Blog Posts

I decided to focus on Omeka today. I’m still pretty familiar with it from last year, so I didn’t find the training too difficult (aside from the fact that I had to reinstall the domain, sadness). Last year, I didn’t pay much attention to the plugins, but this time around I decided to scroll through the ones Omeka had up. I found some pretty interesting plugins like a CSV import button, which I think could be part of future trainings to give pre-existing content to import and look at in Omeka.

I was a little nervous about learning the new interface for ArcGIS at first. More often than not, I am very bad at getting a handle on massive changes to a program’s UI, especially with how comfortable I am with the old one. However, I think the new map viewer for ArcGIS is a lot easier to navigate to me. It may be because of the separate layer panes, since that setup reminds me of the digital art and editing software I’m accustomed to. I also like the addition of the popups tutorial in this version of the training (even though it might have been in the original training and I’m just forgetting). I will say that revisiting ArcGIS and learning new features has been pretty enjoyable. I like learning new aspects of a program, while still being able to connect the new stuff to the older aspects that I already knew before.

I decided to revisit the Gale Digital Scholar Lab training today. Last year, I had trouble with the software because of the difficulties navigating it and the unexpected results from a lot of the text analysis. I didn’t really understand the difference between the text analyzers and the OCR, or that the OCR was actually causing most of those problems. These issues still persisted to an extent, but I understand now that the OCR isn’t perfect, and besides that Gale does a great job with analyzing text that is already correct. I would like to gain a deeper understanding of OCRs and software similar to it, if anything for my own curiosity, but it could help for my current project given our reliance on scanned images.

Audacity is a tool that I’m already pretty familiar with. I have a lot of experience using other audio tools, mainly ones for making digital music, but they have a lot of overlap with Audacity. In the past I’ve only really used Audacity for making quick edits to a single, short audio file. Working now with multiple audio tracks in this program was new to me, but it wasn’t that foreign since the setup is very similar to the audio program I mainly use. If anything, I find Audacity to be a bit clunky to use and frustrating to navigate sometimes, but that’s just because I’m more used to my other program. Overall, I think I would be pretty confident in teaching Audacity, or at the very least some general audio editing tips.

After working on a year of Vivero trainings, I think my advice to new fellows would be to experiment with everything you have access to. The given trainings serve as a guide, but there is always more to explore in a program. Read the program’s documentation if it’s available, or just play around and press buttons until something interesting happens. There’s a good chance to find something that would be useful to your project or to somebody else’s projects.

I think Twine is cool, and that’s really what this reflection will boil down to. The story building interface is really nice to work with, and it’s always good when a program uses visual coding blocks, flowcharts in this case. I think Twine is a deceptively simple program. I don’t mean that it’s hard to use, but rather there are so many cool things you can do just by looking a little deeper. For example, I accidentally came across the ability to allow a user to input text, but force the input to display a message of the creator’s choosing. I’ve never seen functionality for something like that implemented in an engine outright, so it was pretty cool to me. I would see myself using Twine for small, personal projects, but it definitely has a place in education through an interactive text game.

StoryMapJS is a pretty simple program to use, which really surprised me. Mapping programs like ArcGIS were a struggle for me to understand, and that’s what I was expecting going into StoryMap. However, the program is more like TimelineJS, but on a map. Creating slide cards was easy, and dragging and dropping locations really sped up the workflow of creating the map. I also noticed that the map could be exported as a package to host on a website or shared with anyone. I don’t see myself using this program often, but it’s definitely one to recommend to anyone doing small story mapping projects.

I spent my training this month working with TimelineJS. I like this program because it’s very easy to get the hang of thanks to the integration with google slides. All of the major work is done by the program using the template they provide. There wasn’t much of note during the learning process of the tool since it was so straightforward, so I want to consider the possibilities of using the tool in my current project. A timeline would be a fun use of a UI for navigating the archive, but maybe not the most accessible or convenient. Maybe for display purposes if anything, it could be used to show some of the more prominent department productions.

This semester, I was introduced to a variety of different digital tools for analyzing data. Also, since I took the DST course for the first half, I had a lot more time in class to learn more about the tools. However, I think the general ideas behind the proper use of data was my biggest takeaway from the semester. In particular, understanding that digital humanities is very connected to humanity (as the name would suggest). It’s important to understand that every aspect of the field is done by people, it’s just assisted by technology. There are nuances in the tools we use and how we as scholars adapt to it for our needs, and the proper ways to share our findings while being respectful to anyone involved in the process of getting the information. I think the training model was fine. I liked the amount of freedom we had in terms of what we could explore, and the time we got was substantial enough to complete the training and explore the program even more if we wanted.

The TDPS archive has made a lot of progress, considering I joined it when it was pretty much just starting. We’ve set plenty of objectives during the semester that we will continue to revisit. Things like the hosting site and gathering outside archival resources is something that should continue into next semester, and I would need to reach out to some on-campus resources for them. My leads and I have created a short document to track the progress we made this semester and to track our next steps.

I’ve been thinking about StoryMaps for a while since we first did the training on it. It seemed very similar to WordPress, but after helping a student use WordPress for their project, I realized that StoryMaps was a lot more intuitively designed for interactive elements. Also the UI is so simple that I’m amazed at how much it actually offers. I think it’s a good thing to look into for any sort of personal projects, really because it just feels so fun to use.

https://grinnell.maps.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html (I’m using the training data since I did not use it on my first pass of the program).

ArcGIS is still not a program I’m very comfortable with using, but that is more because of my own inexperience with data mapping than the ArcGIS itself. Although a lot of my previous criticisms still apply: I don’t think it’s very intuitive at times and actually manipulating the data once it’s set is very difficult or even impossible. This time I did get to explore more of how the data is visualized depending on the parameters set, something I couldn’t do with my five object set, so I’m glad I could see a little more of what the program has to offer. Still,  I wouldn’t feel comfortable helping students out with ArcGIS mapping just yet. Not until I understand more about this form of visualization, at least.