Category Archives: Project Brainstorm

Throughout this semester I have been introduced to the idea of Digital Humanities through the teachings of the class. One thing I thought was really cool were the use of the Voyant tool to further analyze text. I think that it would be really cool to use Voyant to dive deeper into the Day of DH we all participate in on March  27^th. My idea would be to create a presentation with my findings, possibly a slide show or video. I would use the Voyant tool to analyze different people’s definitions of DH. Also, depending on how many people posted photos, a collage would also add some visuals. I possibly could also use other tools we learned about over the semester.

Our first project, mapping and geospatial analysis was very interesting for me, as one of my other classes involved programming KML. I would like to go more in depth with google earth and google maps into mapping a character through a story. Although I haven’t chosen a specific text, I am aiming to use a mystery novel such as Sherlock Holmes. It would seem very interesting for me to map out the events that occur in such that of Sherlock Holmes throughout the story, which would help understand readers how these locations leads to solve the puzzle.

In addition to the prior idea above, I would maybe try to compare two or more stories of Sherlock location-wise and try to analyze and find common grounds of how Sherlock functions as a detective. Though it does not have to be Sherlock, the choice of using a book series seems to be a better off choice since mapping of the same character would be needed.

We (Szuting,Johan & Nina) were really inspired by the videos shown in class on Tuesday. Therefore, we would like to do a video that showcases how digital humanities effects our everyday life presently and in the future.

We have tossed around the idea of showing a clear comparison between digital magazines and hardcopies. We want to explore what meanings are lost and gained through utilizing both mediums. Also, we want to consider the advantages and disadvantages to accessing a magazine article online in comparison to reading a hardcopy. So far we believe that articles online can be easily shared and analyzed by others. Online readers tend to share links to articles with others on Facebook or Twitter. Also, online media allows us to immediately respond to the information being shared and communicate our reactions with others in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, someone who buys an actual magazine or newspaper is more likely to read more than the one article.

Our plan is to look at one article in both the digital and hard form. From there we would look for what new meanings are developed or lost. We will also analyze the text and how the information is presented.

We are still refining this idea.

In learning about the study of Digital Humanities, we have explored a multitude of different processes, applications, and specific programs that help construct digital incarnations of the humanities. We have mostly investigated the ideas of textual analysis with various forms of literature and writings. While this is interesting, the humanities contain more than just written language. There are many kinds of engaging media out there that we have yet to explore. As a group, Jack and I immediately wanted to expand our project out into the visual medias and see what kind of DH studies could occur outside of text.

Our first idea is focused on the idea of the moving image and the amount of information a person is bombarded with on a daily basis. We live in a world of connectivity where information travels faster than the speed of light. Rather than actively seeking for new contents all the time, information are being fed to people through platforms such as social media networks and RSS feed. This can be extremely convenient but also intimidating at the same time. Often times, the same story will appear on multiple media sources. All the stories will be slightly different especially if it is an important event. This can be extremely confusing. We want to create a application that remix multiple videos of the same news story on one screen at the same time. The videos will be presented on the screen in a grid format such as 3×3, 4×4, or 2×2. The idea is to sample random frames from each broadcast and play them all simultaneously or in succession so that the stories blend together and clash with each other. This will symbolize the mind getting overwhelmed and confused.

We were also inspired by the Waves video. The idea of mashing a bunch of different humanities mediums together in one location to evoke new ideas is very interesting. The ability to combine video, music, type, etc. in one place is easy to do and can be very powerful in its ability to create a completely new artifact from multiple distinct pieces. It might be interesting to pick a specific literary genre, or even just an emotion, and create a blend of different media clips that expands that idea and summarizes the essence of the picked subject. These would all be completely unrelated artifacts that only craft a higher experience when merged together and timed correctly. Such mash-ups have to possibility to be very evocative. If we could find the right subject material, it would be a very fun and interesting experience.

The mode of Digital Humanities that interests us the most is the functionality of parsing through text, and doing analysis of text based off of trends or key words that are found as a result. Since we thought this tool was the most useful, we decided to apply it to our project ideas.

We had a couple of ideas for our final project including our preferred means of applying the digital humanities. First, we thought about Twitter and how we can parse through the trending topics, since there is not an over-all database or one comprehensive timeline.

Another project proposition we created had to do with worldwide news and the opinions of the articles written. The program would parse through articles posted on a news site and gauge how positive or negative the current state of the world is by displaying it on some sort of visually pleasing scale, with bright colors representing positive opinions and/or feelings and dark colors representing the contrary.

We also have to consider the process of web parsing and how consistent all of our resources are on the internet. When we looked on a website such as www.cnn.com the URLs are all consistent, but there are still many difficulties that need to be considered when determining the feasibility of our ideas.

This semester, the examples I have most enjoyed are those revolving around digital tools. Although the texts we chose to analyze with Voyant were not entirely enticing, the tool itself seemed very interesting. It was a bit cumbersome at first, but I thought the core of the tool had a lot of potential in the digital humanities.

I would like to see a mobile version of something like Voyant that could scrape through websites containing original text (like fan-fiction sites) and be able to perform text analysis across one or multiple texts; all from a mobile device.

I think there is potential for this, because there doesn’t really seem to be a tool for analyzing non-published texts… I guess you could copy paste these into Voyant, but it would be nice to just enter the url from your device and see the analysis appear on screen. Options could be word trees, block texts, word search, etc.

I think this could be easily implemented in JavaScript and HTML5, and could scale to a desktop version.