Month: January 2016

I decided to have a little bit of fun with these tools by using information from my historic preservation thesis on gender and Virginia’s equine landscape. While I don’t think StoryMapJS and TimelineJS are the best tools for analyzing and sharing my research, I enjoyed experimenting.

I liked several aspects of StoryMapJS, including its ability to show locations in relation to each other and its integration of media with text and maps. However, I found the tool to be limited in arranging information about a concept as abstract as gender. Since it organizes the locations in a chronology, I think it would work better as a timeline. I ultimately ended up organizing my information about the horse farms in a manner that shows the male-run farms before the female-run ones. Conveniently, this method forms a clean loop on the map. Had I tried to arrange the farms chronologically, the map would have been more confusing, especially if I added more farms. I also don’t like how the map appears on my blog.

I found TimelineJS to be a better tool for creating a history of some of the women in my study’s racing accomplishments. However, I would have had to add considerably more information about men in racing, U.S. history, and gender roles to develop a meaningful context for these seemingly isolated events. I like the aesthetics of TimelineJS because they are clean, straightforward, and the colors, backgrounds, and media can be manipulated more than in StoryMapJS. However, I wish the images used in the timeline could be enlarged.

Ultimately, I don’t think my group will likely use these tool for our 3D laser scanning project for the James Monroe Museum. However, we could possibly use StoryMapJS to map out the origins of the objects we scan to provide visuals. We could also use TimelineJS to create a map of when the objects were made or when they were acquired by James Monroe, although this information could be broad and defeat the purpose of making a timeline.

Although I find Feedly a little bit difficult to navigate, I hope that it will make it easier to keep up with new blog posts by my classmates and members of the DH Compendium.

MAP

When I began messing around with MapStoryJS, I decided to do a few events that were a important to World War II and the Cold War. I found the tool itself to be fairly easy to use. You can set a title to a location and even add images to the marker to help viewers get a sense of what occurred at that location. It didn’t take long to create the 5 events that I did, but I do not see my group using this for our project at all because we are just focusing on the history of one building. I do, however, see us using TimelineJS and you will see why in a little bit.

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TIMELINE

TimeLineJS took a little bit more work to complete, but I love it. You can insert the same information  that could in MapStoryJS and even more. You  obviously can enter the beginning and end dates of events, but if you have the exact time, you can enter that as well. Like I mentioned before, I do see our group using this for the HCC/ITCC project. We can use TimeLineJS  to record and display when the planning for the building began and when the construction finally began. Creating a detailed timeline with this digital tool would be perfect for us and I’m sure we can make it detailed and informative to all future viewers.

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FEEDLY

I might need to use Feedly a bit more, but I do have to say it is pretty convenient. I created a collection “Digital History Blogs” and easily added everybody to the said collection along with two other websites from the Digital Humanities Compendium.

OVERALL

I’m glad to be learning about even more digital tools, but I only see myself using only one of them for the semester long project. I imagine that some groups can use both, so I look forward to the outcome of each project.

I have worked with TimelineJS and StoryMap before for other classes as well as for my job. For Professor Moon’s Immigrant Alexandria course I created both a Story Map as well as a Google Map as a part of a group project.

This is an example of a Timeline JS I made for practice when I first learned how to use the tool.

Here is an example of a Story Map I made for the seminar with Professor Moon. I also have made quiet a few Google maps for other projects.

Since I had already played around with Story Map and Google maps for previous projects I tested out CartoDB. I used the data set from the site that gave an introduction to the program. I did not include a link for the map I made using the Dutch art research, because it was the sample practice tool and not something I independently created. Getting around the learning curve for the site, I think it is awesome how it takes data sets and makes them look so professional and easily interactive. When I had seen the maps by the Digital Scholarship Lab in our earlier class exploration I was so impressed with the interactive maps they had created. Knowing now that they used CartoDB, a tool accessible for me to use in future projects. 

As cool and interesting as the CartoDB maps were I felt that they probably would not work well for my groups site. We are not really dealing with datasets and our primary goal is digitization of the diaries, so collecting datasets possibly goes off course from our goal.

There is the potential that my group would use one of the mapping tools to represent the information from the diaries. This will be more clear once we go through the collection in the digitizing phase, and have a better understanding if we have solid information for a map. It is also possible that we could make a timeline, however I am unsure if that will flow with the way we decide to set up our site.

In addition to the class blogs I added McClurken’s (updated) website from the DH Compendium and a blog called Pelagios that had an interesting set of maps. I’ve had experience with Google MyMaps and TimelineJS so I uploaded a previous class’ example of each. All in all, great for a snow day.