the field, it will provide more examples of how to create arguments about digital history for future digital historians.3 The quote from the article that I like from the paper is, "Why digital history has not had the impact on field-specific arguments in history—an impact on the historiography—remains a puzzle. Certainly, there has been no shortage of claims by digital historians that they would have such an impact." This quote helps show that while digital historians allow showing the timeline and placement of research that were created and used for different fields, with historians now using the online world to produce this information, the amount of information on their topics will be plentiful.

In the following article, Parliament’s Debates about Infrastructure: An Exercise in Using Dynamic Topic Models to Synthesize Historical Change, Jo Guildi talks about how digital historians have used mining tools to expand the search and data collection for their project and how to display this data in their projects so that the public and other historians can use and see all the data so that they can also use the data to continue their research on the same or different topics that can come up in data collection from projects.4 Topic Modealing is a digital tool that allows digital historians and the public to scan mountains of documents into the program to search for specific phrases and words that the person is looking for during the time.2 These digital tools are also used outside the historical field and in different fields like Law and office work. I learned that while digital tools were created for historians to mine data and store the data in these applications, other subjects in the education field can show the importation of digital tools so that students can understand how to use these applications. While reading this article, I see the conflicts with the transitions to the argumentive work vs. the storage and collection of data to be presented online. 

Overall, this week's readings allow me to understand how digital tools evolve and change over time and how different tools survive over the years, and what tools are being used today versus outdated tools that stop working because of the changing internet world. Learning how the digital history world transfer from archival and data collection uses in the historical field to more argumentative sources that help transfer the historical area to a more online version of the recorded conversation. I now see the history of digital tools and how the digital tools that we use in our research in our projects and the data collected can shape and change the meaning of our project from the public and historical view. 

Footnotes:

1. Robertson, Stephen, and Lincoln A. Mullen. “Arguing with Digital History: Patterns of Historical Interpretation,” Journal of Social History 54, no. 4 (2021): 1005–1022, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab015.

2. Robertson, Stephen, and Lincoln A. Mullen. “Arguing with Digital History: Patterns of Historical Interpretation,” Journal of Social History 54, no. 4 (2021): 1005–1022, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab015.

3. Guldi, Jo. “Parliament’s Debates about Infrastructure: An Exercise in Using Dynamic Topic Models to Synthesize Historical Change,” Technology and Culture 60, no. 1 (2019): 1–33, https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0000.

4. Guldi, Jo. “Parliament’s Debates about Infrastructure: An Exercise in Using Dynamic Topic Models to Synthesize Historical Change,” Technology and Culture 60, no. 1 (2019): 1–33, https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0000.

Bib

Guldi, Jo. “Parliament’s Debates about Infrastructure: An Exercise in Using Dynamic Topic Models to Synthesize Historical Change,” Technology and Culture 60, no. 1 (2019): 1–33, https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0000.

Robertson, Stephen, and Lincoln A. Mullen. “Arguing with Digital History: Patterns of Historical Interpretation,” Journal of Social History 54, no. 4 (2021): 1005–1022, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab015.

[jdigitaltools]

Week 5 Blog Post

For this week's readings in Digital Tools, we explore a project that uses Digitla Tools to show what happens to the people during the Holocaust. In the book, Geographies of the Holocaust, the team of people gathered information. They had help from different organizations like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to create visuals and tables to help show the mass of people affected by the Holocaust all over Europe during the 1930s-1940s. This book aims to help expand the story of all the people affected by the Holocaust and help scholars genuinely understand the movement and removal of these people before, during, and after the Holocaust. In this blog post, I will look at Chapters 1-3 of the book and talk about the methods and goals that they are showing in each chapter.

In Chapter 1, Geographies of the Holocaust, the team starts with the reasons why they would create this book to expand the scholarship of the Holocaust by using a geographical approach to these events.1 The goals of showing how the space of these groups of people changed over time from being from their communities and being placed into these camps all over Europe help show the communities before and after what the Nazis did during this time.3 In this chapter, they continue to write about how they are taking  Holocaust scholarship into a new direction by showing the landscape and spatial places where these victims of the Holocaust lived and interacted with each other during this time. Historical GIS is a digital tool that helps historians show data over time on landmasses and stores this data in the locations where the events happened. 4 This research into the Holocaust using Historical GIS forces historians to understand what this is Digital Tool and what it can show us in our study. This chapter helps historians understand the methods and tools used to show what happened to these people during this time in Europe.

In Chapter 2, Mapping the SS Concentration Camps shows all the SS camps the Nazis created during the Holocaust and the locations where they were placed during this time.5 We, as the reader, can see almost every location of the SS camp and that the majority of the camps were in Nazi Germany during this time.6 While this illustration shows most of the creative camps during this time, in visual 2.2, we can see the progression of when these camps were created and where they were placed over time.7 We can conclude by looking at these illustrations that the Nazis built the camps inside Germany, and after they claimed land from their neighboring countries, mainly to the East of Germany built camps in this region.8 This is an excellent example of how Historical GIS should be used to show these camps' progression and whether the Nazis were having them built from the 1930s-the 1940s. Showing the movement or creation of camps throughout the timeframe can have historians understand better why the Nazis would place these camps and why they increased the production of these camps towards the end of WW2.9 Overall, this chapter shows the benefits of using Historical GIS to map out the creation of these camps over the timeframe of the Holocaust.

In Chapter 3, Retracing the "Hunt for Jews" A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Arrests during the Holocaust in Italy, the team shows the movement of families arrested from different cities and how they would transfer from city to city until they were sent to an Concentration Camp.10 There are so many visuals and data tables shown in this chapter that tries to show the people arrested and their fate after WW2.11 I feel that while they are trying to show the data of the people arrested during this time in Italy, it almost takes the person out of the events of the Holocaust. This table allows us to see the data and the number of people arrested during this time; however, it takes the individual out of the Holocaust, and we lose the individual stories and events that led to the arrest and life in these Concentration Camp, I feel that we need a mixture of data sets and tables with a list of the names of the people to provide a more individual story with the data sets in the book. Overall, this chapter shows the movement of people from Italy to different locations all over Europe that had Concentration camps during this time.

Overall, I think that the Geographies of the Holocaust shows how the people were affected by the Holocaust by using space and time to help the reader understand the movement of these people during this time. While the project lacks individual stories, I think this is one of the best showcases of Historical GIS while dealing with complex histories like the Holocaust. 

Footnotes:

1. Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. pg, 2

2.  Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. pg, 3

3. Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. pg, 4

4. Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. pg, 5

5. Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. pg, 19

6. Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. pg, 21

7. Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. pg, 27

8. Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. pg, 27

9.Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. pg, 28

10. Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. pg, 64

11.  Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. pg, 65

Bibliography

Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014.

[jdigitaltools]

Week 4 Blog Post

While reading the articles for this week, my understanding of the start of Digital history and the use of Digital Tools was only focused on the Valley of the Shadows Project and no other projects until now. Roy Rosenzweig was the father of Digital Tools and the advancement of Digital Tools in the field of History. Historians need to understand that Digital History and Digital Tools are tied to the hip in the creation of Digital Humanities and that you need to understand the start of both sections in Digital Humanities to understand this new era of History and historical understanding. This blog post will explore Roy Rosenzweig and how his study into Digital Tools helps grow and makes using Digital Tools easier for students and historians all over the internet. In the article "Roy Rosenzweig and the Future of the Past: Perspectives on History: AHA.”, Steven Mintz writes that Roy Rosenzweig was an "inspiring pioneer in the magical arts of melding history and new media," and he was a person who wanted to make Digital history easy for everyone on the internet.1  Mintz continues to write that Roy Rosenzweig was the first to write a multimedia history textbook and advance online and digital archives that allow access to articles and resources to expand the field of History.2 Mintz writes that Roy Rosenzweig believed that everyone was a historian and that they should have the tools and resources that were once restricted to students and history faculty in universities and other areas in the history field.3 Until his death in 2007, Roy Rosenzweig would continue to expand the  Digital Humanities field for K-12 to create a new generation of historians in the Digital Age.4 His work would lead to the creation of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. In the article "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era", Roy Rosenzweig writes about how historians can create illustrations and advance scholarship availability for people worldwide.5 However, while people are creating history independently, they have this new power to delete their scholarship and control history online.6 This article ties in with his other article, Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely, he writes about how the Libary of Congress gets involved with creating a Digital Archive and allows people to view and send primary sources for the advancement of history and scholarship.7 However, while we create these Digital Archives for students and historians alike, we need to include education on what sources are reliable and credible because now anyone can create a Digital Archive and can create a miss understanding of primary sources and the timeline of history.8 Roy Rosenzweig writes that students and historians, when this article was written to the present day, need to understand Digital Archives and how they can be created with miss information and fake primary sources that can cause dysfunction in the field of History.9 The last article, Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, Roy Rosenzweig writes about how historians dedicate their lives to understanding historical events and trends to create well-researched, edited, and fact-checked papers and books that add to the field of history.10  Roy Rosenzweig writes that "Historical scholarship is also characterized by possessive individualism. Good professional practice (and avoiding charges of plagiarism) requires us to attribute ideas and words to specific historians—we are taught to speak of “Richard Hofstadter’s status anxiety interpretation of Progressivism.”, this quote from this article shows the work needs to produce a new and accurate result in the field of history.11 These articles show the problems and achievements that Digital Tools have on this new generation of Historians using the internet. While this new generation of historians is using the internet and Digital Tools to conduct and present their work in the historical field, they need trusted resources to help them complete their goals for understanding history. Zotero is an application that allows people to cite and organize their sources while researching and writing their people or creating their projects. Omeka is an application that will enable researchers to look through digital archives' themes to make finding sources easier. Scripto is an application that will allow researchers to transcribe works into their languages so they can understand the documents in languages the researcher does not speak. Tropy is an application that will enable researchers to organize their photos for their projects. Lastly, Data Scribe is an application that will allow researchers to show their data in their projects and papers effortlessly. The project I am looking at is The September 11 Digital Archive. I found it compelling because it has the history and what happened during 9/11 when most people were shellshock and unable to understand the event in real-time. This allows people and survivors to return and find peace in the events that happen during 9/11.

Footnotes:

1. Mintz, Steven. “Roy Rosenzweig and the Future of the Past: Perspectives on History: AHA.” Roy Rosenzweig and the Future of the Past | Perspectives on History | AHA. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2009/roy-rosenzweig-and-the-future-of-the-past. pg 1

2. Mintz, Steven. “Roy Rosenzweig and the Future of the Past: Perspectives on History: AHA.” Roy Rosenzweig and the Future of the Past | Perspectives on History | AHA. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2009/roy-rosenzweig-and-the-future-of-the-past. pg 1

3. Mintz, Steven. “Roy Rosenzweig and the Future of the Past: Perspectives on History: AHA.” Roy Rosenzweig and the Future of the Past | Perspectives on History | AHA. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2009/roy-rosenzweig-and-the-future-of-the-past. pg 1

4. Mintz, Steven. “Roy Rosenzweig and the Future of the Past: Perspectives on History: AHA.” Roy Rosenzweig and the Future of the Past | Perspectives on History | AHA. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2009/roy-rosenzweig-and-the-future-of-the-past. pg 1

5. Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” OUP Academic. Oxford University Press, June 1, 2003. https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/108/3/735/22504. Pg. 1

6. Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” OUP Academic. Oxford University Press, June 1, 2003. https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/108/3/735/22504. Pg. 1

7. “Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely.” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://rrchnm.org/essays/digital-archives-are-a-gift-of-wisdom-to-be-used-wisely/. pg. 1

8. “Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely.” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://rrchnm.org/essays/digital-archives-are-a-gift-of-wisdom-to-be-used-wisely/. pg. 1

9.”Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely.” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://rrchnm.org/essays/digital-archives-are-a-gift-of-wisdom-to-be-used-wisely/. pg. 1

10. “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://rrchnm.org/essays/can-history-be-open-source-wikipedia-and-the-future-of-the-past/. pg. 1

11. “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://rrchnm.org/essays/can-history-be-open-source-wikipedia-and-the-future-of-the-past/. pg. 1

Bibliograph 

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” OUP Academic. Oxford University Press, June 1, 2003. https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/108/3/735/22504.

“Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely.” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://rrchnm.org/essays/digital-archives-are-a-gift-of-wisdom-to-be-used-wisely/.

“Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://rrchnm.org/essays/can-history-be-open-source-wikipedia-and-the-future-of-the-past/.

Mintz, Steven. “Roy Rosenzweig and the Future of the Past: Perspectives on History: AHA.” Roy Rosenzweig and the Future of the Past | Perspectives on History | AHA. Accessed February 1, 2023. https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2009/roy-rosenzweig-and-the-future-of-the-past.

[jdigitaltools]

Week 3 Blog Post

I explored the readings and podcasts in this week's readings to understand another section of Digital History. The themes discussed in the articles and podcasts are Reframing History,  Black Imaginaries and Geographies, and  Black Digital Humanities. I found it interesting to talk about this wide subject and how Digital History expanded as a way that people can use to express their voice; that would have been difficult to voice if they had to use the traditional route because they can show the history that they are studying and presenting to the world. 

In the article, A Generative Praxis Curation, Creation, and Black Counterpublics, Julian C. Chambliss and Scott A. French write about the Zora History Festival and how Digital Tools provide a voice for communities that could not get their voice and story in the traditional routes of history and used Digital tools to show their record their way to communicate with Historians in the academic world. The article dives into different community efforts and activism that were presented at the Zora Festival in 2016.1 One of the groups,  the Association to Preserve Eatonville Community (PEC), has used this opportunity to show their work in the community and present their efforts to gain more support and more respect as history and provide a complete form of record in the region of Eatonville that Traditional History did not provide their voice in this section of history. This is how communities can Reframing History and add their voice to the discussion.2 They can provide their insight on the actions that happen to their community and how their voices add to the history of the region.

While Julian C. Chambliss and Scott A. French's article talks about different groups coming together and shaping their piece of history into the historical world, it provides what individual groups can do to push their conversation and became members of the History Feild. In the article, Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities, Kim Gallon writes about how Digital History allows the African-American community to share their voice and be a part of history with their voice and stories. She writes that when digital historians created Black Digital Humanities, we had to consider inclusion and who would be a part of this section of Digital Humanities.3 She writes that people that work in the Black Digital Humanities are providing an area that people did not have in the traditional Humanities and that we need to support the growth of this field so that more and more people can get their voice and story into the discussion of history.4 This article opens my eyes to see that Black Digital Humanities is a space more than a section in Digital history that helps people provide their voice about history to the world. Julian C. Chambliss continues this section with his podcast Every Tounge got to Confess, where he dives into what Afrofuturism is and how this subject is hard to explain and pinpoint one example. He tells us of a time were historians needed to learn what Afrofuturism was and how to understand this complex subject in history and digital history.5 While he was explaining it to us, he used his background in comic books to help discuss what this subject was; however, the following year, many historians were looking at this comic book as the gold standard for what Afrofuturism is, and that became a problem because they were missing other different media and social creations that were also Afrofuturism like music, food, and many more items.6 I enjoyed listening to this subject and learning more about Afrofuturism. A project that dives into what Julian C. Chambliss was talking about is the Mapping Black Imaginaries and Geographies project which allows historians to understand how this space provided by Digital History shows the vast amount of items that people can research about and county the stories with mapping out stories so that the public can understand their voices in history.7

The last section I will discuss is the podcast of Dr. Julian C. Chambliss and Dr. Scot A. French talks called Reframing History. Both men talk about their work in the Digital History field and how they provide voices to communities that would not have in a traditional sense of history.8 In the first Episode: Reframing History, they talk about their will with the Eatonville community and how working with communities like Eatonville can Reframe History to include the stories that were once not discussed traditionally.9 The second podcast, Episode 2: Rethinking the City, looks at how the city plays a role in how historians create history and how people can slip through history just like they did in Winter Park, Florida. Their space in the city is forgotten, and they are trying to bring it back into light.10 The last podcast I will look at is Episode 4: Change the Story, where Dr. Julian C. Chambliss and Dr. Scot A. French talk about the best ways to change the story that people have been brought up in and include this new version into the historical field.11

Overall, I enjoyed reading and listening to podcasts to see and have a deeper meaning in digital History and how that impacts a community that had their voice out of the picture and conversation in the Historical Feild. 

Footnotes

1. Chambliss, Julian  C, and Scott A French. “A Generative Praxis Curation, Creation, and Black Counterpublics.” Home,

2. Chambliss, Julian  C, and Scott A French. “A Generative Praxis Curation, Creation, and Black Counterpublics.” Home,

3. Gallon, Kim. “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities,

4. Gallon, Kim. “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities,

5. Interview with Julian Chambliss, Professor of English, Michigan State University, and Curator of the ZORA! Festival of the Arts & Humanities Afrofuturism Cycle, 2020-2024

6. Interview with Julian Chambliss, Professor of English, Michigan State University, and Curator of the ZORA! Festival of the Arts & Humanities Afrofuturism Cycle, 2020-2024

7. “Welcome.” Mapping Black Imaginaries and Geographies, https://mappingbig.org/.

8. Dr. Julian C. Chambliss and Dr. Scot A. French, Reframing History Links to an external site., Season 1 (2018).

9. Dr. Julian C. Chambliss and Dr. Scot A. French, Reframing History Links to an external site., Season 1 (2018).

10. Dr. Julian C. Chambliss and Dr. Scot A. French, Reframing History Links to an external site., Season 1 (2018).

11.  Dr. Julian C. Chambliss and Dr. Scot A. French, Reframing History Links to an external site., Season 1 (2018).

Bib

Chambliss, Julian  C, and Scott A French. “A Generative Praxis Curation, Creation, and Black Counterpublics.” Home, https://scholarlyediting.org/issues/39/a-generative-praxis.

Gallon, Kim. “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/fa10e2e1-0c3d-4519-a958-d823aac989eb.

Interview with Julian Chambliss, Professor of English, Michigan State University, and Curator of the ZORA! Festival of the Arts & Humanities Afrofuturism Cycle, 2020-2024

“Welcome.” Mapping Black Imaginaries and Geographies, https://mappingbig.org/.

Dr. Julian C. Chambliss and Dr. Scot A. French, Reframing History Links to an external site., Season 1 (2018).

[jdigitaltools]

Week 2 Blog Post

While reading the assigned articles for this week's class, I see three themes and questions that the authors write about and create a place where we can talk about through their writings. The themes that I will examine in each article are technology, the future of historical understanding, and the problems of digital History. I will use the pieces to explore these themes: Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age, What is Digital History, Promises and Perils of Digital History, The Differences between Digital Humanities and Digital History, and A Companion to Digital Humanities. These articles show broad views of Digital History and how historians view this field from the early 2000s to the 2020s. Over 20 years of questioning this field and the direction of the field in future studies. 

In the first article, Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age,  Adam Crymble writes about the relationship between technology and History and how we can make a standard for the field. Crymble writes that while we use technology in our quest to understand our past, we need to be wary of the limitations of technology because if we dive into digital History without understanding the technology that we use for the project, then we could misrepresent the same History we are trying to show.1 He continues to write that if we are going to be in the field of Digital History, then we need to understand the History of technology while working on our project because we need to understand the best practices and methods to produce the best version of our project.2 The article that ties this theme together is the Promises and Perils of Digital History; Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig write about how Digital History could be the future of History. At the same time, it falls short of promises that earlier historians created to sell the field of Digital History. The main problem they write about is the place of Digital History and the worry that Digital History will remove and discredit works that went the traditional route of publication and research.3 The quote that they use to drive home this point is "the Internet does not distinguish between the true and the false, the important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral. . . . Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other; no authority is 'privileged' over any other.", this quote speaks volumes to the field of Digital History because if one day that historians use only the internet for research and publication, them what happens to all the traditional work that History did before Digital History.4

While I talked about and examined the theme of technology and some of the problems that digital History has in the field, this section of my post will discuss the future of historical understanding themes from the last three articles. In the article The Differences between Digital Humanities and Digital History, Stephen Robertson writes that we need to understand the separation between academic use and the field itself to understand historical projects.5 he notes that while we separate the two, we need to understand both to create Digital History and understand the theory and methods that we learn from studying in the Digital Humanities field of History.6 This ties into the article, What is Digital History, Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas continue this question that we see from all the articles that is what is this Digital History. They write that Digital History is "an approach to examining and representing the past that works with the new communication technologies of the computer, the internet network." this piece sums up Digital History and how we use it to understand History.7 I enjoyed reading this article and understanding more about Digital History and what it means to be a Digital Historian. 

The last article I will examine is called, A Companion to Digital Humanities; Susan Hockey writes about the field's History and where it truly started for historians to use computers for data and understanding history. I like how she splits the Digital History field into four eras from 1949 to the present: Beginnings, Consolidation, New Developments, and The Era of the Internet.8 This help historians understand how the field has grown through the years and how old the field is, then what is reported in most books and articles about Digital History. 

This is how the five articles show the themes of technology, the future of historical understanding, and the problems of digital History, how they add more information to each other, and how they can be combined to make a better record of the field of Digital History.

Footnotes:

1. Crymble, Adam. Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age. Westmont: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Accessed January 18, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. pg. 11

2. Crymble, Adam. Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age. Westmont: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Accessed January 18, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central. pg. 11

3. Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig "Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web." Digital History | Promises and Perils of Digital History. Accessed January 18, 2023. https://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/introduction/.

4. Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig "Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web." Digital History | Promises and Perils of Digital History. Accessed January 18, 2023. https://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/introduction/.

5. Robertson, Stephen. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Accessed January 18, 2023. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/ed4a1145-7044-42e9-a898-5ff8691b6628.

6. Robertson, Stephen. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Accessed January 18, 2023. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/ed4a1145-7044-42e9-a898-5ff8691b6628.

7. Seefeldt, Douglas, and William G. Thomas "What Is Digital History?: Perspectives on History: AHA." What Is Digital History? | Perspectives on History | AHA. Accessed January 18, 2023. https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2009/what-is-digital-history.

8. Hockey, Susan. A companion to Digital Humanities. Accessed January 18, 2023. https://companions.digitalhumanities.org/DH/?chapter=content%2F9781405103213_chapter_1.html.

Work Cited: 

Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig "Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web." Digital History | Promises and Perils of Digital History. Accessed January 18, 2023. https://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/introduction/.

Crymble, Adam. Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age. Westmont: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Accessed January 18, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Hockey, Susan. A companion to Digital Humanities. Accessed January 18, 2023. https://companions.digitalhumanities.org/DH/?chapter=content%2F9781405103213_chapter_1.html.

Robertson, Stephen. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Accessed January 18, 2023. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/ed4a1145-7044-42e9-a898-5ff8691b6628.

Seefeldt, Douglas, and William G. Thomas "What Is Digital History?: Perspectives on History: AHA." What Is Digital History? | Perspectives on History | AHA. Accessed January 18, 2023. https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2009/what-is-digital-history.