DH Projects

The largest-ever digital, accessible collection of home movies from the GDR cam onlin on Monday, Sepetmber 23, 2019. The online project, called Open Memory Box, was made availbale just weeks before the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall that led to German reunification. A team of more than 30 contributors has digitized 2,283 rolls of film, sent in from 149 families that lived in the former GDR from 1947 to 1990.

Clips are searchable by themed keywords – such as “beer,” “Alexanderplatz” and “winter holidays” – but the website also has clips of East German life in randomized two-second fragments. In this way, the researchers say, more people can connect with the story they’re watching without having the context and history.

“We think that these fragments give people an incredible opportunity to grasp the zeitgeist of the East in a way that a traditional archive could never achieve,” said Mr. Herskovits, an Argentine-born filmmaker who lives in Sweden.

See also article in The Globe and Mail, Spetember 22, 2019 (Canada): “Canadian professor looks to challenge clichés about East German life with home-video clips.”

Adrian Freed and Lisa Wymore are working together with a small team of creative engineers and artists to make a digital platform that has a low threshold of entry. The system would allow people interested in embodied actions, gesture, sensation, bodily expression, etc. to enter the space and build digital instruments that are activated by a variety of sensor and camera based inputs. These instruments will then be sharable so that those entering the spaces where the platform is activated will be able to build and create artistic experiences in relationship to past explorations within the system. The platform will also allow teachers interested in working with sensors and 3D cameras to engage quickly and reliably with the technology in the space. Our hope is that other laboratories like the Z-Lab will create spaces utilizing this platform so that we can collaborate and create networks.

A project by Digital Humanities at Berkeley.

The China Biographical Database is a freely accessible relational database with biographical information about approximately 427,000 individuals as of April 2019, primarily from the 7th through 19th centuries. With both online and offline versions, the data is meant to be useful for statistical, social network, and spatial analysis as well as serving as a kind of biographical reference. The image below shows the spatial distribution of a cross dynastic subset of 190,000 people in CBDB by basic affiliations (籍貫).

Originally conceived of as a complex digital object comprising audio clips from field dialect recordings coordinated with text files containing analysis on several levels, the Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition project is now being prepared as an interactive database. The central focus remains the collection of interviews, each of which is available both as an audio file and in text format. The texts are currently being transcribed, translated, annotated, and entered into the database. When data entry is completed, tags at both the token level (for linguistic features) and the text level (for discourse and content features) will allow users to extract and compare data on many more levels than has previously been possible.

The database comprises 172 audio clips, excerpted from recordings made by the authors in 66 different Bulgarian villages over the last quarter century. All recordings are of speech in natural conversational settings, and each excerpt is chosen with both form and content in mind. In the first instance, the excerpt illustrates the most salient linguistic features of the particular dialect, and in the second instance, the excerpt is a well-formed piece of discourse communicating some aspect of village life or of the speaker’s worldview. Wherever possible, excerpts have also been chosen which illustrate methods of field dialectology.

A project by Digital Humanities at Berkeley.

This project is as a wiki-based catalogue of the paintings and drawings by Jan Brueghel, his workshop, and his imitators. This includes a corpus of perhaps 500-600 works that are entirely or largely the work of Jan himself, and hundreds more copies and variants. In the wiki, each of these objects has its own page with an image and full cataloging data and bibliography; behind each of these pages, a discussion page allows other facts and opinions to be added. The goal of the site is to be an open-access, limited input collaborative venture, one where interested students can find reliable scholarly information on the artist but also where scholars, curators, and even the owners of Brueghel paintings can contribute information and further the study of Brueghel’s oeuvre. To enable the study of how all these interconnected images were produced, we are creating an Image Investigation Tool (IIT) that can be used to compare imagery between one object and another. Many of Brueghel’s visual ideas derived from the work of his famous father, Pieter Bruegel. The next stage of our project will therefore involve constructing a second wiki on Pieter’s paintings, prints, and drawings. The two wikis will be linked to a separate umbrella site where other kinds of information about the Brueghel family and their visual products can be gathered. This will include a “scale gallery” where visitors can see the relative sizes of various works, a visual timeline, a full bibliography, and scans of published documents and early critical sources.

A project by Digital Humanities at Berkeley.

A Slice of MoMA is the final project in 6.894, developed by Yichen Jia, Qianhui Liang, Jialu Tan.

This visualization project is aimed to improve user experience and help better explore the artworks at MoMA compared to the original MoMA website. Artworks are displayed in the form of a virtual museum where users are able to see color analysis of artisits and selected artworks. The webpage contains three parts, stacked bars with multiple colors, plotted artworks, and recommended relative artworks shown on the right. In the first part of the visualization, artists are represented each by a color heavily used in their artworks and the width of the color blocks is defined by the percentage of the artist’s works in total artworks in that department. The second part of the visualization allows users to have a peek at the artworks of selected artists. Users could scroll and click on each work to see a detailed description. On the right, we provide an area for users to deselect artists and also see recommendations of similar artworks based on the current art styles.

Data are obtained from a dataset oraganized by MoMA (https://github.com/MuseumofModernArt/collection). Pictures of the artworks are scraped from MoMA’s offical website (www.moma.org).

Trove is a crowd-sourced archive primarily built around digitized Australian newspaper sources. Developed and maintained by the National Library of Australia, the collection is searchable and continually growing thanks to an active community of contribtutors.

Perseus is an online library containing a vast trove of texts from the ancient Greco-Roman world and beyond. A project of Tufts University since the mid-1980s, Perseus has evolved into a web-based collection reaching from the classics into many other parts of the humanities, augmented by advanced research tools. You can browse and search the Perseus collections here.

The Old Bailey collection is “A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.” You can view it online here.

These three DH projects were completed by student teams for 2014’s iteration of CMS.633.

Around the World

Around the World—created by Parul Batra, Christian Landeros and Bethany LaPenta—uses an array of realtime analysis tools to construct an augmented record of contemporary news media across the globe. Read the group’s design brief here.

Art Annotator

For their final project, Megan Gebhard, Eric Fisher Jepsen and Evan Moore conceived and prototyped a platform for adding a community layer to art museum experiences. Their project uses annotation technology to expand the modes of interaction available to art historians and other viewers. Read their design brief here.

Arttract

Ari Vogel, Dohyun Bae and Nick Nigam also turned their attention toward augmenting the art museum experience: their project allows users to cement what might otherwise be fleeting encounters with art by drawing these viewings into a process of documentation and curation. Read their final design brief here.

The Venice Atlas is a multifaceted historical document of the city developed collaboratively by students in a digital humanities course. The atlas uses tools including timelines, mapping, and 3D modelling to present aspects of Venice history ranging from geographical evolution to musical traditions.

The Republic of Letters was an international correspondence network including many of the Enlightenment’s major intellectual figures. The Stanford Humanities Center compiled data from this huge set of exchanges and, through an extensive series of case studies, crafted interactive visualizations to illuminate the movements and relationships behind them. View more about the project at republicofletters.stanford.edu.

Provoke is a collection of projects which use sound in pushing the boundaries of scholarly presentation. In addition to the sonic documentation of their research areas, the authors of these projects also —as the name “Provoke” suggests—challenge existing modes of research and presentation, uniting the forwarding-thinking agendas of the digital humanities and of sound studies. Read more about the collection at soundboxproject.com/about.html.

The Comédie-Française Registers Project collects and makes available to scholars more than a century’s worth of historical data from the archives of a royal theater in Paris. CFRP is led by Jeff Ravel of MIT’s history department and has been a long running project of HyperStudio. Right now, the contents of registers spanning from 1740 to 1793 are accessible through a faceted browser, which quickly filters and aggregates data across multiple categories and also links to scans of the original documents themselves. You can explore the data at app.cfregisters.org/registers.