Working with Digital Humanities

The digital humanities tools we explored this quarter impacted my learning in a bigger way than I first thought they would!

I have always been someone who has struggled with keeping track of small details, such as location, and on top of that, I am HORRIBLE with geography in general. So, when I first heard we were going to be working with Neatline as a tool, I remember being kind of scared. Something focusing so strongly on what I considered to be one of my weakest points was a bit overwhelming to me, but it was very helpful once I was able to conquer it. Seeing the different locations all across the map made it a lot easier to conceptualize the journey, especially in stories where it was a little difficult to or the locations switched a lot naturally (i.e Home Fire, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, and I'm not sure if anyone made a Neatline for Equiano but I'm sure it would have been VERY helpful there). 

In addition to Neatline, some other tools that were very helpful for me to put together and visualize some of the details that I usually skip over were TimelineJS and StoryMapJS. I used TimelineJS for one of my research excursions and ended up embedding it in my final Omeka project as well. It was useful for me to see things in a more strictly linear fashion, especially because as I was researching I might find things out of order or across multiple different sources.

As I mentioned above, I worked with Omeka which I also wanted to touch on. This one, again, had a little bit of a learning curve, but once I understood how to work with it, it came with a lot of tools that I really enjoyed. I think Omeka is a very comprehensive tool, and it was very helpful how you could include so many things in it! For my project on printing presses, I really enjoyed utilizing the annotated image feature where you could put text boxes directly over certain parts of the image if people hovered over them. This made it easy to point out certain things that were printed with certain types/using woodblock/etc. I feel like Omeka really allowed me to include anything that I could want for my audience (and myself!) to best understand my project. 

Comments

  1. HeatherLMarch 19, 2023 at 2:32 PM

    Hey Cassi! Geography has never been my strong suit either, so I was also nervous to try Neatline. However, I completely agree that it was helpful in understanding the texts better. Seeing different locations' proximity helped me realize whether different characters were close/far apart from each other, and it also helped me visualize the journeys that different characters took and how far across the world they actually went.

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  2. Eloise DanielloMarch 19, 2023 at 4:57 PM

    Hi Cassi! I was never that good at geography either, but I think this is why the tool was so helpful to me in particular because it is difficult for me to visualize certain locations. I feel like you got a good sense of all of the different tools and it is really cool how you intertwined multiple into your final project! I started using a new one, but sort of wish I had found ways to put multiple together to get exactly what I wanted.

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  3. Griffin JonesMarch 19, 2023 at 5:46 PM

    Hey Cassi! I remember the first time I tried to use Neatline and I was so frustrated! I even remember writing a blog post about how difficult I found the tool. It certainly has a bit of a learning curve, but after getting used to the waypoints and looking at some example projects, I found it to be really great! I think a tool that expresses both time and place with a map and a timeline with room for text, pictures, etc... Is perfect for a global literature course, and I'm glad we used it.

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  4. Noah English 11H BlogMarch 19, 2023 at 9:10 PM

    I agree with the difficulty but simultaneous utility of tools like Neatline. I had a lot of trouble navigating and learning how to effectively use Neatline, but I was very satisfied with the results. I appreciate how it is able to connect geography with information in an easily understandable and accessible way.

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