Text Mining + Group Update

The readings for this week were pretty interesting and they seem to involve some tools that I used in some other courses throughout my journey as Digital Studies Major. Nicholas Carr’s article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, really stood out to me because of the brief mentions of electronic reading compared to physical reading. I’m taking a course right now called After Books with Professor Whalen and whenever we begin to read a new book, he asks everyone how did they obtain it and how will they be reading it. We’ve read four books so far and I’ve read 3 of them in an e-book format. I personally don’t feel any different reading a physical book compared to an e-book, but I do miss the feeling of holding an actual book. It’s just something about feeling the actual mass of a specific book instead of your e-reader for everything you read that is really satisfying.

Like we discussed in class today, I do feel like reading electronic text, be it e-books or articles online, actually helped improve my reading ability with the concept of skimming through text and picking out various keywords and such. This should be true for the majority of individuals living in this digital age because everyone speeds through text messages and articles in order to bring them up in future conversations or they just to learn more about an event that is happening in the world.

Now for a little update on our Convergence Center Project. We have our final interviews Wednesday morning and afternoon, so we will be able to talk about those during our presentation on Thursday. There is a possibility of working on our video walk-through on Friday of all of the resources, but we need to discuss it more with each other. After that we will put all of focus into the website and meet up with Kyle from admissions again to see what he thinks about our website so far.

Before the week is over I will be uploading the edited versions of the interviews to the Explore HCC YouTube account, so they can be put up on our website.

 

Questions? From where?

Text Mining is often used in a way to find questions not answers. From an old time of historian, thinking ‘I dont have enough documentation (information)’ to the more recent ‘I have an abundance of documentation (information)’. Its amazing looking at how far we have come, yes that is a loaded statement… some might ask ‘how far with what?’ or ‘whose come?’ but that is the beauty of it. Text that brings questions forth, text (i.e. information) that provides more then clues or answers to questions… rather text used to widen the field of questioning.

“My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.” a generation of instant gratification, and lost attention span, I found this post particularly interesting as it depicts the fact that the internet brings forth a place that when utilized correctly can be an unmatchable aid in research and finding relative information for all branches of study and curiosity. The way I think of this illustration is the classic saying ‘it’s a blessing and a curse’.

Never the less how do we use the information provided? How do we utilize what we have read? I think being aware of the generational falters, but also take on the tools that are available. To not be bogged down by an abundance, rather to strengthen through knowledge.

Readings for curiosity:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/topic-modeling-and-mallet

Week 10 Reading

“Anecdotes alone don’t prove much.” I feel like the Nicholas Carr reading probably could have stopped there, and little of value would have been lost. I think there are quite a few problems with Carr’s article, but I would definitely point at a very faulty assumption in his basic premise as one of the root issues. Carr seems to think that because we read differently on the Internet, we are by definition not reading as well. As someone who has grown up with the Internet and doesn’t really recall a world without it, I can definitely say that I don’t think Google has impeded my ability to read long books, for instance. I’m a history major, and even long before college I would often dive into very long books for pleasure reading or simply because I wanted to learn something about the relevant topic. I have read War and Peace and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, to name two famously long and heavy works.

Rather than weakening our capacity for “deep reading,” perhaps Google simply teaches us a different kind of reading that’s equally useful within its limitations. Even if we accept that I’m less likely to stop to read an entire article in-depth while I’m browsing JSTOR and in all likelihood doing multiple other things in different tabs, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not accomplishing something useful. For instance, the online format makes it quite easy for me to quickly skim through the article, determine if it would be useful to me, save it for later, and use its author, references, and key-phrases to quickly find more related articles. But by the standard Carr is insisting on, that’s apparently the same as flitting around frivolously and rewiring my brain to be more shallow. Reading a book “deeply” and reading articles on the Internet might be different in terms of how you read them, but I do not buy that they are mutually exclusive.

Text Mining and Site Traffic

I had never heard of text mining before, so the reading this week was particularly interesting to me.  When I first read about topic modeling, I thought this would be an interesting thing to do with Slaughter and Murray’s letters, but then I saw that to do this, you need one hundred items at the very least, and we fall short.  But, other ways of text mining seem to be useful for our purposes and may be potential methods to increase traffic to our site.  In William Turkel’s article “Searching for History,” he talks about AOL’s release of search data in August 2006 and how information like this is useful for historians to see what kinds of things people are searching for in relation to history.  Although this could be beneficial in that historians could include key words on their sites that match up with popular search terms, where would one find the information to mine?  AOL released data, but soon took it down because people had used things like credit card numbers in their searches.  Do other search engines, such as Google, release search data that excludes sensitive information like this?

I Googled “Google search data” and one of the first things that came up was “Google Trends—Think with Google” (https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/tools/google-trends.html).  I clicked on it and the basic description that popped up was “The Rundown:  How do people search for your brand? When do searches spike? What about your competitors? The Google Trends tool uses real-time search data to help you gauge consumer search behaviors over time.”  You can search for certain terms and Google Trends will give you a graph that shows you interest in a topic over time.  I need to play with it some more, but given the description of this tool given by Google, it seems to be more geared towards businesses, but could prove to be useful to increase traffic to our site.

Week 10: Text Mining, Topic Modeling, and Searching in History

I found the readings very interesting and came up with some ideas to possibly incorporate in our Civil War diaries project. Wlliam Turkel’s “Digital History Hacks,” explained that different words and forms that people used to search history. It never occurred to me to think about what search terms were popular. If we can figure out what common search terms have been used to research civil war soldiers then we can use them in our site to get more visitors. Turkel says that most people use adjectival forms to search different histories. So in our case we could possibly use things similar to Civil War history. Although Turkel’s research does not necessarily include every search term it is a very interesting concept. The readings and site that discussed topic modeling also gave me the idea that we could do some topic modeling for the diaries because there are so many entries. Our topics could include some of our tags that highlight major themes in the diaries. I think that topic modeling adds a lot to sites and projects that are databases because it shows the main themes in an inventive way.

The reading about google made the argument that the internet is reprograming our brains and making them weaker. I agree that due to the internet has led to writing and reading being shorter but the author does not clearly point out that the internet also creates a larger amount of data. Not only have people been able to document more information than ever it has also become easily accessible to many more people.

Project update

This past week our website has really begun to take shape. Working with Omeka has been an experience. I think my biggest challenge has been assuming that editing the web interface would be as easy as in WordPress, and while I value the archival elements that Omeka has, I wish a better option existed that blended the best elements from the two platforms together.  So far my biggest issue with Omeka is getting the homepage configurations right. There seems to be some presets to the main tables on the page which I’m hoping to get around by possibly creating a new page and linking that as the new homepage instead of using the default option.

Another issue I’ve had this past week is sourcing images to highlight the content we already have. I was able to find a a great painting by Carl Rochling of the battle of Fredericksburg which I used as a backdrop and then layered a slightly transparent copy of one of Murray’s letters. I think this new banner gives a good sense of what our website contains, and the personal/ intimate feel that we’re going for. I also attempted to create an image of for our site introduction by combining both the Murray and Slaughter photographs, but I mistakenly forgot to account for the Union flag, which is incorrect in the image. I’m going to email our contact Luisa from the national park service and hopefully she can point me in the right direction as to picking a more accurate flag for the time.

This week my main goal will be completing/ revising page aesthetics and getting the skeleton of our website in order so that our group can organize our information in a clearer more definite way.

Week #10 Internet Use and Reading

The first article I read about how the internet has changed how we read and how we thing was very interesting and I agree with the conclusions wholeheartedly.  I have noticed myself being distracted or uninterested in reading a book for a long period of time, and even if an online news article  is long, I seomtimes don’t get through the whole think in one setting which is upsetting and frustrating. As a lover of books, literature, and libraries who has volunteered for years at the library in my hometown, I have also noticed that my peers do not visit the library often or read physical books for pleasure. When I am my the local library in Northern Virginia I often notice that the age group in libraries is ether young or old. There are children and caregivers or parents in the reading sections and there are older people using the computers for searching the internet, but there are a very few number of young adults in the library. I have read articles which talk about how elementary, middle and public high schools are getting rid or downsizing their libraries which makes me very sad. I’ve always loved the feeling of holding and reading a book new book. Additionally, I have never been a fan of electronic book technologies such as kindles, nooks, or iPads because they do not feel as confuting or as familiar as touching a real book or flipping real pages to read.

Group Update

At the moment, I am not concerned about my group being on track with our project.  We have successfully completed our first two big goals, which were (1) to finish digitizing the letters and their transcriptions and (2) to visit the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor Center and Confederate Cemetery to collect photos for our introductory video.  Currently, our next task is to upload all the letters and transcriptions to the site, but we are slightly behind on this for a few reasons.  Firstly, we are having to correct typos in the transcriptions of Murray’s letters.  Secondly, we have not yet decided on a file format to place the letter scans on the site.  Lastly, Slaughter’s letters have to be uploaded after Murray’s or else the collections will mix when site users click “next item.”  So, we have to finish uploading Murray’s letters before Slaughter can be completed, so this fact has set us back a bit.  We will also be beginning to work on the StoryMapJS to trace George Murray’s movements with the 114th PA during the war.  My main concern with this is whether we are able to work on it as you would a Google doc, with one group member creating the map and then sharing it so others are able to work on it when they have time.  If this is not possible, we may have to get together as a group and complete it.

Digital Resume

The last few days I’ve been working on revising both my resume and domain of one’s own to resemble more of a digital portfolio of my cumulative work at UMW thus far. Admittedly I  spent quite a lot of time on the aesthetics of the site itself. I’m a fan of  minimalist style but I also wanted my site to be customizable  so that I could include widgets like an “about me” and icon links to my other social media accounts. It was tough to find a layout that worked, but I’m happy with the current results, although I’m sure after my presentation today in class I will be tweaking a few things. I have already included a “projects” page which has a few selected digital media projects, unfortunately I don’t have anything substantial to show for my second German major yet, but that should change in the fall after I have completed my honors thesis. I have also included both a text and link to a copy of my resume / CV in the menu bar. I think I’ll continue to edit my resume since this assignment has given me the opportunity to really overhaul the information I previously had down. I’ll be planing to use my resume in the Fall and the university’s upcoming internship fair, so this updated website will also be a good asset to have for the near future.

Brief Update

In writing a brief update to Professor McClurken, I figured I could do the same for the weekly blog post.  The letters are currently being uploaded to the site and once this is done, the letters will be “digitized” and we will have finished the bare minimum required from us.  It has taken us longer than expected to get this far mainly because of the plugins (both implementation and testing) but we have been working on various other tasks that we have made for ourselves in the meantime.  To repeat what we covered last Tuesday, the bios are going well, transcriptions look good but may need to be looked at a second time for formatting or spelling, and the main concern I have now is creating two front pages for the collections and one front page for the site as a whole but that should not be too difficult.

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