This category is for Humanistic Studies 351: Intro to Digital and Public Humanities, Spring 2014
I have chosen to review a digital project that we are all familiar with, City Lore’s “City of Memory.” The reason I have decided to evaluate this project is that it was the inspiration for my group’s final project, “360° of Memory.” The City of Memory [COM] project is essentially an interactive map of New […]
There are many ways one could evaluate a digital project. What I decide is important is the actual creation of a new object based within the public inter-webs on educational knowledge. Criteria – New Creation – Engages & Open to the Public – Educational I arrived at this conclusion with the help of re-reading Diana Taylor’s Save […]
I’d hate to be repetitive, but I have a feeling my views on the A Million Blue Pages project are shared by most members of this course. The project’s concept is, in my opinion, genius. As we discussed as a class throughout the semester, the creation of objects/items digital or physical is a very intuitive […]
City of Memory is a site that I had originally heard of while reading the Letting Go: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World. I had thought that the idea sounded interesting, but never actually checked out the site until I needed to evaluate a digital humanities project. Upon going to the site I found […]
The Texas Manuscript Cultures page recently won second runner up in the 2014 international Digital Humanities Awards in the category Best DH Project for Public Audiences. The site is summed up as a place “dedicated to preserving and promoting the culturally diverse hand-written social history of the peoples of Texas through digital access (txmscultures.writingstore.com – […]
Considering we have been interacting with the House of Leaves/A Million Blue Pages page a lot this semester, I have decided to use it as my exhibit of evaluation for this assignment. Using the criteria listed on the Museums and the Web 2012 (MW2012): Best of the Web: Review Criteria, I have I decided to […]
Because of the amount of interaction I’ve had with the site over the past few weeks, and because of how heavily we’ve focused on digital exhibits this semester, I thought that A Million Blue Pages would be an appropriate site for me to evaluate based on some of the criteria suggested by Museums and the […]
The Berenson & Harvard Exhibit contains three main sections detailing Bernard Berenson’s and Mary Whitall Smith’s time at Harvard University. The two later went on to be the founders of the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. The exhibit was made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the center. The exhibit is extremely user […]
I have chosen the website A Million Blue Pages for the assignment of evaluating a digital and/or public humanities project. Since I have interacted with it quite frequently this semester, as well as searched through it and seen what others have contributed, I feel I am quite familiar with it. Concerning categories and criteria for […]
I evaluated the A Million Blue Pages exhibit we worked on in class and I actually enjoyed the idea behind it. Overall, I really liked using a social networking website for our class part of the A Million Blue Pages exhibit. I believe that making exhibits digital is beneficial for all who participate. Having A […]
How did this assignment affect your reading of this novel? I thought the original assignment of reading House of Leaves would be a chore in itself. Knowing I had to go further and create five nodes made the idea seem a little more tedious. Instead of enjoying the novel for what it was, I was […]
The creating of objects affected my reading of House of Leaves because it forced me to look for things that could be elaborated on in the novel. Rather than focusing on how the novel all pieced together I looked for bits and pieces that stood out to me and used them for the assignment. Though […]
Having to complete a digital assignment filled with abstract items changed the way I approached the novel House of Leaves. Instead of worrying about what the big picture is about, I became more in tuned to the little pictures throughout the story. The website made it clear that to be able to tell the whole […]
On February 1, 2011, Google launched a site called the Google Art Project. This database allows users to tour art museums without having to leave the comfort of their own home. Using Street View technology, people can virtually navigate through the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Fide museum in Madrid, and […]
House of Leaves has to have been one of the most difficult books I’ve ever had to read. Actually, scratch that; The Fountainhead is the most difficult book I’ve ever tried to read, but for a much different reason, and one that I honestly won’t try to go into at this time. House of Leaves as a […]
For our online exhibit evaluation we looked at the President’s Desk, an interactive look at president John F. Kennedy’s Oval Office. While we found this exhibit interesting it was not exactly memorable. The way the information was presented was what stuck with us the most; as far as content goes, there was an overwhelming amount […]
This assignment helped shape the way I experienced reading House of Leaves by taking something un-graspable, such as text, and making it tangible and physical. In a sense, this project made what wasn’t real, real. This was helpful in understanding the text because it allowed anyone reading and creating at the same time to explore […]
Some parts of this book were extremely difficult to get through. To be 100% honest, I still have not finished it. Making the nodes for the A Million Blue Pages project definitely helped me through what I have read so far. Thinking of how to turn certain parts of the book into a node made […]
Danielle: I feel like the A Million Blue Pages assignment really made me pay close attention while reading House of Leaves. The text itself is incredibly complicated and required a lot of extra attention, but then looking for something to make an object out of- a meaningful object- became a much bigger part of the challenge. […]
The exhibit, A Million Blue Pages, served as handy supplemental visual material during our reading of House of Leaves. We appreciated its interactivity and the fact that we were even able to post our own work. Unfortunately, we feel some of the content fell short as there are not a lot of curation guidelines for […]
As a second time reader of House of Leaves I was expecting the Million Blue Pages site to affect me more than it did. I went into the project very excited to share knowledge and ideas with people across the country who enjoy the book as much as I do but left feeling disappointed. Lack of […]
Being a part of A Million Blue Pages and contributing objects to the page made the experience of reading and analyzing Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves so much more interactive and dynamic. Just as the novel forces the reader to see and interpret the book as an object, creating the objects made me, as a […]
When I first thought about this assignment, I can admit that I wasn’t that thrilled. I mean, the book was (and still is) so confusing to me and I didn’t really enjoy the read because it frustrated me most of the time. But, as I began to make my ‘objects’ and begin to think about […]
When I first started reading House of Leaves, I had no idea what to expect. As a first time reader, I was overwhelmed with the amount of reading and differing narratives. I had a difficult time figuring out what to pay attention to. In the small picture, I feel like this project was a great […]
The first time I read House of Leaves, I felt like I had been handed a textbook with no spine, none of its pages numbered, graphs and charts without tidy explanations at the bottom, and you get the idea. The second time around, however, I find I can enjoy the book a lot more because […]
From our experience with House of Leaves, we found that the reading experience is generated from more than just the words typed on the page. Since it is such an experimental book by nature, interacting with A Million Blue Pages creates a much more rich and communal familiarity with the work as a whole. Our […]
In today’s society people always have a need for more. They need to know more, they need to see more, experience more, and feel more. Traditional practices of documenting history and defining what history is cannot keep up with the needs of today’s society. In order to reach out to the general population the ways […]
Relevance and Authority I admit it! I have put off the drafting of this piece for quite some time, the reason being that answering or even thinking about the question, “what is ‘history,’ and where does it stand compared to individual and collective ‘memory’?” is a daunting proposition. One can tell from my use of […]
To put it most simply, history, according to the Oxford Dictionary is stated as, “A written narrative constituting a continuous chronological record of important or public events or of a particular trend, institution, or person’s life.” This, I feel, is what everyone thinks of when thinking of the definition of history. However, individual memory and […]
Today’s youth, in thinking about the fundamentals of history and its importance, will most often correlate history to the indulgence of facts, dates, and the memorization of people, places, and times. While this is, at its core, one of the main aims of a historical knowledge, this ideology commits a great error in that it […]
In 2010 The Library of Congress posted on its official blog that it had reached a deal with Twitter. This deal would allow them to archive all public tweets on the site since its creation in 2006. CNN reports that as of January 2013 over 170 billion tweets have been archived by The Library of Congress. […]
How does a curator go about deciding what goes in an exhibit? One thing is for sure: nobody asked for your opinion. But they probably should have. Kathleen McLean suggests that the “most dynamic conversations and exhibitions take place around the edges, in the margins, in the overlap of disciplines, and in the framing of […]
Ever since I was a child, I loved going to museums and historical sites. I was probably considered a little weird, because I loved learning something new about the history of the place where we were or being able to read about experiences about the people there. One thing that I have always been fascinated […]
The essays we’ve read in Letting Go? have each described some type of historical exhibit in which the public is either encouraged to interact with the exhibit, or has provided the information for the exhibit themselves. And while each exhibit differs in the way its information is presented, an issue addressed by each of the […]
As our class struggles through the complex subject of the digital and public humanities one must always reflect on the why. One aspect of this question is the intermixing of academic work with public dominion. When reading Letting Go what clearly is the problem most people have with the intermixing popped out of the pages. […]
Finding the perfect balance of historically relevant material as well as interesting material or making historically relevant material interesting have become issues of late. Sure, television shows can be culturally defining, but should they be? The answer is most certainly no. There is a time and a place for everything, including the most relevant television […]
History is an ongoing study with material being constantly piled and no real authoritative or objective rule on what is or is not worthy of remembering. Usually leaders are thought to be worth remembering, but many Americans have trouble remembering their country’s forty-four presidents. The presidents that are remembered are the ones that implemented initiatives […]
In our first reflection on this semester’s readings we discussed the idea of experiencing raw data in order to have a more organic, self-driven interpretation of historical artifacts. We expanded on Michael Frisch’s discussion of raw and cooked data in Letting Go?, wherein raw history is derived from “relatively unmediated” sources, and users rely on ‘professional’ […]
Today, historians and museum curators are grappling with the issue of popular historymaking, and how it can be incorporated into the already existing framework for exhibits and displays. Many are very wary of including it because the quality and/or truth of the public’s history is not very reliable. But the public is pushing back because […]
As I worked through the readings, one caught my attention the most. Steve Zeitlin’s piece “Where Are the Best Stories? Where is My Story? Participation and Curation in a New Media Age” discussed his project City of Memory. I really enjoyed this project and how it might represent history and the memories people hold. I […]
In Steve Zeitlin’s essay “Where Are the Best Stories? Where Is My Story? Participation and Curation in a New Media Age,” Zeitlin discusses, at great length, his interactive web project www.cityofmemory.org. This seems like a pretty snazzy concept: retrieving stories from all over New York and displaying them on a map that can be easily […]