Tag: Lab 2

Connections in sound by Patrick Egan is what project I will do my 2nd lab on. This project investigates patterns of collecting and accessing traditional Irish music in North America. The project reviewed Irish music in 1850 to 2000. Irish music is popular in North America. Traditional Irish music had influenced country music in Nashville, Tennessee. Irish took their traditional music with them to America. Collections of Irish music are at Library of Congress in American Folklife Center. Library of Congress has 2500 recordings of Irish music. Old recordings were online. Irish singers played different instruments. Irish music is almost like Scottish music. One of instruments Irish singers play is flute. Archivists, librarians, and digital specialists worked on Irish music at Library of Congress.

singingbox331

I looked at a project called Singing Box 331 which aims to provide an enhanced re-telling of an article about Mohican Hymns that was written in 2019. It is a “glammed-up” news article with pictures and some audio files and large walls of text. It features a non-linear style navigation experience for the user, however, there are not that many directions to go. The materials for this project would be mostly written text, and some images/audio clips as I mentioned above. The processing method of this project is the non-linear assortment of the walls of text and images. There are categories like “introduction”, “music”, and “conclusion” to name a few. The presentation used by the project is a website.

I personally hold the opinion that this project would be much better with more visual and audio representation of the material, rather than huge walls of text. To me, DH projects are unique compared to normal informative websites because of the ability to create an interactive experience for the user, or even display information in an unorthodox way. Especially in today’s world, most people do not have the patience to go through many huge portions of text on a white background. I would think it would be more effective to present the information in shorter snippets, highlighting the important parts of the information. The information would be more memorable and accessible to a wider audience.

I looked at jsLDA and their goal is to model data in text. It takes documents (not documents in the way we know them, but rather, chunks of texts) and uses various stop words to sort themes. For example one that the website talks about is studying how certain themes came up in the state of the union address and classifies them by category.

In my opinion the project was very cool and it even had a user-end interaction option. However, the website lacked substance. The project was there but the presentation lacked anything of any real excitement value. Additionally, the site only has one page. It offers little information, poorly explains the purpose of the project, and presents it’s user interface in such a way that it seems almost disinteresting.

The website I visited was rather unique compared to the ones we saw in class since it was primarily concerned with any given visitor making an account and using their software, but we will get into that later. The website itself is called Recogito, and it is monitored by Pelagios who is a digital humanities initiative whose goal is to connect different data about the past together. With this being where Recogito is coming from, it is no surprise that this website is built around “collaborative document annotation”. This means that it is a tool to help scholars, or anyone really, annotate images or texts, then allowing their work to become public data for others to use and look at. It shows one how to annotate images and text through the program and then share their progress and data with anyone they choose. Overall, it is a tool that can be used to produce data that can be shared and worked on with multiple people.

My analysis of the website is quite straight forward since their website the way it is structured is quite straightforward. The entire site is built around the visitor using the software, so it has many nuances that are strategically placed there in order to help facilitate and encourage the people visiting to do just that. For one, the website one has three links and one of them is the login tab. This is created in this manner to give the person a very limited amount of options, unlike many other websites who have many tabs/links. At the bottom of the webpage, there are many comments they chose to rotate through their homepage, as well as statistics that reflect very well on their website. Overall, I think the website is structured very well and is shaped for it’s function, which is to get as many accounts and data from the users as possible. As far as the data itself is concerned, I am not sure there is a real way to know what type it, besides the fact that it is composed of texts and maps. On the other hand though, one can know that the website is not providing data itself, the website designers desire the user to provide the data so the range of topics can vary from person to person.