I attended the 8:30 am paper session of the Digital Scholarship Conference. While I was there I learned about several groups humanities projects that they had completed. Although I thought that the visualization of the Polish Jew’s life using the Corpus linguistics application was interesting, I was most interested in the Boston Marathon archive project.
The “Our Marathon” project is an archive of accounts and videos that are relevant to the deadly Boston Marathon Bombing that occurred on April 15, 2013. Through the use of digital crowd sourcing along with personal crowd sourcing, the “Our Marathon” group was able to gather enough information to create a detailed archive of the Boston Marathon. In order to get the full story, the “Our Marathon” group interviewed several different demographics of people. The “Our Marthon” group first interviewed people from Watertown, the place were they caught the boston bombing killer. After, the group also interviewed people from the Boston Public Library, located at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and people from Cambridge, the place where the two brothers lived. Finally using the application Omeca, the “Our Marathon” group was able to bring all of the information they collected together into one well-detailed archive.
I thought this project was very interesting for several reasons. For one, I thought that the “Our Marathon” project was able to show me contemporary uses of digital humanities and how the use of visualizations and archives can help to tell a wide range of stories and preserve the memory of a variety of events and stories. Another reason why I really enjoyed this project was because of the “Our Marathon” group’s ability to coordinate such a large project with some many pieces to it and pull it all together into one comprehensive archive. In addition, I think that the group was able to collect some really neat photos of the Boston Marathon that can be found no where else except for in the archive. I think that this paper session taught me a lot about the different uses of digital humanities, and how the use of digital humanities can help a lot in coordinating large projects such as the “Our Marathon” project.