Reflecting on my First Forays into the Digital Humanities

Like Dana I’ve never been asked to formally reflect on a class before but I’ve found that ultimately it is an interesting and worthwhile exercise. This reflection has allowed me to go back and consider my initial expectations, what I’ve learned, how my approach to public history has changed, and what I hope to learn in the coming semester. 

Practically from the moment I first navigated to the history department’s website and viewed last year’s digital history wiki page this past June I’ve been excited for History 9808: Digital History. I didn’t know what half of the topics were, for example I had to ask my brother-in-law what spidering is, but that didn’t seem to matter.  I think on some level I viewed (and still view) the Digital History class as the epitome of what a public history class should be: current, informative, and hands-on. Moreover, in my opinion the class addresses a topic that is distinctly lacking in most humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts degrees. In my undergraduate education the extent to which we were taught to effectively use the digital sources available to us was minimal. It was limited to a library research seminar here or there and in St. Mary’s required historiography course a guest lecturer who very briefly discussed digital history as an emerging market (a lecture that while a worthwhile introduction proved to barely touch upon what is available to us as historians in a digital world). Moreover, I felt like I, to some extent, had a bit of an advantage. I’ve been actively using the internet to communicate, play online games, and research for almost 10 years now. I felt on some level that I had a deeper and more meaningful relationship with digital technologies than the average person. Little did I know that my meaningful relationship barely scratched the surface of what the internet and digital humanities had to offer.

Probably the most meaningful thing I’ve learned this semester is just how little I know, and more so, just how much there is out there to learn. I’ve learned about copyright, open source technology, folksonomy, information trapping, collective intelligence, markup, mashups, and augmented reality. I’ve tried my hand at blogging, twitter, html, css, some basic text mining, image manipulation with The GIMP, and website design using Google Sites. The class also had a look at one of the many interesting sources available to us free on the internet The Eaton’s Fall and Winter Catalogue from 1913-1914. Outside of class I was lucky enough to try google wave and got the class into it as well with Tim’s help. I joined a number of academic waves and I’m hoping in the new semester to use it more actively as two of our classes will revolve more directly around group projects. I have on more than one occasion been confronted with topics that were completely new, for example: folksonomy- though in that case, it was perhaps more an issue of not knowing the appropriate name for a concept it turned out I had encountered before. I have yet to completely wrap my head around CSS, when I finally did get my CSS assignment working I had no idea how what I had ultimately done was different from an earlier permutation that for whatever reason was broken and did not work. Moreover, although I understand that APIs are good and useful I have not yet quite wrapped my head around how I use them. Apparently there’s  a book for that, though here is a question: is it available online?

Digital History has also changed my approach to Public History, where before I had an almost snobbish disregard for digital sources, now I look to them first. I have a new set of skills that to a certain extent make digital sources more useful that print sources and I know where to find the information I need and I know how to extract the answers I need from it. Moreover, I’ve learned to use the internet to my advantage I can create a working website and will hopefully be well versed in online interactive exhibit design after next semester.

When I started my MA in Public History I imagined that after my 12 months at UWO I would  be prepared to find employment with a museum or local history group. Perhaps I would be researching and designing exhibits or collecting oral histories, or maybe I’d decide to stick to a more directly academic context and I would contribute to the study of social memory and continue to be a good Atlantic Canadian historian by continuing to explore why the history of Atlantic Canada remains largely underrepresented on a national scale. Digital History has opened my eyes to so many different possibilities from digitization and visualization to publishing online and exploiting new and different sources. Moreover, digital history has helped me to understand the importance of a web presence, and has made the idea of becoming an independent contractor far more palatable. I feel ready for the world of public history with my handy digital humanities toolbelt and theoretical hard hat.

Image Manipulation

Earlier today I added the finished products of  a Digital History assignment to my website. You can have a look here. The assignment involved editing an image using The GIMP. In a few days I'm going to post a guide to completing the edits we were asked to do. I found that when I was trying to figure it out no one place seemed to give me the quick and dirty answers so I'm going to fill the gap I noticed.

Concordances and Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott has been my favourite author since I first read Little Women when I was in third or fourth grade. She was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1832 and published her first novel in 1854. An Old Fashioned Girl was published in 1869, and it tells the story of a young country-girl who visits a wealthy friend in the city first when she is 14 then again 6 years later. Polly (the country girl) helps guide her friend’s family to the conclusion that their family life is all they need when they face bankruptcy. Throughout all this Polly is becomes very close to her friend’s elder brother Tom introducing a romantic aspect to the novel. 

I drew a fair amount of the above from the wikipedia entry and to be honest I caught myself thinking “really? the book is about family values?” I haven’t read it in at least 5 years, very possibly longer. My impression was that the novel was, at its heart, a romance. I had already decided to use the book for the Digital History class’ simple text mining assignment; the inconsistencies between my personal impression (recollection) of the book and the wikipedia description helped me decide what question to ask of the text. I decided to attempt to figure out using concordances if the book is a treatise on family values with a minor romantic sub-plot or a romantic novel as I was, before reading the wikipedia summary and thinking about it a bit further, inclined to believe.

I began by selecting a plain text edition of the novel available on Project Gutenberg and plugging it into the TAPoR Find Words -Concordance tool on the linked page. I decided to start by asking how love appears in the text. The word love appears in the text 88 times and is interspersed with reasonable regularity throughout. However, my initial TAPoR results just didn’t tell me much about the context the word appears in. I decided to expand my concordance to give me the sentences on either side of the word instead of just 5 words. First and foremost I need to mention that apparently Louisa May Alcott did not subscribe to the view that writing should be clear and concise- there is absolutely nothing concise about some of the sentences that the tool selected. More importantly though having the concordance tool give me the sentences gave me a much better picture of the context in which the word love appeared. It quickly became apparent that the majority of the mentions of love in the novel were not romantic in nature. They either referred to the love of, for example, an activity or person more generally, or they referred to familial love. More importantly, mentions of love that directly related to Polly were very rarely of a romantic nature. Making the assumption that love and romance in the 19th century especially among higher class city dwellers revolved around courtship with the eventual end goal of marriage I decided to see what the concordance tool had to say about the words marriage, matrimony, and union. There was only one mention of the word marriage in the entire novel, matrimony does not appear at all, and union appears once in an unromantic context towards the middle of the novel. Finally I asked the concordance tool to tell me about the words courtship, courting, and flirtation. Courtship does not appear in the novel at all, nor does courting. Flirtation, I suppose, is a word that has very few other meanings. It appears in the novel on four distinctly romantic occasions.

In my opinion, the results of my concordances tell me rather unequivocally that my childhood impression of An Old Fashioned Girl as a romantic novel was, at least, thematically wrong. This was at the very least an interesting way to use concordances to examine text.

Perhaps the most challenging thing about generating these concordances was choosing a question to try to answer, followed immediately by choosing words or phrases to plug into the concordance tool. I carefully employed my trusty thesaurus and used the tools linked on the TAPoR pages but I’m sure there was probably a better way to answer my question using the tool. We’ll stick it in the category “learning experience.”

Sources:

http://www.louisamayalcott.org/louisamaytext.html