Synthesizing Group Projects

Lots of the pitches from last Wednesday seemed great, and in most cases they probably already work as stand-alone projects. Most important, I think, is that the tool/visualization aspect is often really well thought through–whether it’s putting together different forms of text analysis for more productive and comprehensive results or enhancing the social experience of the museum visit with location-based conversations and VR (just to take a few examples). It made me realize that, although my site idea combines some basic visualization possibilities explored in existing software in previous weeks, I don’t have something radically new to offer in terms of design and interactivity.

In the interest of getting a prototype of a project done within the next month, what I do have to offer, I think, is an existing database with lots of different dimensions. What I might suggest, then, is that some of you could find it interesting to use this database to test out the more experimental features of your digital humanities programs.

Some examples of possible syntheses:

  • Thatcher: The tricky first step of the Warpmap project as it stands would be scraping the NYT for date and site info and then attempting to measure the relative importance of different events. With the Olympics data, we could create a Warpmap that looks at submission origins over different Games, and we could weigh “importance” according to results (i.e. gold, silver, bronze, honorable mention, loss).

  • Pojiang: Perhaps you already have a dataset in mind for the architectural CVs. If not, the Olympics dataset has lots of different sortable dimensions that could fit into the axes that you put in your Github demo: e.g. year, nation, artform, topic… (And, for what it’s worth, architecture is one of the five art forms in the “Pentathlon of the Muses”!) We’d probably create charts or globes based on a given Olympiad or a given artform rather than a single artist, since single artists rarely submitted more than a few artworks, but the colorful columns and maps you envisioned would still suit the data nicely.

  • Kelsey / Xinwen: One thing I’d really like to be able to do with all my images of the Olympic Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture contests is create a virtual gallery/museum in which a user could sort and traverse artworks in different ways: for example, you could start with the Berlin 1936 Olympics and then create a room for Italian artworks within those Games, or you could (at the click of a mouse) reconfigure your rooms such that you’re looking at all artworks relating to track and field for that Games. We could even model this experience on what the actual Olympic galleries looked like, based on photos I have from the Olympic records. Since I already have a database, this might be easier than trying to start from scratch with the MFA or another existing institution.

  • Peter: If I’m able to get some Olympic text scans OCR’ed in the next month, I’d be really interested in running the text through whatever synthetic text analysis tool you come up with! I realize this is more of an application of your project than an actual collaboration from the start, so this may not qualify as a true group project–but anyway, it’s still on my mind, as I think some great comparative results might arise.

Apologies that this leaves out a few classmates–I couldn’t come up with syntheses for every project, and I couldn’t always remember the different pitches that well. And in any case: if you want to pursue your original vision without resorting to my oddball Olympics data, more power to you. But if any of these ideas seem tempting to you, let me know!

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