The Humanities Now!

Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Digital Archive of the Boston Marathon Bombing

    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.…

  • Digital archives of the Boston bombing

    I went to the 8:30 am paper session of the Digital Scholarship Conference and found the project “Our Marathon” very inspiring. “Our Marathon” is a crowd-sourced archive of pictures, videos, stories, and even social media related to the Boston Marathon; the bombing on April 15, 2013; the subsequent search, capture, and trial of the individuals who…

  • Geographic Visualization Map and It’s Relevance

    This GIS, Geospatial Information System, is used to be able to describe the Moravian missions made by Powell and his friends during the year 1748. The GIS has already been used for similar ideas, shown in Bodenhammer’s article, The Spacial Humanities,  “archeologists have used GIS and computer animations to reconstruct the Roman Forum, for example, creating a…

  • The Importance of Understanding Visual Rhetoric: thoughts on Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis

    Over the last week or so, we have revisited visualization as  a technique for interpretation. In our production of networks using Gephi, the process of creating data, preparing it for input into the software, manipulating it once in the software and then interpreting it once entered has been foremost.  As we move on to mapping,…

  • Close Reading – Powell Diary XML Markup

    At first, the Powell Diary was not a very meaningful text to me. I felt distanced from the content and did not quite fully understand what was going on or what the significance was. However, through the process of constantly marking the text up, at first in the google doc and eventually in Oxygen, I…

  • A New Perspective

    The past two weeks have greatly enhanced my appreciation for the work that goes in to marking up a text, which in our case was our Powell Diary transcriptions. I had no idea how much detail is behind a marked up text. I think that the most fascinating thing is that the average person is…

  • A Deeper Understanding through Marking Up

    The process of marking up has introduced a whole new realm of close reading that I was unaware of. When analyzing almost every word and deciphering them into categories, you can gain a new and deeper understanding of the text rather than simply reading it in print, which is what Pierazzo talked about in her…

  • Closer than Just Regular Reading

    When it comes to reading just any material, close reading isn’t the first thing that jumps into your head.  Reading a body of work usually consists of starting at the top of the page and reading the at least most of the words.  Close Reading is a completely different story. Using Oxygen to make a…

  • The Powell Diary Takes on Oxygen

    After transcribing our Powell Diary pages, we then went through and color-coded specific meaningful words in order to then easily markup our transcriptions in the program Oxygen. Before we as a class were able to transfer our marked up transcriptions into Oxygen however, we had to create a Google doc where decisions could be made…

  • Categorize the data

    Close reading in digital humanity is a little bit different from the traditional reading process. From my own experience, it is a process of categorizing rather than information gathering. Elena Pierazzo values this categorizing process a lot in her report. “For print the choice of which features to include in the transcription is limited largely…

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