Interactive Research Map or How I Learned to Come Up With a DH Project off the Top of My Head

My DH project was borne out of a meeting with Dr. Schocket, during which I had few ideas and pulled this one out of thin air. For my project, I will be proposing a prototype for a much larger project that I feel could greatly benefit the historical research community. Essentially, my project will create an interactive map which will feature numerous research institutions and archives from around the United States. Whenever a user hovers over one the many dots that will appear on the map, it gives information about what primary source collections are contained at that particular institution. I believe this will give scholars a much-needed boost when it comes to pinpointing where they need to travel for research.

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Evaluating DH

Like Liz and, it seems, so many others I am still struggling with the concept of DH. I am not necessarily struggling with the general definition of DH but rather what can be categorized as DH. Now, we have added the concept of evaluating DH which, at this point, might seem even more foreign to some of us who lack the necessary background. Not only is the definition of DH changing rapidly, all concepts related to DH are changing. This, of course, makes evaluating a project in DH much more challenging. In a way, I worry that I am in no way qualified to evaluate a DH project because I cannot even come to a simple conclusion on what kind of projects can even be considered DH.

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What is Digital Humanities?

After reading through Sarah’s and Dave’s posts, I am in agreement that the classification of what is and is not Digital Humanities is a major task in the field. As an undergraduate, I was both a History major and a Telecommunications major so I have some background in Digital Humanities. Despite this background, I did not have a large amount of interaction with DH and, more importantly, I was and am still unable to figure out what constitutes DH. In regard to Dave’s mention of vlogs and YouTube, there must be some line that separates meaningful contributions to the field of DH and the seemingly uninformative, useless videos. But at the same time, are these videos useless? Do they not give us an idea of the other side of the pendulum? Do we sometimes ignore “stupid” videos because they do not explicitly advance our understanding of DH, or are they simply another important part of the DH community in the sense of “all opinions matter”?

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