You searched for New archive

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)

September 20, 2017

Can the microbe speak?

It’s 5:30 pm, and I’ve been staring at my computer screen for over eight hours. There’s a crick in my neck, my breathing is shallow, my blood pressure has elevated, and the entire Giza governorate has just disappeared off of the map the instant that I finished tracing its borders—for the third time. I take a deep breath, utter a few choice unpleasant words under my breath, make sure to save my work, and turn off the computer. Today, the dragon has won.

I am two weeks into what I had originally, and naively, thought would be a one-week project to map the outbreak of epidemic and epizootic diseases in Egypt during the First World War, which comprises a subsection of my dissertation project. It’s not a great time to be working on Egypt, as it’s become nearly impossible to get research clearance from the Egyptian government. Funding has also become a near impossibility: my optimism at being named a finalist for a Fulbright in early 2016 was short lived; the program was suspended due to security concerns before awards were announced.

While online resources are scarce, I did find that the Egyptian government’s official gazetteer has an online index of its entire run since the 1870s. Over the course of several days, I discovered that the gazetteer was a virtual treasure trove of exactly the sort of data I’ve been looking for: reports of disease outbreaks in detailed locations up and down the Nile Valley. Over a week, I compiled a spreadsheet of almost 800 records for the period between late 1914 and mid-1919.

The question, of course, was what to do with this data. I was certain the diseases would tell me something, if I could just figure out how to get them to speak.

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose)

It was Julia Gossard, a UT alumna now teaching at Utah State University, who pointed me in the direction of the Programming Historian, a website dedicated to helping historians use digital tools to process data through modeling, mapping, and other methods. I didn’t have time to learn a programming language, but mapping was an idea I liked. The site has several columns about creating maps, using open source mapping software. While I’m a big fan of open source, especially when it replaces costly technical software, I was a bit uneasy about the lack of support for the platform – in short, I foresaw the ability to get myself into trouble, but not out of it.

A little digging around led me to the unexpected find that UT has an institutional subscription to ARCGIS, which is the (otherwise very expensive) industry standard mapping platform. Using UT’s institutional subscription to Lynda.com, I started training myself to use ARCGIS.

Had I known what I was getting myself into, I probably wouldn’t have dived right in.

Mapping the data required me to tag each record with the latitude and longitude of the reported location. This led me to one of the key stumbling blocks for all scholars of the Middle East who’ve dabbled in the digital humanities—so much data is out there on the web, but much of it is transliterated from the original language. There is no universally recognized Arabic-to-Latin transliteration method, and the potential inconsistencies are well on display in the web’s largest open-source geographic database, Geonames.org. While some of its Egyptian entries contained the original names in Arabic script, most did not, leaving me to guess—frequently incorrectly—how they might have been rendered. Since Geonames is open-source, I added the names both in Arabic and one of the more commonly recognized transliteration systems to Geonames’s database as I went, which will hopefully make someone else’s life a little easier.

People fleeing a cholera outbreak at the port of Boulaq (near Cairo) in 1883 (via Wellcome Collection)

Finally, it was time to start mapping, and herein lay another challenge. ARCGIS has an expansive built in library of open source data, which included, as I had hoped, administrative maps of Egypt. I very quickly realized, however, that the administrative borders of the early 21c did not correlate directly to those of the early 20c. At least one governorate has since been split into three and there were a lot of unfamiliar names on the maps. I discovered that the UT Libraries has a copy of the 1917 Egyptian census, which has a big fold out map of the country. I scanned it, brought it home and compared it to the current maps … and realized that it was probably going to be easier to draw the 1917 map in ARCGIS rather than try to adapt the contemporary maps.

The process took nearly two weeks, employing long forgotten Photoshop skills (yay for bezel curves!), tracing a century old map and rendering it onto a satellite image of contemporary Egypt. The resultant map is, as they say, “good enough.” It’s probably got a distortion of around 2 miles, but it’ll never appear in print at that level of detail. Maybe when my monograph becomes a best-seller, I’ll hire someone to re-draw it.

I learned that ARCGIS has some quirks. It has a tendency to freeze up every 60-90 seconds. I quickly learned to save my work every time I did anything, a lesson that came in handy when, for some reason, the entire Giza governorate vanished inexplicably … three times … after I drew it. (The following morning, I discovered that the governorate hadn’t vanished, it was just invisible. I still don’t actually know why).

Finally, the big day came. After the blood, sweat, tears, swearing, and yelling at the cat, the map was finished. I overlay my disease data, and sat back to look at the results.

Children playing in a poor neighborhood of Alexandria under quarantine during an outbreak of typhus, sometime around WWI (via Wellcome Collection)

Have the microbes told me a story? They have. As I set forth on the next phase of my project, I have clusters of locations and specific dates to look for. But the maps have also given me more questions—Is there a correlation between a two-year outbreak of cattle plague and the rampant inflation in the cost of food during the war? Does the death of 139,000 Egyptians due to influenza at war’s end have anything to do with the eruption of a populist uprising just six weeks later? And why is this most deadly epidemic absent from the press and the pages of the official gazetteer?

I also realized the importance of presenting my data in this visual form. No one is going to go through all 800 records on my spreadsheet, but the map provides a clear snapshot of my subject and the questions it raises, and it makes a visual case for the argument I’m laying out in my dissertation. In this form, it will make my modest contribution to this field of study more convincing and accessible.

The New Archive series highlights various uses of digital tools in humanities research. More from the series:

Charlie S. Binkow explores Honest Abe’s Archive
Joseph Parrott highlights the digitalized political posters collected by archivist and artist Lincoln Cushing
Maria José Afanador-Llach discusses her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

Honest Abe’s Archive: The New Archive (No. 21)

April 15, 2015

By Charley S. Binkow

Perhaps no figure in American history has been studied more than Abraham Lincoln. A man of profound importance, intellect, and ambiguity, Lincoln has been a source of fascination for scholars, students, and Americans for generations. There are innumerable documents centered on Lincoln and his legacy, which are now accessible to everyone via The Lincoln Archives Digital Project.

According to their website, the digitalization project, which started in 2002, is the first project to scan “the entire contents of a president’s administration.” That’s a lot of stuff—by project’s end, they will have approximately fourteen million images. But they do a wonderful job of organizing their growing collection. There is a search option to the archive for those who know what they’re looking for. For those who just want to browse, I would recommend starting with the website’s interactive timeline. This screen not only gives one a comprehensive history of Lincoln’s life, but it also supplements dates with a ticker-tape news display of global history. For example, you can learn that in 1811, two years after Lincoln’s birth, the Grimm brothers published their famous fairy tale collection.

Honest old Abe on the Stump, at the ratification Meeting of Presidential Nominations. Springfield 1860. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

From that page, one can head to the documents section to read Lincoln’s personal writings. I recommend reading the letters he sent to Mary Todd—one can really feel how much he misses her while he’s traveling.

The website also gives researchers the chance to explore Lincoln’s world. I would suggest looking at the maps section located on the left. One can explore city maps, battle maps, maps of foreign countries, and maps of territories.

Battle of Gettysburg, 3rd July 1863.

The newspaper section is a must. The website breaks the papers up by north and south and lets you peruse to one’s heart’s content. The editors of the site also give the reader a chance to explore the history of the newspapers/magazines and suggested future readings.

This is a fruitful and expansive archive. And it’s only getting bigger. I have already found useful information for my own research, and I’m sure any scholar can find something of use here for theirs. But to any American history enthusiast, this is a playground of documents, pictures, and downright interesting stuff.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

Joseph Parrott highlighted the digitalized political posters collected by archivist and artist Lincoln Cushing

Maria José Afanador-Llach discussed her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice and Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
Charley Binkow discussed digitalized images from the Folger Shakespeare Library
Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush
Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

From the Humanities to the Digital Humanities: The New Archive (No. 20)

March 26, 2015

By Maria José Afanador-Llach

How does a humanist become a digital humanist?

Dr. Ece (pronounced “A.J.”) Turnator talks with us about her work in digital history. She earned her Ph.D. in Byzantine History at Harvard University in 2013 and is currently curator of the Global Middle Ages Project and is a CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) and The A. Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow in Medieval Data Curation at the English Department and UT Libraries. In the Fall 2015, she will teach Introduction to Byzantine History in the UT History Department. My conversation with Dr. Turnator offers insights into the challenges and the exciting new possibilities that the digital era brings to scholarship in history and more broadly in the humanities.

Ece Turnator

During her graduate training Turnator became interested in the workings of the digital world. She studied with Prof. Michael McCormick on the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations (DARMC), a project that makes materials for a Geographical Information System (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analyses of Roman and Medieval civilizations freely available on the internet. She became the assistant project manager of DARMC, a seminal experience that introduced her to new ideas and methodologies that ultimately helped shape her own research and dissertation.

By the time Turnator started to explore these digital tools, she, like other students, had been seeking training on her own and trying to figure out what tools were best suited to her research. She initially learned how to utilize GIS through workshops that gave her a sense of the scope and potential of the tool. She felt that she needed more than what occasional workshops had to offer and began to take courses in digital methodologies. She recommends that students take advantage of the resources at UT, and take an introductory course in digital humanities (offered at the iSchool) in order to get a proper overview of the methodologies available to them. This advice is relevant no matter what area of the humanities one might be interested in. Turnator explains, “In general, I don’t think we ought to divide digital humanities into departments because the questions asked and the tools used can be deeply relevant no matter which specific humanities field we happen to be in.” Data visualization tools and text analysis tools can be useful to anyone in the humanities, she asserts, “These tools can productively shape research, depending on what questions we pose.”

Distribution of a Thirteenth-Century Fine Ware. (Map created using a GIS)

For example, in her dissertation research about Byzantine economy, Turnator worked with large amounts of data involving archaeological artifacts, ceramic, coins, and textiles. In trying to understand the distribution patterns of ceramics across what is today Western Turkey and Greece, she built a table of ceramic types and mapped them by site. She was able to notice patterns that were difficult to see by using traditional methods and these insights changed the course of her subsequent research.

Sites Studied in Turnator’s Dissertation

Excel Table showing data on Fine Ceramic types derived from sites studied in Turnator’s Dissertation

The Global Middle Ages Project (a much expanded site is under development) started in 2007 by Prof. Geraldine Heng from UT Austin and Prof. Susan Noakes at the University of Minnesota, aims to become a generator of new ideas and questions about the global Middle Ages and work as a tool for graduate students, scholars, and the general public to reflect and learn about the medieval world beyond Europe. In 2013 under the leadership of Dr. Fred Heath, the Vice Provost and Director of UTL, the libraries became a partner of the project. Currently, the new GMA site is being built utilizing the expertise in the libraries. One of the site’s projects in the pipeline is called Virtual Plasencia. Prof. Roger Martinez (U. of Colorado, Colorado Springs) and Dr. Victor Shinazi’s (ETH Zurich) and an international team are working on a 3D redesign of the city in northwestern Spain today. One of the biggest challenges of this and other digital projects, according to Dr. Turnator, is to not replicate our analog habits but to learn to benefit from being in the digital world by understanding how it actually works, and what its limitations are.

There are five other projects in the GMA pipeline:

Lynn Ramey and her team’s (Vanderbilt University) “Discoveries of the Americas
Chapurukha Kusimba (American University) and his team’s “Early Global Connections in East Africa”
Timothy Pauketat (Urbana-Champaign) and his team’s “The North American Middle Ages: Big History from the Mississippi Valley to Mexico”
Christopher Taylor’s (Williams College) “Peregrinations of Prester John: The Creation of a Global Story Across 600 Years”
Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers University) and Abdurrahman Atçıl’s (Queen’s College, CUNY) “A Prosopographical Study of Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Medical Elite”
Thomas Kealy’s (Colby-Sawyer College) “Itinerary Poets in Thirteenth-Fourteenth-Century-Al-Andalus

Another challenge that Dr. Turnator faces right now on the Global Middle Ages project is establishing consistent searching tools for the diverse projects that are and will be in its network. It is necessary but difficult to produce “metadata standards,” that is, categories for indexing content that most medievalists can agree upon so that users can find what they’re looking for on a large network of websites. To that end, she is organizing a workshop funded by CLIR, the Mellon Foundation and UTL, to bring medievalists to UT Austin for a two-day workshop in May 2015. The purpose of the meeting is for medievalists, librarians, and technologists to discuss medievalists’ workflow in research, publication, and teaching. Turnator explains that “the biggest challenge in digital anything is that it absolutely requires collaboration with librarians and other stakeholders on campus to succeed in the long run.” Librarians are experts in long-term preservation, access and in dealing with what are called data-interoperability issues, or the problems that come up when online content is created without consistent standards of data description and definition. That is why having one foot in the libraries and one foot in a humanities department has been so useful for Turnator and for the projects she works on.

Digital Humanities is increasingly becoming a desired and expected skill set for humanists. Job openings at the MLA (Modern Language Association) and AHA (American Historical Association) are increasingly requiring this skill set. Nationwide, humanities departments have begun to incorporate courses to accommodate these emergent needs. At UT, Turnator points out, the School of Information (iSchool) has fantastic resources and courses relevant for humanities students; workshops are available at UT Libraries, TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center), Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL), to name a few. So UT has great resources but they may be difficult to navigate for humanities students in their fields trying to fulfill their department-specific requirements.

Turnator also shared her views about how she sees the digital humanities evolving and affecting scholarship. Projects in the digital humanities, she explains, challenge traditional ways of doing scholarship, especially the single author/monograph model. We do not yet have a well-oiled review processes to evaluate digital projects, which are often collaborative, and hiring committees often do not understand where credit is due and tend to ignore them completely in the hiring process; that will change as the field matures. For now good digital humanities projects bring mostly good publicity and fame to established scholars. In the future, formal training will not only help graduates get jobs but will also help forge the path that leads to peer-review and publications that help faculty get promoted based on valued digital projects. She adds “the acquisition of digital skills require formal training and careful study.” We need to train a new generation of humanists who not only know how to build digital projects but also how to evaluate and utilize them. Formal training in these methodologies should be front and center, and just as the methodologies tend to be naturally collaborative, this type of training needs departments, research units, and libraries to bring their expertise to the table and collaborate. When this happens, digital methodologies have the potential to change the world of humanistic inquiry in the long term.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:
Maria José Afanador-Llach discussed her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice and Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
Charley Binkow discussed digitalized images from the Folger Shakespeare Library
Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush
Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

All images courtesy of Ece Turnator

A Graphic Revolution: The New Archive (No. 19)

March 12, 2015

By Joseph Parrott

Lincoln Cushing reviewing slides from the Cuban Communist Party in Havana, 1994.

Digital History is more than just a new, innovative way of using and presenting historical data. It offers an opportunity to change the way historians and archivists understand the holding, preservation, and curation of artifacts. Archivist and artist Lincoln Cushing has been quietly working at the forefront of this information revolution, spending nearly twenty years compiling, digitizing, and organizing political posters from Cuba, China, and the United States. Available through the website Docs Populi and his ongoing work with the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), these posters represent a truly global exploration of art, politics, and identity available at the click of a mouse.

The importance of this new archive is clear in Cushing’s first major project, the unrivaled collection of posters from the Organization in Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, or Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina (OSPAAAL). OSPAAAL was founded in 1966 to help promote anti-imperial and socialist causes in the developing world. The Cuban-based organization helped define an imagery of global revolution through its dynamic, brightly colored posters that it distributed in the pages of Tri-Continental magazine. Traveling to Cuba in the 1980s, Cushing was stunned to find that despite their importance, there was no archive or even definitive list of OSPAAAL posters. He spent years scouring various repositories on the island, in the United States, and Europe compiling a list of every poster produced until 1995.

Yet rather than bringing these posters together in a single repository, Cushing chose to assemble the archive virtually. An early believer in employing technology to preserve and disseminate knowledge, Cushing used digital photography to bring the artifacts together online, free for all to access as the artists originally intended. The 300 posters therefore represent not the digitization of a physical collection but rather the best available artifacts assembled from individual repositories and private collections scattered across the globe. The images are presented in high definition, faithfully preserving the intricate details, coloring, and overall quality of the prints.

Posters from the Ann Tompkins collection on the Cushing dining room table, some tightly rolled for more than thirty years.

The combination of preservation and accessibility fits perfectly with the idea of activist posters and provided a model for future work. Cushing slowly expanded his digital archive as new opportunities appeared. A member of the Bay Area activist collective, Inkworks Press, his digitization of its work since 1974 has provided an American perspective on leftist politics. Docs Populi added more than 500 images from the Chinese Cultural Revolution after Ann Tompkins (Tang Fandi) worked with Cushing to digitize her entire collection before donating the physical objects to the East Asian Library at the University of California at Berkeley. Finally, Bay Area activist and collector Michael Rossman insisted that Cushing be involved in managing the more than 24,000 images he donated to the Oakland Museum, a collection representing American causes from the 1960s until today. The result is a truly global archive.

Poster for the Port Chicago Campaign (1983) that worked to stop arms shipments to Central America from the Concord Naval Weapons Station in northern California.

Such posters are good candidates for digitization, because artists rarely copyrighted images and indeed desired widespread reproduction, but Cushing has also used technology to manage the ongoing tension between openness and responsible stewardship. With the Rossman collection, the OMCA wanted to maintain the ability for visitors and researchers to engage with the sometimes intricate details of the prints while still preventing anyone from using the high resolution images for their own purposes. The solution: provide a low resolution image with the ability to magnify details for individual exploration. Online visitors have the ability to explore the posters with the same level of detail they would likely have in an archive, all while preventing misuse, preserving the objects themselves, and making them available to audiences unable to visit Oakland.

In combining these diverse images in a single digital gateway, Cushing has made it possible to explore the transnational dialogue that occurred between leftist artists. Visitors can browse through the individual collections or search by date, subject, or artist and see the transportation and adoption of ideas that helped create visual vocabularies of revolution and counter-culture. Comparison of material from the OSPAAAL and Rossman archives, for example, illustrate how Cuban artists adopted psychedelic imagery to help sell their ideas abroad. One can even follow the evolution of specific iconography, seeing, for instance, how Americans repackaged Cuban depictions of African revolution (itself borrowed from an Emory Douglas illustration in The Black Panther) to protest Gerald Ford’s intervention in Angola in 1976.

Inkworks Press Anti-apartheid poster (1985).

Just as important as finding new audiences and revealing connections is the recovery of information. In contrast to traditional archival practice that only opens public access once the material is fully catalogued, organized, and described, Cushing’s archives have the ability to evolve. The Rossman collection at the OMCA is a perfect example. With more than 24,000 thousand images, fully cataloguing the entire collection will take years. Cushing nonetheless posts the material as soon as possible with minimal descriptions of text, size, and production method that he later supplements with greater detail on the artists and context. This approach opens the collections to the public sooner, but it also provides the opportunity for people knowledgeable on the images to contact the OMCA to provide additional information. This kind of managed crowd-sourcing is, in Cushing’s word, “a very robust way of producing truth.”

The idea of a single digital repository for widely scattered material is especially attractive for decentralized movements and, as a result, Docs Populi is one example of a slowly emerging practice of collecting and centralizing materials on political causes and themes for open access research. While it cannot and should not replace the necessary preservation of documents at the OMCA, the University of California, and elsewhere, it provides a way to bring together scattered information for the purpose of research and education. Cushing’s work provides a model for the ways that new digital platforms can strengthen libraries and archives as they pursue their primary missions of preservation, information collection, and knowledge dissemination.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

Maria José Afanador-Llach discussed her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice and Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

Charley Binkow discussed digitalized images from the Folger Shakespeare Library

Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush

Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

Links

Lincoln Cushing on the technical aspects of digitization and online exhibition:

http://www.docspopuli.org/Documentation.html

Texas posters from Michael Rossman’s “All of Us or None” Collection, including a great piece from Austin artist Jim Franklin: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=taxonomy%2Fterm%2F154&keys=texas

Interview with Michael Rossman from “Berkeley in the Sixties”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKFzq9xPwiE

All images courtesy of Lincoln Cushing

Digital History: A Guide by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig (2006): New Archive (No. 18)

November 6, 2014

By Maria José Afanador-Llach

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)

In the past years, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has produced a myriad of digital tools and scholarly reflections on the impact of using digital media and computer technologies to democratize history. For the Center, democratizing history means to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, both former directors of the Center, offer a pragmatic and well-documented guide about the ways in which historians can “build the digital future of history in the web” or the “History Web.” The book offers a reflection on why historians should build history websites and the related on-the-ground challenges and opportunities of doing so.

Digital History begins with a brief history of digital history and the ways historians have translated their work to the web with digital archives, online exhibits, online articles with sets of historical documents, historical fanzines, blogs, educational resources, and multimedia products. The authors contend that becoming familiar with what has already been done on the web, defining the genre of the site you are creating, and thinking about the intended audience are basic steps to get started online. The key questions here are: what communities of people do you want to reach and what are your goals in doing digital history? After assessing the different genres of the History Web, the authors then turn to a very pragmatic discussion of how to start a historical website.

In “Getting Started,” the authors highlight the importance of understanding the basic technologies behind the web to be able to match scaled technologies to particular History Web projects. The authors offer basic explanations of the nature of a website—the non-fixed nature of content on the web—the decentralized nature of the Internet, the programming lingua franca of the Internet – HTML — and choices about where to host a website. Each website has a content and purpose, they contend, and an appropriate technology should match each website. They then turn to an overview and assessment of the many computer programs available to make basic websites (such as Dreamweaver and Microsoft’s Front Page) that require varying levels of HTML or other knowledge. Alluding to the potential for interactivity, the authors refer to Flash—an animation software—for creating multimedia narratives combining videos, maps, timelines, photographs and text. Another key issue is a task that historians face day to day: organizing the data. Databases or XML are necessary when one has hundreds or thousands of artifacts or documents to display. A more complete discussion about the possibility of organizing expansive resources using databases or XML is found in the Appendix of the book. The chapter ends with the question of how to fund a digital history project and a reminder of the importance of defining clearly the genre and goals of the project.

Not Even Past brings primary sources, book recommendations, and the cutting edge research of the Department of History at UT Austin to the wider public through digital medium.

The authors go on to discuss the possibilities for manipulating historical data with electronic tools in order for historians to make findings that were not previously evident in analog sources. In this connection, one of the first steps in a digital project is to efficiently produce digital formats. Here the authors assess the pros (advantages of access) and cons (expensive, information is lost) of digitization, the ways in which a text can be digitized, and the existing digital formats. The chapter also offers information on specific tools to make images digital, how to digitize sound and moving images, and they discuss whether you should do all of the work by yourself.

Related to building the repository of digital materials to feed any digital history project is designing a website itself. The authors stress the centrality of designing websites that serve public historical understanding. In “Designing for the History Web,” the authors discuss several design principles that can account for effective online communication. Since presenting content in the web is different from composing paper-based works, the authors stress the need to think about design principles such as contrast, the relationship between features on the page, order, alignment, consistency in color, font, size, and texture. Since the nature of hypertext implies non-linear navigation of contents, every webpage needs a basic navigation tool. Lastly, the authors discuss the site structure, which I believe should be the guiding principle of any web content, even before defining stylistic elements. The information architecture of a website is what allows users to know where to find information in a website. “Building an Audience” is concerned with strategies for attracting an audience to a history website. The chapter discusses the importance of defining an audience, reaching it, marketing strategies, get visitors to comer back, and tracking and assessing the audience using log analysis programs.

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

“Collecting History Online” casts light on the use of the Internet to collect accounts and artifacts from the recent past. The authors argue that the collection of historical documents, images, and personal narratives has the potential to create innovative forms of history in the future. Thousands of historical sources are produced daily on the web. Webpages are ephemeral, newspapers sites change every day, and even many blogs disappear leaving no trace. Gathering material from the web, however, can entail hurdles related to privacy and copyright. “Owning the Past” traces the history of copyright and intellectual property, which the authors call “an ever-evolving set of principles” that raises questions about the rights of producers and consumers on the web. The authors align themselves with the principle of Creative Commons, which allows the distribution of material found online as “a shared storehouse of human creations.” The authors discuss the legal landscape that digital historians should navigate to protect their intellectual property and ensure their compliance with copyright laws. While historians worry about copyright infringements, for-profit organizations such as ProQuest have made massive investments in digitizing the past and selling access to their collections to universities. Questions of unequal access to digital historical materials forefronts a debate on who owns the past and engenders ethical questions around the commercial drive that turns paper-based sources into commodities. This raises issues around the copyright, for example, of twentieth-century materials (almost everything published after 1923 remains covered by copyright), that in the majority of cases only big corporations can afford.

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts between 1676 and 1772.

The final chapter, “Preserving Digital History,” is a meditation about strategies to ensure that digital materials will survive in the future in an electronically unstable environment. Digitization is not preservation, the authors explain, given the loss of information that comes from transforming analog into digital format. A robust reliable storage system is not enough, the authors argue, and the information sciences still have a long way to go towards improving the longevity of digital copies and avoiding the corruption of files.

In short, the book offers a comprehensive overview of the perils of contributing to the History Web and ways to manage the obstacles and produce a useful website. Surprisingly, the book does not situate digital history within the broader field of the digital humanities. This issue has been the subject of debate, as it seems that digital humanists have defined the field mostly around digital literary studies leaving digital history outside the defining features of the intersections between computing and the humanities.

Lastly, rather than reading the book in a linear way, I recommend using this book as a manual in which to find advice on specific practical issues regarding the creation of a digital history project. Very useful assets of the book are the countless links to online publications and digital history projects. Learning about digital history is partially achieved by reading the book. Navigating through the great number of online digital projects, even those in literary studies, I believe, is the best way to get a sense of the various, creative ways other humanists have chosen to preserve and visualize their research in the web.

One question remains: Now that we have a multitude of digital history websites – archives, blogs, data visualizations and collections, how are these digital tools shaping historical research methods? Stay tuned.

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Online).

Digital Visualization Workshop, Venice 2014: The New Archive (No. 17)

October 23, 2014

By Maria José Afanador-Llach

Over the summer, I spent two weeks in Venice participating in a digital history workshop organized by Duke University and Venice International University. The objective of the workshop was to introduce participants to a variety of digital tools for historical research and presentation. The participants came from disciplines such as art history, history, archeology, architecture history and information science. We learned the basic features of different software, mostly open source, in hands-on sessions.

Island of Burano, Venice Lagoon

Once we became familiar with the history of Venice and its geography, we started to work hands-on with various digital programs. We used QGIS to make maps and overlay historical maps on locations in physical space. Another tool that we used was Neatline to create exhibits linking images, maps, and timelines. With SketchUp we produced 3D representations of objects. Lastly, we used Google Earth Pro to record a tour inside a 3D map and produce video files. We also learned the basics of blog and website development, and video editing.

We worked in groups to create a digital-historical narrative of a theme of our own choice related to the topic of the workshop: The Venice Lagoon. I worked with an art historian and an archeologist to produce a narrative about the fortification system of the Venice Lagoon. We produced a video and a timeline exhibition using some of the tools that we learned. You can see them here.

View of Venice From La Guidecca

I would like to recommend two of the tools that we used during the workshop and end with a short reflection about what I believe are pertinent questions to ask when considering going digital.

Geo-Referencing Historical Maps

In the first sessions, we learned to overlay historical maps on contemporary maps by geo-referencing them with a free software program called QGIS. Geo-referencing means to assign real world coordinates to old maps. Geo-referencing historical maps can help historians visualize, interpret, retrieve and compare geographic and spatial information. On this webpage of the National Library of Scotland, there are some relevant points to take into consideration about the uses, limits and possibilities of geo-rectifying maps. For example, a possibility is to compare historical maps from cities in different points of time and compare them to present-day satellite images. Also, geo-referencing allows integration of early maps with other topographical information such as height. In some cases one should be cautious of the possible distortions that geo-referencing can cause to historical maps that do not fit contemporary maps with geometrical accuracy. Here you can see a geo-referencing exercise that I made using QGIS with map of the viceroyalty of New Granada—contemporary Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. I marked six points in the historical map and then matched them with points in the real map. For a step-by-step tutorial for georeferencing using QGIS click here.

Creating a geo-reference map.

Image of historical map geo-referenced on top of present day map.

A Geotemporal Interface

If you are trying to figure out a way to interactively visualize and narrate historical transformations, a geotemporal interface can be helpful. In the workshop, we learned about geotemporal storytelling using Neatline. Created by the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia, Neatline expands the functionality of Omeka, which is a content management system. Neatline offers the possibility to create a story through an interface that connects a timeline to a map. You can georectify a historical map with QGIS and then place it on top of the default OpenStreet or Google Map to create an exhibition. Then you can start adding objects (events, photos, documents) to link to the map. The interactivity features include a “Neatline-enhanced edition of text documents.” It works by connecting paragraphs, sentences, and words of your own writings with objects in the exhibit. A fascinating example is the project Mapping the Catalogue of Ships which analyzes Homer’s natural geography of Greece through a map of the itineraries of Book Two of the Iliad. The exhibit links the contingents in the Greek army with locations in the map. For more about this feature you can read about Neatline-text here.

Mac Lab at Venice International University. Venice Visualization Workshop, June 2014.

After my experience in Venice, there are some things that I would recommend for those interested in engaging with digital tools. First, consider how a digital component could enhance your research and teaching.

Do you want to incorporate digital tools to curate your own archival material and maybe then turn it into an online exhibition?
Do you want to create public history contents to circulate in social media?
Do you want to engage digital tools for teaching and as a resource for working in the classroom?
Do you want to visualize your archival research differently to see if you can come up with new research questions?
Do you want to use digital tools to visualize a historical transformation that is not easily discernable in the written text?

Secondly, learning new tools always takes time, and archival work and writing consumes most of our time. However, the Venice workshop helped me realize that I can learn to use software that at first might seem too challenging. If you are seriously considering using digital tools for your work, you should be open to experiment and learn the basics about the tools you want to engage with. I would add that ideally, as it has been happening across the world, we should aim for collaborative work among humanists, computer scientists, graphic designers, and digital humanists. For now, there are lots of open source and user-friendly digital tools to experiment with.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

Charley Binkow discussed digitalized images from the Folger Shakespeare Library

Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush

Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

All images courtesy of Maria José Afanador-Llach

“Oh this learning, what a thing it is!”: The New Archive (No. 16)

October 16, 2014

By Charley S. Binkow

Has any single author had as massive an impact on history as William Shakespeare? For over four centuries, the works of the Bard have been read, analyzed, and performed all around the world. Keeping track of that massive history, let alone the history of Elizabethan/Jacobian England, is a monumental ambition. Luckily, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has taken up the task. And even better: they’ve digitized their collection for the world to see.

Title page of the First Folio, by William Shakespeare, with copper engraving of the author by Martin Droeshout. Image courtesy of the Elizabethan Club and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Title page of the First Folio, by William Shakespeare, 1623.

This extensive online collection has over 80,000 digital images. There are manuscripts, flyers, posters, books, papers, costumes, theater memorabilia, art pieces and a lot more. The behemoth archive is broken up easily into three sections: What, When, Where, and Who. Historians interested in letters of Francis Bacon or religious ceremonies of the 17^th century (like these marriage sermons), only have to click a few buttons to find what they’re looking for. Just browsing the topics will intrigue most anyone. Some fascinating things I stumbled upon include a picture of a Japanese Hamlet from 1905, Edwin Booth’s Iago and Richard III costumes, and a German graphic of The Merchant Venice from the 19^th century.

Photographic full-length portrait of Edwin Booth as Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice, c. 1870 (Via Wikimedia Commons)

Historians, theater enthusiasts, and Shakespeare lovers will get a lot out of this collection. Historians can get primary documents showing Shakespeare’s influence all over the globe, they can read the documents of his time, and peruse four centuries of art in high definition (seriously, zoom all the way in and get up close to the cross-hatches). Any one studying anything even tangentially related to Shakespeare’s age can find something useful in this collection, like this early map of Cuba from the 16^th century or this Italy travel guide.

This is an amazing collection of historical images. Follow our links, or just jump into it and get lost among the artifacts. The love of Shakespeare is infectious; seeing the thousands of items associated with Shakespeare, compiled by people who love him and his era, will make you want to open a new tab in the Folger site and start reading the complete works.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush

Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

And Charley Binkow perused some incredible photographs of Egypt snapped by European travelers

First image courtesy of the Elizabethan Club and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

California’s Gold Rush in Pictures: The New Archive (No. 15)

May 8, 2014

by Charley Binkow

Using digital collections can be a daunting task. With hundreds of thousands of documents, unless you know what you’re looking for, an online archive can look like one giant blur. Calisphere’s collection on the California Gold Rush is a great collection that offers something to both archive experts and first timers.

" Excavation of River Gravel" (UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library)

” Excavation of River Gravel,” Butte County, CA (UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library)

“Jennie Hastings — Photo Number 13278 — An old time San Francisco pickpocket; also a grand and petty larceny thief of the old school.” (UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library)

The archive is usefully broken into subsections, each as interesting as the next. From Murder and Mayhem, to Diversity in the Changing State, to, my personal favorite, Environmental Impact, one can find a wide range of fascinating history in this collection. Each subsection includes a synopsis detailing its significance within the collection and California history as a whole. The collection is very well organized and easily navigable. Having the synopses make the documents come to life in a whole new light. Photographs show the effects of devastating earthquakes; flyers warn criminals of the vigilance committee; and pictures give us an image of a young San Francisco, one that looks considerably different from the one we know today.

Destruction on San Francisco’s Clay Street after the 1906 earthquake (UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library)

An underground opium den in San Francisco (UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library)

Possibly most exciting is the archive’s potential for learning. Each subsection details just how the collection relates to specific state education standards, which makes it easy for students as young as grade four to access archives for classes and interact with history through primary documents. Instead of just reading textbooks, students can build their own conclusions based on the primary documents in a navigable way. They can learn the differences between Daguerreotypes, photographs, and lithographs, for example. They can study newspaper clippings from the era and compare them to the ones of today. But the site is not just for beginning historians. Advanced students and even professional historians can use the site’s rich collection for more nuanced research. Calisphere is the new archive that can both intrigue history experts and inspire a new generation of historians.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

And Charley Binkow perused some incredible photographs of Egypt snapped by European travelers

Seeing John Donne Speak: The New Archive (No. 14)

April 24, 2014

by Henry Wiencek

Ever wish you were actually there to experience a moment in history? What would it have been like to witness British soldiers marching into Concord? Or to hear the German bombers flying over London? The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project believes it can provide that very sensation—or at least approximate it. A group of historians, architects, and sound experts collaborated to digitally reconstruct the sights and sounds of a unique historical moment: London’s St Paul’s Cathedral on November 5, 1622, the 17^th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot by English Catholics to blow up Parliament. Through the power of computer technology, we are present as John Donne—one of England’s most renowned poetic voices—commemorates this traumatic event with a sermon paying tribute to God and King James I.

John Gipkin’s “Painting of Paul’s Cross,” 1616 (the Bridgeman Art Library, New York, and the Society of Antiquaries, London)

The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project starts by digitally recreating St Paul’s Cathedral as it appeared in late 1622. According to one contemporary account quoted on the site, this was a place of great religious, civil, and social importance: a public space where “principal gentry, lords, courtiers, and men of all professions” converged. With the help of Google SketchUp, engineers were able to generate a 360-degree model of that very churchyard, its Romanesque cathedral, and the buildings surrounding it. But it does far more than just depict the physical space—it captures a particular moment in time. You can see the late fall’s dim light and low sun, the smoke rings filling the air from nearby chimneys, even the black birds circling overhead. What emerges is a detailed portrait of the space, the people present, and all the other bits of daily minutia so often lost to historians, yet so critical to shaping the feel of living in a place.

A digital rendering of St. Paul’s courtyard in 1622. (The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project)

The site takes primary accounts of Donne’s speech, the crowd, and even the weather conditions of that November morning and brings them back to life. Users can actually watch computer generated reenactments of the speech—digital renderings of what scholars believe it looked like and sounded like to be in that churchyard as John Donne spoke. In order to faithfully reconstruct the crowd’s auditory experience, sound engineers considered a variety of factors, ranging from Donne’s speaking ability to the acoustic reverberations adjacent buildings likely produced. The reenactments even incorporate a variety of “pre-industrial” sounds that would have been echoing around the London churchyard in 1622. As Donne speaks, you can hear dogs barking, horses trotting, and workmen banging hammers.

Isaac Oliver’s contemporary painting of John Donne (National Portrait Gallery, London: NPG 1849)

The site includes not one, but a variety of video clips, each capturing how the sermon would have sounded from different vantage points. Class differences are even registered. While the distinguished guests sitting above in Sermon House would have clearly received the speech as it echoed through the house walls, more ordinary Londoners at ground level would have heard ambient street noise, chattering people, and crowing animals competing with Donne’s fainter, more distant words. Users discover that the listener’s unique position—both in terms of geography and social rank—created a unique aural experience.

Recreation of Donne’s speech as seen from the Sermon House (The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project)

The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project transforms the text of a speech into a dynamic performance of religious, political, and social meaning. Users can approximate the experience of history unfolding in real time by using more of their senses: listening and looking, and locating themselves in a virtual space. By reenacting the varied sounds of November 5, 1622, this multi-sensory project illuminates the varied social experience of seventeenth-century England. Despite the pageantry and ceremony surrounding it, Donne’s sermon was nothing more than background noise or a few snatched phrases to many ordinary Londoners. The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project elegantly reminds us that there is no one way to hear, see or understand a historical event. It all depends on where you’re sitting.

Watch a portion of the reconstructed sermon from the courtyard:

Or watch it from the Sermon House:

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive:

Victorian tourists exploring the people and places of Egypt

And a website that lets users hear 1920s New York City

Visitors of the Nile: The New Archive (No. 13)

April 17, 2014

by Charley Binkow

For centuries Egypt has inspired awe in the West. From Napoleon to Anderson Cooper, westerners have found an intrinsic fascination with Egypt’s rich culture, history, art, and politics. Since they first arrived, Egypt’s visitors have tried to capture its incredible landscape and document its complex beauty. The Travelers in the Middle East Archive gives us a comprehensive collection of what these visitors saw and what they chose to record one hundred years ago.

Postcard entitled, “Egypt – Native Women” (Lehnert & Landrock Egypt – Native Women (81) (n.d.).
From Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/5521)

Between the late 19^th and early 20^th century, explorers took photos, stenciled pictures, and documented all they could see in the Nile Valley. And while these travelers captured grandiose or exceptional images for their catalogues, they were also fascinated with the real, day-to-day life of Egyptians. In this collection, we can see what these explorers saw as noteworthy, what they wanted the world to see, and how they portrayed Egyptian life. This archive is just as much, if not more, about those who documented Egypt as it is about the Egyptians themselves.

Postcard entitled, "Entrance to an Old Native House," 1906 (Lekegian, G. Entrance to an Old Native House (1906). From Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/20913)

Postcard entitled, “Entrance to an Old Native House,” 1906 (Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/20913)

The archive has assembled these primary sources and divided its massive collection into thematic subjects. One can peruse Art & Artifacts, History & Politics, and a lot more with exceptional ease. There are beautiful pictures, high quality photographs, and vivid paintings that bring the land to life. I especially like the photographs of the Egyptians doing daily routines, such as women carrying pots or boys and girls on the street. And while there are some stunning portraits of foreign dignitaries, like the British general Sir Reginald Wingate, the best images are of the people whose individual lives often don’t make it into the history books. This collection shows the workers, the poor, and people in mourning. Historians can access photos portraying how ordinary people lived—what they wore, how they walked, who they associated with. But they can also better understand the Westerners who visited. Was the land more than a spectacle to them? What do the drawings say about their creators?

Photograph of Egyptian boys and girls walking down a road, 1911 (Sladen, Douglas Egyptian Boys And Girls. (1911). From Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/21592)

Photograph of Egyptian boys and girls walking down a road, 1911 (Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/21592)

In addition to the pictures, the archive has digitized certain key writings. My favorite is E.W. Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians from 1836. Just skimming through the pages brings a whole new world to life. You can read about the Egyptian process of child naming, their various beliefs, and their relationships between religion and law. The preface is a worthy read by itself—especially Lane’s account of the serpent eaters!

This archive is incredibly rich and rewarding, filled with a gold mine of primary documents. Click around and discover Egypt for yourself. The more you traverse the website, the more you’ll want to.

The latest from The New Archive:

A database that preserves the sounds of 1920s New York City

And the American Civil War, as drawn by Harper’s Weekly

Recent Posts