It's finished!
My project is finally completed and ready to launch! It's certainly a learning process, but it does highlight areas of my research that I wanted to focus on. It also allowed me the opportunity to play with digital tools, with some successes and some failures. This allowed me to analyze data a bit differently than I would have if I had just written a traditional paper.
So here it is! I'm more relieved than anything to have something that I knew nothing about completed in only a semester. Here's to more digital humanities and the continuation of collaboration in digital history!
Earapoza.iweb.bsu.edu/MaritalBliss/MainPage.html
Friday, December 18, 2015
Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Damage Control Night and an Update
Alrighty, so this week has been a bit crazy.
Right now, I am in the process of simplifying my content essays (the ones written for my 650 about marriage in the North and the South), troubleshooting my code and fixing the errors within it and getting my mapping data finalized. I just got all 28,221 entered in on Massachusetts marriages on excel with their corresponding towns. I am still looking to get all the Virginia marriage data entered and then forward then to Angie who can help me map these layers.
I have selected my sources for the etiquette examples of literature and then I just need to pull out excerpts. I will also be doing a word cloud of these books to show the commonality of words and this section will also show the nGram for booking written in the period around 1850 (+/- 5 years).
Right now my maps are almost done, my nGram is completed, my images need to be narrowed down (census records and images of married couples), and my newspaper excerpts need to be narrowed down and presented in a more readable fashion (potentially OCR them and add Voyant). I would also like to complete a timeline of popular U.S. history events and the publication of major books/articles on marriage.
I'm not super stressed about getting all this done, once I troubleshoot a few errors on my website, I will be able to just plug in my content that has all been gathered and then upload it.
Right now, I am in the process of simplifying my content essays (the ones written for my 650 about marriage in the North and the South), troubleshooting my code and fixing the errors within it and getting my mapping data finalized. I just got all 28,221 entered in on Massachusetts marriages on excel with their corresponding towns. I am still looking to get all the Virginia marriage data entered and then forward then to Angie who can help me map these layers.
I have selected my sources for the etiquette examples of literature and then I just need to pull out excerpts. I will also be doing a word cloud of these books to show the commonality of words and this section will also show the nGram for booking written in the period around 1850 (+/- 5 years).
Right now my maps are almost done, my nGram is completed, my images need to be narrowed down (census records and images of married couples), and my newspaper excerpts need to be narrowed down and presented in a more readable fashion (potentially OCR them and add Voyant). I would also like to complete a timeline of popular U.S. history events and the publication of major books/articles on marriage.
I'm not super stressed about getting all this done, once I troubleshoot a few errors on my website, I will be able to just plug in my content that has all been gathered and then upload it.
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Update Time!
The semester is certainly chugging right along! I will apologize for the delay in this blog-it was written over a week ago, but I forgot about the whole "publish this post" button that demands to be pushed in order to post. Frustrating to say the least.
Regardless, I haven't had a lot of time to spend on the website portion of my project, but rather have been compiling snippets of primary sources and organizing my research in order to have it formatted better for the website. I have also been working on duplicating my project for another class which is proving to be a bit difficult seeing that the content of the two projects is fundamentally different.
Right now, I plan on delving into my primary sources a bit more, linking and adding them to the website, recomposing my historiography in a way that is user-friendly and then starting to draw conclusions from the spatial and digital representation of my research! The end is indeed in sight!
I'm hoping to have all my coding and connections done soon so that they will be out of the way, but I am stil toying with how to represent my data, as well as fighting ArcGIS a bit on the creation of my maps. I may need to go back to Angie and see if she can help me structure them in a more readable way. All in all, it's getting there and it should be decently easy to wrap it up for finals!
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Web Designing
OH MY GOSH I HAVE A SITE.
I apologize for the outburst, but it is really exciting to finally have a template up and functioning with links between pages and content online! It's really pretty exciting to visually upload the data and see what the end result will look like. I finally feel like I have a handle on this and know what I'm doing.
I now have a new organized site map that corresponds with what tabs are in my research/website and am now playing with how I want to organize this. Onward and upward!
I apologize for the outburst, but it is really exciting to finally have a template up and functioning with links between pages and content online! It's really pretty exciting to visually upload the data and see what the end result will look like. I finally feel like I have a handle on this and know what I'm doing.
I now have a new organized site map that corresponds with what tabs are in my research/website and am now playing with how I want to organize this. Onward and upward!
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Update #2
After giving a Pecha Kucha presentation (see below!) I've come to realize some things that I want to update about the scope and presentation of my project.
First, rather than looking at the entirety of the U.S. in the 1850's I am going to look at just at Massachusetts and Virginia to limit the number of sources as well as to provide specific examples of just the north and the south. That means that all my primary sources need to come out of those two areas. Though I would have liked this project to encompass more, it seems to make more sense to limit the project to two specific areas indicative of their regional areas.
That being said, it makes my primary and sample sources smaller and more attainable. So I am feeling much better about mapping out these two specific areas (by county) and then looking at just the articles and books published in these areas. This makes the project more powerful and gives more of a reasonable look at what marriage was in the 1850s between the north and the south.
I have started reading some primary sources given to be by Dr. Stephan and I will be finding online scans of these (or completing them myself) and then, once I figure out how to make folder on iWeb, I will be placing them up there to help keep myself organized. Right now, I'm planning on getting the maps done around halloween and then making sure that all my primary sources are in a digital format. That will make the usage of analytic tools much easier.
First, rather than looking at the entirety of the U.S. in the 1850's I am going to look at just at Massachusetts and Virginia to limit the number of sources as well as to provide specific examples of just the north and the south. That means that all my primary sources need to come out of those two areas. Though I would have liked this project to encompass more, it seems to make more sense to limit the project to two specific areas indicative of their regional areas.
That being said, it makes my primary and sample sources smaller and more attainable. So I am feeling much better about mapping out these two specific areas (by county) and then looking at just the articles and books published in these areas. This makes the project more powerful and gives more of a reasonable look at what marriage was in the 1850s between the north and the south.
I have started reading some primary sources given to be by Dr. Stephan and I will be finding online scans of these (or completing them myself) and then, once I figure out how to make folder on iWeb, I will be placing them up there to help keep myself organized. Right now, I'm planning on getting the maps done around halloween and then making sure that all my primary sources are in a digital format. That will make the usage of analytic tools much easier.
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Progress #1
Well, figuring out a topic and making it translate to a digital medium seemed like a simple task...
Until it wasn't.
Right now, I have met with professors to discuss where I want my topic to go, and until about 10 minutes ago, I wasn't sure. I have decided to paint a picture of what marriage looked like in the 1850's by looking at not only quantitative census data, but also literature and other primary sources about the topic.
This being set, I am hoping to meet with Angie in GIS tomorrow to discuss what a map would look like (population density and marriage) and then to talk to Dr. Stephan about more sources that I could use to enhance my image presented of marriage during this period. From there, I also am looking at authors on specific areas (counties) and utilizing their framework to look at marriage in the same area. This way there is not only a large-scale look at popularity of marriages in the U.S. but also there is a type of case-study into one particular area.
Right now, I'm a bit overwhelmed because I know what I want to do (map, NGram, historiography on marriage, images) but I'm concerned about the uploading to iWeb and attempting to figure out the coding of that. What I'm planning on right now is gathering up all the pieces that I need and then putting them up at once and dealing with stylistic issues later on.
I'm hoping that my meeting with Angie will help me get more organized and give me more of a direction to go. I am still looking at working with a story-map framework to give some flow to the project, as well as to help me maintain a level of organization as I continually add to the sections of this project.
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