Ethan Klapper – Digital History Methods

April 14, 2011April 13, 2011

Rollout: The Project Gemini Chronicles

I am nearly finished with my digital project, The Project Gemini Chronicles. I am pleased with the outcome of this project, but of course, there is room for improvement.

Here’s what this project features:

Primary source documents, uploaded to Scribd by others
Slideshows for all but one of the missions (still working on obtaining photos for Gemini 9)
A YouTube video on each mission page
Curated links to other resources via Delicious

If I had more time and resources, here’s what the next steps would be:

Through FOIA, I would have searched for even more primary source documents, scanned them, and uploaded. This way this site would be a comprehensive destination for Project Gemini primary source documents.
More video content
More comprehensive copy

The site, in its current version, is complete and should be considered a framework for future expansion. Curating the content was very time-consuming, but it was a good experience.

This site accomplishes its intended goals, which I posted about in January:

This project will make accessible historical information that is difficult to find over the vast sprawl of the Internet. NASA’s work interests many people, and I feel this site would do a service to the general public by making this information easier for the public to find. Perhaps it could even be used as a teaching tool in classes.

I feel, as a result of my work, this does serve as an effective portal. Those interested in learning additional information that is beyond the scope of this site are able to find additional resources in the curated links.

I learned a lot as I went through this process, the biggest surprise being just how long a project like this takes to put together. But I can’t think of anything I would do differently. I am proud of this project, and I hope you enjoy it as well!

March 9, 2011

Victorian Researcher Finds Google Makes His Life A Lot Easier

If you thought “Googling the Victorians” was about something else, you’ll be disappointed. In this article, Patrick Leary discusses how Google has made his life as a researcher of the Victorian era so much easier.

That’s to be expected with anything in digital history — wouldn’t our lives as historians be so much harder without Google?

But what is so surprising and unique about Leary’s article is how he views Google’s usefulness as something of an accident.

Leary writes about his search for a phrase that appeared in the Sunday Review.. His search for this phrase appeared in a number of other sources as well.

Leary writes: “Such experiences reinforce the conviction that the very randomness with which much online material has been placed there, and the undiscriminating quality of the search procedure itself, gives it an advantage denied to more focused research.”

While Google has helped his work, Leary also writes that it is no silver bullet and that one should always verify the authenticity of a source that is returned in a Google search.

“A great many legitimate scholarly purposes can nevertheless be served by an array of online texts that are, to one degree or another, corrupt,” he writes.

Later in the paper, we hear with excitement the prospects of expanded digitization projects as well as improvements in optical character recognition, or OCR, the technology that enables the searching of 19th century Victorian documents. Leary is also excited about the expanded number of non-profit digitization initiatives, like the Internet Archive.

He then discusses how new generations will take this kind of research for granted.

“What we are seeing is arguably not merely an electronic supplement to traditional library and archival research, but a more fundamental shift in our relationship to the textual universe on which our research depends,” he writes.

In all, this paper is not at all surprising. It could be extrapolated and made applicable to other topics within history, or even other fields. But what makes it important is Leary’s anecdotes about how this has changed his life — and his field.

January 29, 2011January 31, 2011

Visualizing Your Data With IBM’s Many Eyes

Many Eyes is a powerful tool that enables a user to create visualizations from any kind of data set.

Here’s where it gets fun: while a user can upload their own data set, Many Eyes is a community-powered tool. There are over 150,000 data sets to choose from, and many are pre-visualized.

Another (seemingly underused) feature are Topic Centers. Topic Centers allow teams of people to collaborate on visualizations. Topic Centers are organized around certain topics (makes sense, right?), as well as teams of people at organizations and classes (like this one).

Here are some examples:

Average Time Spent Commuting by State

Number of arrests by age and type of crime

News Blogs Dominated By A Few Startups

But selecting a dataset from the community is not always the best option: the metadata associated with many of the datasets is inaccurate or incomplete. Rest assured, because what makes Many Eyes such a versatile tool is that any type of data is accepted, so long as it is in a structured format. Data needs to be pre-formatted in Microsoft Excel (or similar spreadsheet software), then pasted into Many Eyes’ Web interface.

Then the user is presented with an array of visualization options, from tag clouds and word trees to assorted graphs and even maps.

A couple of potential uses for historians:

Take a historical text or speech (i.e. the Gettysburg Address) and create a tag cloud from it, where the more frequently a word is used, the larger it will appear.
Create a network diagram to visualize a historical figure’s family tree.
Use a map to show population trends over time.

Over the summer, I took air traffic control data and visualized it using Many Eyes, for fun. It was easy to use every step of the way. In fact, it’s so easy to use, the hardest part should be finding the data in the first place.

It is beyond imperative to have good visuals when working on the Web, since readers hate long blocks of static text. Bringing a history project to the Web calls for the use of visualizations like those that can be generated using Many Eyes. It will make your work more attractive, and will certainly help your readers understand things better. At the end of the day, it’s all about them!

January 20, 2011January 31, 2011

Preliminary Proposal: A Multimedia Project Gemini Portal

For decades, the work of NASA has captured the imagination of the American public and the world, sending humans to the moon and unmanned craft even farther.

NASA’s work is documented rich in eye-catching images, videos, as well as lots of primary source documents that are freely available on the Internet — and are public domain.

That’s all great, but this documented history is strewn across NASA’s websites and elsewhere around the Web — hardly an easy way to explore the archive.

In this digital project, I hope to use WordPress or Drupal to create a multimedia portal for Project Gemini, which lasted from 1965 to 1966.

Gemini capsules accommodated two astronauts and the Titan II rocket was used (the Titan was actually developed as an intercontinental ballistic missile). A total of 10 manned flights were flown. Despite some flaws (including a capsule that spun out of control that Neil Armstrong commanded), the program was deemed successful and paved the way for Project Apollo, which sent astronauts to the moon.

NASA’s official website for Project Gemini is clearly stuck in the 1990s and, simply put, is garbage. Something must be done.

Using my Delicious site, I have curated a number of links to sources I would like to incorporate into this website. Additional content can be found on YouTube and other non-NASA.gov websites.

I plan to create a page for each of the 10 Gemini missions, and possibly an additional page to talk about the test flights. Each page will include links (or even embed) the relevant images, videos and primary source documents. The pages will all include a 1-2 paragraph introduction to the mission, and could possibly list the vital information (dates, crew, etc.). The homepage, I think, should be more of a splash design, with each mission’s patch displayed. Clicking on said patch would send the user to that mission’s page. A short introduction to the site will also be included on the homepage.

This project will make accessible historical information that is difficult to find over the vast sprawl of the Internet. NASA’s work interests many people, and I feel this site would do a service to the general public by making this information easier for the public to find. Perhaps it could even be used as a teaching tool in classes.

What do you think? Do you think this idea makes sense? Do you have any specific suggestions for me? Please share your thoughts in the comments. I look forward to hearing from the class.