Category: Digital Humanities Coursework

This project is a side-by-side comparison between two mapping projects: one covering the 1760 – 1761 slave rebellion in Jamaica and one covering racial terror lynchings in the United States from 1877 – 1950.

Slave Rebellion in Jamaica, 1760 – 1761

The first of the two mapping projects hit an immediate problem, however. Either Jamaica is a much less interesting place than I’ve been led to believe, or the “map” portion of this project’s webpage is non-functional.

The “blog” section is likewise broken, but the “project,” “sources,” and “acknowledgements” sections are intact, leaving a good deal to work with. The project write-up discusses the design choices and philosophies behind the (now theoretical) map, allowing a comparison with the other item.

The most notable feature is that the map is designed to invoke a sense of the mid 18th Century by mimicking the mapping practices and aesthetics of that period. This is an unusual choice given the subject matter; in my experience, periodized maps are usually made for projects with a sense of “adventure” to them, ones meant to immerse users in the period. We may be hard pressed, however, to find users interested in immersing themselves in the rather bleak setting of a slave revolt quelled through mass summary executions. Stanger still, the map is imitating the style of the colonial powers of the period. This is an odd decision given that the project write-up states that the imperial perspective of source materials makes accurate study of the rebellion’s events difficult.

Beyond that quirk, the rest of the project appears to have been quite standard issue. The legend, seen below, does not attempt to imitate period styles in the way the map itself does, selecting quite simple icons for events. I should note the presence, however, of the “uncertain location” designation, both in the map legend and the project write-up. This is a useful feature that I would like to see replicated on more (and ideally extant) mapping projects. Data obtained from old and often unreliable sources is frequently vague, confusing, or outright contradictory. This can be difficult to represent on a map which, by the nature of the medium, is a quite concrete representation. This is the simplest solution to the problem I’ve seen to date.

While the loss of the map itself is unfortunate, the slave rebellion project appears to have been a useful, if strangely designed, tool. If it could be repaired, this map would find quick use by academics.

Lynching in America

The lynchings map, beyond just being functional, comes with a very modern appearance. Users can mouse over a state to see state-wide data or click on the state to see data broken down by county instead. The handful of white dots represent playable media on a specific lynching, which can be viewed by clicking on them.

The map itself is simple enough, although it offers relatively little information. Even the county-level breakdown simply provides a number of lynchings. This data is itself a fairly interesting subject, however, thanks to the term used by the project’s creators: “Racial Terror Lynchings.” This term is mentioned in the upper left-hand corner of the general map but not defined. The county-level map simply notes the numbers it provides as “reported lynchings.”

The project’s creators actually have a quite restrictive view of the term “racial terror lynchings” which would never be apparent to a user looking only at the map itself; information about that definition is displayed in a write-up on a different part of the website. I would never have noticed this had I not been doing independent research on lynchings in Obion County and thought the number 16 sounded low; my sources had placed at least 21 racial lynchings in Obion County during the same time span.

The issue isn’t the definition of racial terror lynching used, but rather the presentation of data. Listing the numbers on the map as simply “reported lynchings” implies that this is a complete data set; in fact, it is only reporting a specific type of lynching. This could be resolved with a fairly simple fix by using the complete phrase “racial terror lynching” in the county-level data and adding a link to the text at the top right to their definition.

Comparison

Both maps are effective tools to display their respective data sets, although both also contain oddities which may lead casual users astray. In the former map’s case, there is likely little recourse; altering the core design of the project would necessitate a complete restart (although, given the map’s current state, this may be a prime opportunity to do just that). In the latter’s case, the fix is a fairly simple display issue that can be addressed with a couple lines of text.

I selected the al-Turayyā Project and the Atlas of Early Printing for my study and comparison of mapping projects.

The al-Turayyā Project

The al-Turayyā Project is described by the archive as “Mapping the Arabic world in the classical epoque (circa 9th and 10th centuries A.D.).” Sadly, the Arabic world seems to be missing a few pieces, as can be seen below.

At first glance, I assumed that this was just an issue with the interactive map loading. Reloading the webpage several times, however, I discovered that this same set of tiles was consistently missing; I can only speculate as to why. The issue was, however, unique to the Google Satellite version of the map. The site also provides the options for Grayscale, Google Terrain, Water Color, and National Geographic versions of the map, the lattermost of which I used for the remainder of my time on the project.

Despite the initial issue with visibility, the technical features of the map seem to be in working order. The core of the project is the ability to click on a site or route (represented by the dots and lines) and find sources and other information on the topic.

Another item is its route-finding capability, allowing users to plot a course between two or more population centers and view the route, distance, and travel time that contemporary travelers would have likely experienced. I’ve used similar websites in the past for my own projects and found this feature incredibly useful for understanding timelines, particularly as far as communications are concerned.

The al-Turayyā Project seems like an excellent resource but is (to an extent) falling apart at the seams. Load times in particular are terribly slow or may require multiple attempts, leaving users unclear on whether the location they are researching has no data attached to it or simply is unable to load it. While potentially useful, I would consider the Project in its current state to be unreliable.

The Atlas of Early Printing

The Atlas of Early Printing is much the same concept as the al-Turayyā Project, allowing users to interact with a map of western Europe and click on points to view material regarding said point. This time, the key point are not population centers, but the arrival of printing at various places across the region.

Unlike the al-Turayyā Project, however, which had consistent technical problems throughout the time I used it, the Atlas of Early Printing had new and exciting technical problems each time I opened it. At different points I had all of the points disappear from the map when I attempted to zoom in, the map stick open at roughly the size of my thumbnail, and my entire browser crash when I dared to look too closely at Greece. All of these issues occurred only once and were fixed by reloading the site, however, so this seems a matter of instability.

Beyond technical issues, however, the map provides a remarkable degree of control to the user, allowing them to layer a wide variety of datasets beyond just printing on top of the map, such as bishoprics, universities, papers mills, trade routes, and more. The image below features the map with all optioned checked on, creating an incomprehensible mass which reflects (if nothing else) the number of options available.

The Atlas of Early Printing is a much more polished and user-friendly site than the al-Turayyā Project, although this may be influenced as much by the availability of data as the sites’ technical limitations. If one can overlook the instability issues, the Atlas could be picked up and used as is.

Zotero is probably the most exciting bit of software this program has thus far introduced me to. I began by creating a History and a Political Science collection in the library to split the works I would be collecting between my two primary fields.

Once the core categories were set up, I started populating them with literature on violence by non-state actors, my chosen subject of study in both Political Science and History. At this stage, I was still separating them out into the same two categories.

Throughout this process, I was expecting to need to intervene in the citations Zotero was providing, but I never experienced any issues. The software seems to be reading WMU’s library website perfectly and the one article I took from another cite (a dissertation from Murray State) seems to have loaded correctly as well, missing only the abstract. The one issue which appeared consistently was the capitalization in article and journal titles; notably, this was the WMU Library’s fault rather than the software’s. Helpfully, Zotero had a tool for this, allowing me to set any field to “Title Case,” automatically capitalizing items in that field.

The auto-generated tags were unfortunately not the most useful items. They were too numerous and too specific to be helpful. For example, having added four articles on the topic of Chechnya, the tag “Chechnya” brought up only two of them and the tag “Chechen” brought up only one. Still, the tag system itself seems useful once I delete the existing items and add my own.

Once my initial twenty-five items were set up, I started to look towards creating subcategories. I mainly wanted to separate out History titles dealing with Late Antiquity (my specialty) from a handful of other titles I had collected.

Once this was done, my library was effectively complete for my purposes, although I’m certain more subcategories will need to be set up as I progress through new projects. Thus far, I’m deeply impressed with this software. Zotero has delivered citations practically ready for use with every book and article which I tracked down.

Thoughts on AI Analysis

AI-driven analysis comes with all of the positives and negatives of other computer-based styles of analysis. It has the capacity to generate and sort enormous quantities of data at speeds alien to human researchers. It can also, however, incorporate errors, inconsistencies, and irrelevant information seamlessly into these datasets, forcing human researchers to check the computer’s work or even toss out the data entirely.

What appears to be a new development in AI’s case is its unique ability to source data from third-party sources. This introduces a new set of complexities; this data cannot be fact-checked by human researchers if they are unsure where the information was gathered. The larger the project, the easier it becomes for such problems to slip into the finished product. As such, I am cautious to speak positively of their research potential at this time though, as I have mentioned at previous points, the potential for an exclusively academic-run AI is enticing.

Project Proposal

Searching through the Cultural Analytics Lab’s pages, I came across an article titled “Seeing a Century Through the Lens of Sovetskoe Foto,” by Alise Tifentale of the City University of New York. This project, carried out alongside Lev Manovich and Agustín Indaco, analyzed Soviet photography based on the covers of the USSR’s state-sponsored photography magazine over the years it was published.

I suspect that a similar project could be applied (with considerable additional effort) to the material culture of far older groups. I (cautiously) suggest that a database of surviving artifacts from Antiquity could be formed in three dimensions, allowing AI to search for comparisons across cultural groups. With appropriate safeguards in place for false positives, this could become a particularly useful tool for trade-heavy periods and regions in which similar items in different cultural styles frequently crossed borders. The AI could potentially identify cultural exchange and the drift of artistic style.

The Co-Citation Network for Philosophy is a sprawling graph which demonstrates trends (rather than absolutes) in citation between publications in top journals. The image below shows the complete graph. Any point on this graph can be dragged out of the way to reveal overlapping text and possibly freeze your browser.

A user unfamiliar with the field of philosophy could reasonably expect to get some useful information out of this graph. Critically, for someone like me who has no idea who the key authors are in the field, this is a decent way to locate some of the trend-setting texts for introduction (although, in fairness, gives no suggestion on whether other, prerequisite texts might need to be read before them. For example, as the graph’s designer notes, David Lewis is frequently found at the center of citation clusters, marking him as a key figure in English-language philosophy.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, some clusters form isolated, operating as small, closed discussions (some overlap may still exist; the graph only manages relationships over a specified threshold of citations). These discussions, were I to speculate on them, likely represent authors who are part of particularly niche debates or overlap strongly with other, non-philosophy fields, thus preventing them from forming citation chains with authors in more central positions on the graph.

While useful, the graph has strong limitations. The creator notes that the project is not in a finished state and that it remains, at this time, primarily “descriptive” in nature. As such, more complex data must be sourced from elsewhere. This does not inherently render the graph useless for such efforts, though. For example, while the graph offers no data on items such as gender, race, or seniority, the most-cited authors are made very clear. Comparing them with data on these subjects gathered from other sources could create a fairly clear (if time-consuming) picture of the biases at play in English-language philosophy.

Introduction

The Stanford Spatial History Projects seem to be in a rough state without Adobe Flash. Three projects I found interesting turned out to be malfunctioning, but I eventually tracked down two which I could draw a comparison between. I landed on “Geography of Chinese Workers Building the Transcontinental Railroad,” an effort to reconstruct the areas Chinese workers were present in during construction, and “Richard Pryor’s Peoria,” a documentation project surrounding Peoria, Illinois during the time Richard Pryor lived there.

Geography of Chinse Workers Building the Transcontinental Railroad

The Railroad project is designed to allow users to follow the exact route of the Transcontinental Railroad. The webpage repeatedly provides 3D overviews of the route through Google Earth, which can in turn be accessed through the link on screen, allowing users to jump to the same view and manipulate the map to further study the modern terrain.

Interspaced between these assets are contemporary photos of the period described in the text which are as closely associated with the mapped locations as possible. These images have no interactive component but provide important context to the original terrain prior to the construction of the railroad or other infrastructure.

Throughout all of this, users are given the option to toggle a map which will track their physical progress along the railroad route as they scroll through the project page. This seems to be the most unique and interesting feature implemented on this project and is remarkably helpful once users get used to it.

Richard Pryor’s Peoria

The Peoria website is an archive of source documents stretching from 1919 to roughly 1980 (while a few documents postdate this period, they are collected in a brief closing section). From the home page, the site allows users to filter based on several overlapping criteria: People, Places, Eras, or Themes (the “More” heading, confusingly, acts as the home page).

The site is focused definitively on Pryor himself, with most of the documents provided linking to him or framed by his life. There are a few documents which have little connection to Pryor; the project seems to have been willing to include any additional information they received on the topic of Peoria even if it didn’t personally impact Pryor, but it does not appear to have such sources out. The below diagram, for example, displays that all individuals in the “People” heading are of some relationship to Pryor.

Comparison

The two websites discussed above serve vastly different purposes. The former is a mapping project overlaying historical activities onto the current physical world. The latter is an archive of sources on a particular city. Both are “spatial” history projects, attempting to make an area more legible to modern users, but they have vastly different approaches.

The user interface for the Railroad project has a slight learning curve and can appear almost broken at first; the various links and hovering mapping feature do not move the way the webpage seems it should. After a couple minutes practicing, however, the benefits of their system far outweigh the time spent to learn it, allowing users to see multiple types of information on screen at the same time.

By contrast, the Peoria website is remarkably user friendly, allowing documents to be found by effectively any criteria. The multiple approaches create redundancies, but the site’s relatively few documents prevent this from becoming a problem. While it would likely scale poorly, the current layout of the Peoria website is excellent for its purpose.

To locate files with good metadata attached to them, I thought first of visiting government websites. I visited the Irish government’s website and selected a PDF outlining part of their housing plans, specifically discussing the effective use of existing properties. The first page of this item is pictured below.

Entering the metadata was mostly straightforward for this document, although I will confess that the creator and publisher become a little blurred when dealing with a government resource. I decided to enter the listed department of the Irish Government as the creator and the Irish Government in general as publisher, which seemed most logical given the way the website was set up.

I wanted to use a different file type for my second entry, so I looked through several areas of the Irish Government’s website and eventually, by way of the Cork City Council’s site, found the website of The Butter Museum in Cork. From their gallery, I selected a jpg image of a butter wrapper, which I have included below.

This turned out to be a slightly more difficult item to include metadata on. The original image had been shared to Tumblr by the museum and included little information about its background. Even the location is not terribly clear; County Tipperary helpfully contains two towns by the name of “Ballingarry.” The southern one seems more likely, given the mention of the nearby town of Thurles, but that remains speculation.

Beyond that, I encountered few problems. Once I was finished, both items were visible in the listings on the Omeka site.

I still feel shaky on some of the metadata entries, but this project has demystified the subject a good deal. I should be able to work with it again in the future.

Exploring the Library of Congress’s categorization system has been a useful experience for me. What has and has not changed in the past decade tells a lot about the priorities of the archivists and the volume of information moving through the Library of Congress. I initially thought to look into Private Military Security Companies (PMSCs) since the practice has seen significant continuing evolution in recent years, but it turned out (to my surprise) that the Library of Congress had made no changes in the period of 2012 – 2022.

Curiously, however, I noticed that not far away, “privateering” of all things had seen revisions. Compared to the 2012 version, the 2022 entry had added a section on privately operated prisons, created a new subheading on the legal status of privateering, and altered the heading on “pirates” to instead reference “piracy.”

After this, I turned my attention towards my Late Antique work. For the most part, little had changed. Merovingian Period history is not prone to updates and had not undergone any revisions when I checked into the dynasty or its principal sources. While looking into Gregory, Bishop of Tours, however, I found that the entry for Tours itself had undergone some revision and expansion. This was not focused on the city, but rather on types of tours available for the public, with the concept of “ghost tours” being added in the 2022 version.

While my specific areas of study appear to have been little altered in the past decade, the entries around them have undergone changes. I found the change from “pirates” to “piracy” particularly insightful, indicating a shift from group focus (piracy as an occupation) to activity focus (piracy as an act).

Learning the basics of Markdown was an interesting and surprisingly quick experience. The system becomes intuitive after a relatively short time. For some of the more basic elements, I used this as an opportunity to brainstorm while working on my M.A. thesis. The first item I formed was a possible chapter/section breakdown organized under some of the list features, as seen below.

I then transplanted a paragraph from the introduction and applied bold text to all of the names in the paragraph, noting that it retained its italics from the original text. I also tracked down an indentation command so it would appear as it does in Word.

Next, I used the block quote feature to create a comparison between a Latin copy of one of my sources and an English translation of the same passage.

For the fourth and final setup, I tried out the link feature, linking a pair of websites through Markup.

Overall, I would call the system as a whole fast and remarkably user-friendly. I picked up the basics immediately despite having no real familiarity with Markup. I am not yet sure of the utility it will have in the future, but I said the same about Latin when I first learned it. I look forward to seeing where Markup will crop up as I move forward in this course.

I’m Samuel Talbott, a graduate student currently working on an M.A. in History at Western Michigan University. I completed my undergraduate degree in History and Government & Politics at Millsaps College. I have created this website as part of a digital humanities course and look forward to maintaining it as a resource in the future.

History cannot be approached as an isolated field. I apply the tools of political science to my historical studies, using these methods to improve my understanding of government and politics across the human past. This is only one set of methods, however. A comprehensive approach to history must include multiple disciplines from both the humanities and the sciences, necessitating collaborative projects between academics.