Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Is it a “S” or a “F”?

    The transcription of an archival document is not possible without contextual knowledge that the artefact is submerged in. Essentially, the only individual that knows exactly what is written, is the individual who wrote it. Technology today enables us to read a typed document and have no difficulty recognising every letter that is written. Archival documents…

  • Transcription: Conquering Old English

    The transcription process is a very tedious yet interesting procedure. With the use of transcription, people can gain access to millions of archives that they had no previous chance of having . In addition, the use of transcription allows people to easily read the writing from the original document which they may have previously not…

  • Transcription: Challenges and Achievement

    My first attempt on transcription was really unsuccessful: on a 52-minute class, I transcribed only two lines of the Powell Diary. Since I was not a native speaker of English, I unconsciously believed that this assignment was too hard for me. I was diffident and uncertain about every word of my transcription. It was on Wednesday…

  • Transcription Process: Difficulities To Learn a “New” Language

       ↑ Press to play(Mission Impossible Theme) Transcription Process is really important while researching old archives. It can be described as a “strange learning experience”. Original text is quite tricky and difficult for me to understand. Challenges can be summed up to 3 parts : mysterious hand writing, intricate grammar and wrong pronunciation. For example, on this…

  • Blog #1 – Old Weather

              The primary Digital Humanities focus of this website is to promote the transcribing of 19th century ship logs pertaining to weather in certain areas of the world. The purpose of this is to acquire a collection of data regarding weather to spell out a pattern and further progress current climate…

  • How the Transcription Process Went

    Transcribing old english documents can sometimes be tricky, especially when the author is a little careless like Powell in his diary.  It is written in a sloppy cursive with many spelling errors and a few pronouns, causing issues while rewriting. Also, the rewriting part of transcription be difficult digitally because there aren’t many softwares that…

  • Kindred Britain

    The Digital Humanities Project Kindred Britain uses the approach of network analysis to show how historic figures, mainly from Britain, were affiliated and related to one another. Although a network analysis project, Kindred Britain employs several other approaches such as mapping and visualization to help clearly convey the relationship of over 30,000 historic figures.  Through…

  • How to convert a Word .docx to .txt file

    How to convert a Word .docx to .txt file In Word docx, choose “Save As” and then choose “Plain Text (.txt)” format ** make sure that you give your file a new name, just in case it overwrites your existing Word document (it shouldn’t, but just in case ..) You should get a pop-up window…

  • The Significance of Digital Artifacts

    Digital humanities projects, such as the ones on the Digital Humanities Sample Book website use methods such as 3D mapping and literary analysis to display many different archives regarding numerous fields of research. These projects exhibit new types of information regarding humanities research that would not be easily accessible through other means of media. These…

  • Digital or Original? Archives, the Deciding Factor.

    Archives and digital editions are just two of several categories used to describe DH projects. Although one can be turned into the other, they are two separate categories for a reason. When saying that one can be turned into the other, I am referring to the fact that an archive can be transferred to a…

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