15 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2022
    1. One reason why an area like the Hill District is still so segregated is that redlining created a lack of investment in parts of Pittsburgh that persists today.

      It is incredible that after all these years, nearly a century, a couple coloured lines on paper have manage to make this much of a difference to the livlihoods of black americans. People have had the power over the last century to change this trend; the fact that the problem still consists today shows that racism is still a serious problem across the US and the rest of the world.

    1. What are the affordances and drawbacks of an open-access mapping platform?

      The affordances of an open source mapping program mostly encircle the same idea of extra, more accessible information. While Google is great at showing what they think EVERYONE is interested in, an opensource map might be better for trying to find specific locations nearby (such as an auditorium in a school). Some drawbacks exist in the consistency and reliability of the map; with everyone having access to add to the map and no real verification, it leaves the map prone to misinformation, as well as clutter from too many locations being placed in one area.

    1. Last year, the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre was one of 21 recipients of one-time funding from NHDS through the Digitizing Canadian Collections program.

      We need more of this; Not just in Canada, but worldwide. Archiving is a great way to store historical documents for future teachings; being able to digitize EVERYTHING, not just mainstream books that go through big publishers, gives everyone a chance to make history and get their truth out.

    1. And then there is this: as we well know the digital tends to be far less static than prior mediums of preservation.

      This line represents the importance of proper archiving and metadata information. Being able to track a document's original source and state (unedited) gives us insight into what the page / document was trying to present at the time it was created. Web documents edit easily, so if archiving was not a common practice it would be quite easy to change content down the road, completely negating the point of historical evidence.

    1. especially if someone reported a book being in someone else’s home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That’s what we have right now on the web.

      With great power comes great responsibility. The web is the greatest source of knowledge we as a species have; however, work will need to be done to maintain and archive it. (Sounds like an interesting idea for a digital humanities project.)

    1. At this point we had a series of documents, organized by time, and a clear indication of the total fine on each event entry. But there was still no way for a reader to see the penalty amounts at a glance without clicking on each "card" in the timeline. So we color-coded the entries based on fine amount: green for fines less than a million dollars, and yellow for more than a million. TimelineSetter makes that easy -- we just needed to put two labels into the "series" column in the CSV file.

      Digital humanities give us many new, creative ways to relay information; in this example, they use colour to indicate severity of the fine, letting readers gain a better understanding of the timeline with a quick glance.

    1. 709. Hard winter. Duke Gottfried died.710. Hard year and deficient in crops.711.712. Flood everywhere.713.714. Pippin, mayor of the palace die

      Across these 25 years there are 1300 weeks. 9125 days. Approximately 219,125 minutes. We all know much history happened in this period of time, yet all that exists in this historical account is 60 words. Digital humanities has not only expanded our access to history, but also its scope, covering every small detail, compared to a paragraph's worth of words to describe a 25 year span. I really do appreciate the humourous contrast between year 710 and 712 however.

  2. Oct 2022
    1. "e change we are experiencing is precisely that quantitative and qualitativeevidence are becoming easier to combine

      Distant reading is not solely a product of the digital age and exists in many forms

    1. If we take a long view of disciplinary history, recent research on large digital libraries is just one expression of a much broader trend, beginning around the middle of the twentieth century, that has tended to reinstate the original historical ambitions of literary scholarship.

      Historical recordings are exploding in the time of digital humanities, making it far easier to explore trends throughout history and better keep track of our history as a society.

    1. Twine games look and feel profoundly different from other games,

      Is a video game with no video still a video game? How are digital humanities defined and who gets to define them?

    1. The diversity of the gaming world is driven partly by the depth anddifference of gaming platforms. Playing a computer game can not onlyrequire a substantial investment in time but also obtain to (access) mul-tiple platforms, with combinations of often very separate hardware andsoftware.

      Games are an expensive storytelling market to get into. I built a $1500 computer when I was 14 that I now use for schoolwork and other tasks I could finish with a 10 year old laptop.

    1. Clicking on a list of 30 pre-selected words ranging from “American,” “Budget,” and “China,” to “Taxes,” “Trade,” and “Wages” reveals how they were used in chronological order.

      Data like this paints a broader picture of what was happening over time, giving us a broader sense of what life was like in the past. For example, the jump in the word "freedom" shown in figure 1.4.1 with President Roosevelt represents the great depression and the time throughout the second world war, where citizens would of been fighting for their lives on the home front and the European front.

  3. Sep 2022
    1. Google Fusion Tables Google Maps Some JavaScript (to get the map to display properly)

      Digital tools are hard to define as they are not always just one tool. As an example, when I use a hammer to pound a nail, the tool I am using is a hammer. If I use a hammer and a center punch to punch a hole in metal, I am now using two tools to finish one task. The incredible part of digital humanities is its ability to combine multiple tools into one and give them an entirely different use; This website proves that, showing just how many digital tools go into creating a simple digital humanities project that works as a singular tool.

    1. using anything from Google Mapsto geographic information systems (GIS),

      Google Maps, and any technological mapping system for that matter, has always been a digital tool that has stood out to me as under appreciated. Two decades ago, if you wanted to find out some specific geographical information on a location across the globe, you'd probably have to go to your local library, hope to find a book that covers your location, and dig through it once you find it to find your information. Now, if I want to learn about the spring monsoons in southern Asia (Something they taught us quite a bit about using Google Earth in my geography class last semester) I can go on to Google Earth and look it up, getting results immediately. Mapping technologies are a digital tool that has expanded our understanding of our world around us ten fold, letting us learn more and closer connect with the place we call home.