Monthly Archives: October 2023

Tools

Mapping with Kepler.gl

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In the digital humanities, mapping offers another way to provide information in a way that engages the audience. Histories of the National Mall, for example, uses a map interface as a gateway for visitors to explore the Mall in a different way. As the developer explained, there are no markers about the history of the space – the Omeka based site serves as digital historical markers.  

Digital mapping tools are powerful for visualizing data. Through digital mapping, relationships, change over time, aggregation or dispersion, and paths/vectors can be highlighted or explored. In an exercise with the Kepler.gl, layers and filters were added to datasets to understand patterns and identify possible relationships between the data (interview information from the WPA Slave narratives).  Some of the questions it left me with were regarding the clusters of interviews geographically, I am thinking I should have played with adding towns and cities, to look closer at what communities may have been targeted by the interviews, or whether it was a random distribution of the survivors of enslavement.

The timeline map also raised some interesting questions as the interview dates clustered in the spring and summer, vice an even distribution across the dates. It leads to the question of were the interviews rushed, or funding running out, or was it just the time available (See map below).

Reviews, Tools

Text Mining with Voyant

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I understood text mining as a concept, using Voyant, with all its highs and lows, helped my comprehension. I realized my knowledge was thin, familiar with word clouds and graphing, working with Voyant, and I am curious about other tools as well now, I was able to delve into the context, and found some surprises.

Sinclair and Lockwood discussed the two basic questions for text mining:

  • a means of taking linguistic and semantic characteristics and seeing the different uses and context
  • taking unfamiliar work and making it understandable

The experience I had exploring the Kentucky dataset supports the idea. For Kentucky, I ended up with this cirrus

 

The prevalence of the word “War” surprised me, until I dug into the context. War was discussed as part of the story of participants, in the context of the Civil War, and as a verb. War, it turned out, also meant was. Simply looking at the word cloud or even the trends, would not have shown the other meaning, and just left it as the interviewees must have been deeply invested in the war.

 

Voyant was a little challenging sometimes, with functions working some times and not others, but the value of the tools outweighed any issues with the program.

The text mining exercise was interesting and made me think more about what can be learned, and how little I knew at the start.

Definitions, Guides

Why Metadata Matters

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Metadata, in simplest terms is the data about data. Metadata provides a description of a Web resource by assigning attributes to the object. www.dublincore.org uses the example of how libraries use metadata as part of the catalog: title, author, date of creation or publication, etc.  The site goes on to explain that part of the stressful information overload frequently experienced during a search is undifferentiated digital data. 

A Web resource’s basic information follows the basic idea of the library catalog, expanding it out to encompass more information. The Dublin Core Standards offer a framework for elements using terms that were developed across multiple user communities as a means of simplifying metadata.

Metadata attached to a photograph of a coffeemaker adds information for perspective. By offering information on the physical dimensions, it helps visualized the item outside of the flattened digital format.

Databases

Database Review

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Everyday Life & Women in America

Home – Everyday Life & Women in America (gmu.edu)

Everyday Life & Women in America provides access to primary source material from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at  Duke University and The New York Public Library. The collection contains periodicals, pamphlets, monographs and broadsides spanning the period of 1800-1920, which can be viewed and searched multiple ways. The collection is curated to provide “a thematically unified but eclectic range of material,” a seemingly contradictory goal. Searching the database is a little trickier than advertised, as the site repeats that there is an option to view the documents thematically, but it is extremely difficult to determine how to do so. The basic search allows filtering by date and date range,document type and library or archive. Search results offer both a list of documents and a tab for secondary resources, essays commissioned to offer more context to some of the material. Advanced search is available using Boolean search parameters. 

The search guide offered does a thorough job of walking a user through how to search as well as some different ways to think about language in the search. “Selection and Language” offers the warning that due to the time period, language that is offensive today will frequently be used, but may also be necessary and will return search results that may not be found otherwise. They frame the challenges as it is “problematic” but may be critical to finding hidden narratives (there is a section in the searching guide discussing some ways to work around this as well). The search guide also has an excellent section “Find People” that guides the user through language and filter options to help look for people that do not often stand out in the collection. The searching guide also directs the user to three ways to browse the collection: View Documents, a list of documents; Search Directories, which leads to a search by Library of Congress Subject Heading from a drop down; and Thematic Areas. The Thematic Areas are disappointing, as the site describes them as guides to highlight major themes, where in reality they are paragraphs with a few examples. They do come with the disclaimer that documents are not tagged that way, it seems like a lost opportunity.

The collection is 700 plus items published between 1800 and 1920 in the United States. The publisher is Adam Matthew Digital Limited, published first in 2007 with updates to the platform and content in 2017 and 2023 (https://www-everydaylife-amdigital-co-uk.mutex.gmu.edu/introduction/publication-details). Images can be downloaded as the full document in PDF, Current transcript (if available), and the content metadata. Each item is full text searchable. 

Much of the collection comes from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University whose mission is the acquisition and preservation of materials about the lives of women. The Center started with the endowment of an archivist and has expanded to a permanently endowed center in 1993. As a reviewer noted, some of the database skews toward documents from the South, however the partnership with the New York Public Library offers some balance as well as the Town Topics periodical on Gilded Age society in New York. The documents do not list sources of digitization, nor do either of the sources specify how they were digitized.

The database was reviewed twice, one in 2008 and in 2013. Bothe reviews rated the database as useful and worth using. Both commented on the Chronology feature, color coded by category for context, and while it is nifty visually, it is of limited use as the entries do not link back to resources.

  • http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/everyday-life-women-america-c-1800-1920/docview/1325052624/se-2?accountid=14541
  • http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/everyday-life-women-america/docview/225720643/se-2?accountid=14541

The database is available by subscription through libraries or educational institutions. The homepage will load without subscription, however only the introduction page is accessible, navigation to any other page requires a login. Copyright information is contained in the metadata for the item, there is no guidance on citations.

Overall, it is a rich database that offers different perspectives on the period. At under 800 items, it is definitely curated, but with an eye toward introducing the depth writing about women’s lives in the era.