Thoughts about travel

I see it’s been a couple of months since I last posted. Academic life has intervened–teaching three courses, including one completely new, and serving on an administrative search committee, among other things. The Digital History course is almost over; the students give their final presentations Thursday to their classmates and community partners. After seeing the…

This is one of those days when I am feeling discouraged. Spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to figure out how to upload the Neatline plugin to Omeka. The directions are sparse: download the file (check), unzip it (check), move the Neatline folder to /plugins (huh??). Where is plugins? After much searching and trial…

We had two fantastic presentations of WNY digital projects this week in my Digital History course. On Tuesday Nick Gunner (who works in Fredonia’s marketing & communications division) showed us the mapping application he developed to present the prodigious research efforts by Doug Shepard and Wendy Straight to map antislavery activism and the underground railroad…

Well, it’s been awhile since I last wrote at the end of the Doing Digital History workshop (thanks CHNM & NEH!). I am three weeks into my Digital History course, so time to reflect a bit. I think it is going fairly well. We had a discussion yesterday about how we would define digital history,…

Thanks to Jeff McClurken’s model, I put together a pre-class assessment survey on Google Drive for my DH class today. It was fairly quick and easy (took less than an hour–of course, I didn’t have to make up my own questions!). I will send it out to the students tomorrow. Hope it doesn’t scare them…

I was very energized by today’s session and have lots of ideas for my Digital History/Humanities course, as well as for making my other courses digital inflected. I think right now I need to try to keep myself from trying to do too much this fall–need to start with small steps! I have a clearer…

I have to say that text mining was rather less fun than I had expected. Yes, the Ngram and Bookworm and Voyant were fun for searching terms (see previous post), but I am having difficulty figuring out what I would use the topic modeling for. Using an (admittedly) small sample of texts, it didn’t tell…

And here is a Voyant cloud of a conference paper I did a couple years back:

This was an incredibly busy day–my head is still spinning! I am looking at my notes and see Lincoln’s warning: “Data mapping is hard.” He was NOT kidding! I had a rather hard time wrapping my mind around how to do this, and had some problems with the data set and the Google Fusion tables,…

I am not very good at this, sad to say. I can do the word clouds and such from a text, but when it comes to dealing with data . . . Loaded the data set into Viewshare but could not quite figure out how to get usable views. The church seemed to have too…