Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, they made several underlying assumptions and predictions about the future of the Digital Humanities. While some of their concerns, such as the difficulty of incorporating video into digital projects in a pre-youtube/blip/etc world, have been tackled, others remain. The high cost of digitizing and the choices that must be made when designing a digital project are still as relevant as they were seven years ago.
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| Image courtesy of the CHNM's The Making of 1989 project . |
I found myself being sucked in to the Center for History and New Media's The Making of 1989 project. Its simple layout and use of wonderful soviet era art and propaganda posters to illustrate the text was successful in drawing me in. Less successful was Matthew Booker's interesting yet confusing use of what seemed to be dynamic and interactive maps as static jpeg images.
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| Image courtesy of The Journal of Digital Humanities. |
In his article about San Fransisco Bay's ecological history,
Visualizing San Francisco Bay’s Forgotten Past, Booker places these Spatial History Lab interactive timeline maps as image files, rendering them muddled and confusing. In the image above, what do the green sections indicate? What about the Brown? How exactly does this help us visualize the landscape of San Francisco Bay's salt ponds?
Another project close to my own heart is found on the University of Maryland's Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities site. Called Preserving Virtual World's II, it will attempt to create a way to preserve old video games and software.
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| Image courtesy of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities |
Another great use of the digital humanities is found on Dan Cohen's blog, where he shows how use of Google Book's archive of Victorian literature can be searched to find trends in culture.
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| Image courtesy of Dan Cohen's blog |
As the above image indicates, automated searching through a vast collection of 19th century books shows trends in the publishing of books with "God" in the title. This kind of data can be used as evidence of larger trends in culture, and anomalies can lead to new areas of research that otherwise would not have been explored.
New tools and guides to the digital humanities, such as Lisa Spiro's series on getting started in the digital humanities are opening up the digital landscape to new arrivals. As technology and the tech capabilities of new generations of scholars grow, it is clear that more and better uses of digital spaces are inevitable.
I agree on the San Francisco Bay project. It seemed a little confusing with its maps...Interesting bit about the preservation of old video games.
ReplyDeleteI too agree with your observations on Booker's "project". I think it was intended to be more of a journal article, but with color pictures, it didn't seem like Booker was utilizing many of the tools a digital format could afford.
ReplyDeleteThe Virtual Worlds II project is interesting. As a casual gamer, I find it an exciting project. As someone who works at the Washington Digital Archives, I find it unnecessary. The idea of preservation is to preserve items of lasting value. I'm just not sold that 'The Oregon Trail' and other "classic" video games have that value.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, yeah I was hoping the images on the SF bay article were dynamic online as I read them printed off, turns out they were not.... bummer.
I too was a bit baffled by Booker's concept. It's case seemed to be lost to the fine details that he rendered about the environment. He seemed to be making the argument that history could be used as grounds for resolving environmental concerns by returning lands to their "natural" state. However, he didn't drive home that point entirely, especially with the distractions of the visuals, some of which had no place on the page.
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