Educator + Infonista + Historian

Today I pitch my research idea for the DH Incubator. The University of Maryland Libraries have held a series of workshops on getting started in the Digital Humanities this last semester. The last workshop (today's) is the pitch for attendees DH projects. My project is the independent study that I am planning to do for the spring semester. I don't anticipate my project being chosen for the DH Incubator, but am hoping that by presenting it I can get the support of University of Maryland Libraries' faculty and staff. Which will help me complete my independent study and hopefully complete the beginnings of a publishable article by the end of the semester. The slides for my proposal explain that I would like to examine "the information seeking behaviors of humanities instructors for digital resources" in librarian speak. Or "what makes DH useful for instruction" for everyone else. Then I have to decide if I want to submit my proposal as a topic for D...

Last week my group presented our perl based internet application. We used a perl module from CPAN called Twitter::Badge . In this module a user enters a twitter handle and the program returns that twitter user's most recent tweet. We adapted the program to display a twitter user's 5 most recent tweets. We allowed a program user to enter up to 6 twitter handles which were processed as an array. The Twitter::Badge would then retrieve the tweet and send it to a sub-array for each user. It was necessary to create a document for each individual user to hold the tweets. The interface was set on an automatic refresh every 3 minutes because that was the maximum number of requests twitter.com will allow by the program per computer. We had problems setting up our program because Twitter updated their API while we were working on the project. This meant that we had several weeks when we were unable to work on implementing our project as our module's author worked to get the modu...

Last week we presented our Perl projects to the class in INFM 743. These are examples of my classmates projects. Project 1 - Indian Cricket League website to aggregate information about cricket teams, players, and matches which is built using MySQL, Perl, and Javascript. Project 2 - Weather website which compares weather underground and geo weather websites. Project 3 - Another website which tells the user what weather specific item might be necessary. Project 4 - Smart email program in which the program reads words written in an email and then searches flickr for an image with the same tag. The image selected by flickr will appear with the email. Project 5 - Where am I? game program is a guessing game in which an image from flickr is uploaded to a website and then the user is given 4 cities to guess where the picture was taken. Each game runs 20 pictures. Project 6 - Another weather website "Simple Weather Stylist" provides clothing suggestions (and an ima...

Most of my peers who already have or are currently working towards graduate degrees in a humanities field decided to take one of the many of the information access courses other than LBSC 751: Information Access in the Humanities this past semester. They gave sound explanations that had to do with diversifying their courses to increase their employability. Their logic gave me pause about pursing this course. However, after reflecting on my purpose for earning an MLS I decided that LBSC 751 would be a good fit for me this semester. I blogged about my reasons for earning an MLS in my post DH is a Service . I appreciated starting the semester off with an introduction to Digital Humanities since this is such a significant way of accessing humanities information. In the future DH projects have the potential to be some of the best cultural heritage resources for humanities information seekers. Though I will admit to being dismayed and confounded by classmates who had no clue what DH is an...

*This week I've edited and republished several previous posts as part of my LBSC 751 Final. Previously I wrote about DH being a public service and the difficulty that humanities scholars have created for themselves by only viewing other scholars as their primary audience. This week’s readings for LBSC 751 follow right along that thread by examining humanities publication in this digital age. I heartily agree with Shawn Graham, Guy Massie, and Nadine Feuerherm’s chapter “ The HeritageCrowd Project: A case study in crowdsourcing public history ” in Writing history in the digital age: A born-digital, open-review volume , when they stated that “the need to reach out to the public has never been greater.” In these times of limited resources, humanities scholars need to stop talking to each other about how significant and relevant they are as interpreters of cultural heritage and prove it to the public through their actions! As Leslie Madsen-Brooks (2012) points out in “ ‘I neve...

*This week I've edited and republished several previous posts as part of my LBSC 751 Final. I decided to earn an MLS because I want to work on Digital Humanities projects. As a high school humanities teacher I frequently searched the web for primary sources to make history and literature more engaging for my students. I knew there should be tons of resources online but I just couldn’t find them! I decided to go to back to school to learn the technology skills necessary to increase the number and findability of quality primary sources on the web. Basic digital collections are useful for instruction but DH projects are more suited to educational ends. I left teaching to find a place for myself merging educational technology and digital collections in order to better the teaching of others. I enjoyed Trevor Mu&ntildeoz's blog post about DH and was excited to hear what he would have to say in class. Listening to students ask questions and the answers Mu&ntildeoz provide...

QUESTION 2. Faculty, English I'm teaching an English honors seminar this spring, and I'm hoping to include a component of primary research. There was widespread discussion in the Victorian popular periodical press of matters related to the concerns of this course -- physiological psychology, mesmerism, evolution, phrenology, vivisection, and so on. But I'm unsure what the best ways of helping students enter into the research might be, and what kind of access is available to original texts (presumably, principally online or in microforms). ANSWER So my first response to this request would be to ask for the catalog description and the syllabus if available so I could get a better grasp of the exact content and original format desired (only popular publications or scientific publications from the period as well? ), along the same lines of Alana’s request . In addition to Alana's description of databases sources available, I just wanted to point out that one of Research Por...