Almost Done

With the end of the semester upon us, I have shifted my focus from my own, nearing-completion webpage to the Albuquerque Airport web page. This one is more important and so I am putting more time and energy into it. My project is a group project with two other students directly, and a few other students helping with the programing as well. We are working on a visual project, putting together a web gallery, focusing on the airport and tourism. It’s so strange to think that we are making a professional website. It’s cool, but also adds a lot of pressure since we want it to be good and something we are proud of and happy to have our names attached to. I’ve been having trouble with a few aspects of the page and will soon have the web designer help me. I tried to create a new page to make a separate gallery, but when I copied the information and pasted it where I wanted a new page to be, it would simply replace the other instead of making a new one. I tried changing it several times, trying to figure out how to make a replica and not delete the page. But I still could not fix it. So there’s my failure of the failure blog. But the good news is that it does not have to be done today. And even though I could not make a separate page, I was still able to work on the slides, so I’m still making good progress. And when this problem gets sorted out, all I have to do is move over the slides I want on to the new page. I still have to go back and cite the pictures and text and add in one more section, but the pictures are done, except for one, which I am having trouble working with. It was at first a PDF, and then I thought I got it switched to a jpeg, but Pixlr will not edit it. I tried it as a png too, but again Pixlr said there was an error. I will have to ask about this in class as well. But really, the page is nearing completion, despite these obstacles. And I think it will be good one! We have great pictures and a cool web design. It will be very interesting to see the final product! Check it out in a week or two when the first draft is done! (Sorry, we don’t have a url yet, but Google can surely get you there!)

Getting Back on Track

This week’s failure blog is a short one for a short week. The failure for this week is that I have not worked on my portfolio (so there’s not much to report). My other classes had earlier deadlines for papers and projects and things, so I am finishing those up and I will be getting back to Digital Humanities during the Thanksgiving break. I am planning out what to do for the rest of the semester for this class. I cannot believe this class and the semester are almost over! Time flew by. The Airport Project is my main concern now. After the Thanksgiving break I will begin working on setting up the gallery page with the information and pictures my partners sent me. I think we have the design decided on, so it will just be a matter of inserting our data into the page style (which I will get from the web design team) and formatting it to work correctly and smoothly. Besides the Airport Project, all that is left to do is the individual portfolio. I’m pretty close to being done with this too. Over the break I will work on the writing portions on each of the pages as well as the written page about my research and the written page about the Digital Humanities being used in my field of study. That’s my plan for now: get these last things done (especially the Airport Project!) and finish the semester strong. Check in next week for the progress report (one that will actually have more action to report). Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Nevermind, I Got It

Scratch that last blog! I figured out iMovie. What it was is that I have two iMovies on my computer for some reason, but the new one is in a folder, instead of just an icon like the other one. But once I got in the folder and got the new one, it’s been working better. It’s still tricky to work, but I think I’ve got the hang of the basics. I am going with my original idea of making a slide show in iMovie. I’ve already started on this but I'm not done yet. The cool thing that I didn’t know before Jessica told me was that you can save text typed in PowerPoint as a picture and then insert just text into iMovie. So instead of recording my voice, I have captions. I am thinking I will play my own music instead of what comes with this program though. So far it has been difficult making a simple trailer, mostly because even this second program has been touchy and doing strange things (not as bad as the other version though!) Also, because I wanted it to be cooler than it is, but I just can't do cool stuff with it yet. So for now, it is very bland, but it’s done. Long story short, for me this is a good video. I have never used iMovie before or anything like it. I was unsure how to formulate it content-wise too, but I’m just going to go with what I like and what would make this slide show look most like a real move trailer: pictures! (And maybe animations and film off of the Internet if it’s not too hard.) I’m studying Medievalism, meaning how we use medieval ideas and stuff in pop culture today especially, but also how other time periods did this too. Everyone has always loved the Middle Ages! But it is a chicken-and-the-egg thing: do we love the Middle Ages because of pop culture? Or do we love it so we put it into pop culture? (Or does it even matter?) For me, I went into medieval studies because of the books and movies I had as a kid, namely J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Stephen R. Lawhead. I love this study because I love history and pop culture and learning the history of pop culture and how pop culture uses history. But enough about that. You will see the trailer on Friday!

Road Bump

Today’s failure blog is about the video. I failed at iMovie. I just could not figure out! And Google did not help. The program kept doing the weirdest things. I was going to try to make almost like a slideshow of different pictures, like a trailer but of stills instead of seconds-long video clips. But it would do strange things like replay the same picture in a row instead of moving to the next one; so it would show the first picture twice, then the third then the fourth. I only got to four pictures by this point. There were a lot of little issues like this and weird changes and inconsistencies that the program was doing to my pictures. I don’t know if it was the photos I chose or what, but I could not fix it so that it would run smoothly or even the same from one time to another. And one time it got stuck! I couldn't get out of iMovie, it would not force quit or shut down. It was terrifying! But eventually I guess I hit force quit enough times for it to do it and not give me an error message telling me it could not quit. So I think I might just shoot my own video and put it into iMovie in one swoop instead of trying to make a fancy PowerPoint of images I add in one by one. Either way will take more time than I have, but at least I know how to point and shoot a camera. Then we’ll see if I can’t get it to work in iMovie! If not, I will look into another program like Camtasia to see if that works better. I might also see if there is a photo slideshow program and instead of having video one. This is all just brainstorming and the beginnings of experimentation right now. So far the video programs have been much harder than I expected. I expected it to be easy like PowerPoint, but it was not (at least for me). But we’ll see how this goes and you can tune back in this weekend to see how it turned out!

Light at the End of the Tunnel

The problem I’m having now is getting my screen shots to fit inside the website. I had trouble with getting things to fit at the beginning of the semester, but not again until now, which was strange. I guess I took too large of screen shots. The screen shots I uploaded with my tutor worked fine, but now with these, they won't fit. There seems to be no difference between what I put into Text Wrangler with and without my tutor, but the results are not the same. I will have to Google this problem, but later. Other than that, my website is beginning to come together. I am working on writing in the descriptions and my process to the different pages, but have not finished yet. So my website will not yet reflect these changes. I wanted to finish the pages, at least finish this draft of them, before I changed them in Filezilla and uploaded them. But I’ll let you know (probably – hopefully – in my next blog) when the changes are done and up on the web. For today, I’m just working on the typing and describing parts of the website. I need a break from all the difficult programing and hard stuff today. But with just a few more classes left, it’s getting to be crunch time! I’m running out of time, but I’m closer than I thought I would be by now, so there’s the positive side! Like I said, next week should be the final or at least the penultimate version of my webpage. Tune back in in the next week or so to check it out the final product!

Baby Step

As I try to finish up my website, I am having trouble with a few things. Mostly time. It is amazing how much time it takes to do things on the computer! But on the positive side, I found a cool website for topic modeling called Regex. It doesn’t actually clean anything, but it can find and highlight anything you want to look for in your work. So if you wanted to double check for errors or just see what's in your documents or combine documents, this website would be helpful. It just won’t (as far as I know) take and replace anything. But OCR has been really difficult! And I haven’t even tried to clean PDFs! I’m just trying to get it done with a few word documents. But I think I might have finished my Mallet page. I still don’t really understand it, but my tutor helped me to go through some of the basics. I used the Command Line on the Terminal to look at three documents and see what it spit out. I still don’t really understand what all the numbers and how it’s set up, but it worked, I guess. I haven’t played with it enough to see how to actually use this for my research. The format doesn't make sense to me. Maybe I still need to put it into Excel or something. But I nonetheless have a screen shot (another new thing for me!) of the results. I also put it into Overview. That made even less sense, but maybe that’s because I only used three documents (and unrelated ones – just the three on top). Maybe if I play with it more and add more to it I will understand better. But the main thing is that I did it, and I even have pictures of my work. It’s a baby step, but a step! (Got to end these failure blogs on a positive note!)

For Real This Time

Last week I thought that I had finished and published my website, but I didn’t. So I have it here for real this time. The problem before was that it was coming from my desktop, not straight from the web, so only I could see it. I forgot to actually put it on the Internet through Filezilla. So today I put all of my pages into Filezilla, but then it still didn’t work. It was online, but it looked like my old site, except for my new index page, which I had just recently created. I could not figure it out. So I just moved all of the files into my “old” folder within Filezilla and put the pages into the program fresh and it worked. I don’t know why or how, but it did. So now you can see it too! It’s very simple, but for me it’s a huge step! And I think I’m getting very close to finishing the site, which is exciting. I just need to put up a few more pages. The design is done though, so I just have to fill in the skeleton with the pages I haven’t finished yet. Because I’m not sure yet what my research will be exactly, and because this is my first try with computer things, I designed my website to reflect that. I figured I can change it if or when I need to make it more scholarly, so for now, it’s just a presentation of what I learned to do with the computer. Check it out at maggiewaring.net!

Success!

I finally got my webpage to look like a webpage! I was able to show all the topics over a few pages. They are extremely mediocre, but I was able to do everything, albeit at the elementary level. It was such a relief to see it all there and working! I had help from my tutors getting all of this together, but I was still able to do more on my own than I thought I would. They helped me to see where there were mistakes in my code and how to improve the ascetic, such as adding padding to the text so the words were not so close to the border. They also pointed me in the right direction when I got stuck. I did more than I thought I would and feel pretty good about my very simple website. It’s also very close to completion, which is good since this semester is closing quickly. This has been a very frustrating class, but having an end product now makes me feel better. I really struggled remembering things from past weeks when I fell behind to put up on my webpage, such as QGIS, but with my tutors I figured out how to put it on my website. For showing all of the Command Line things, I wrote out some code on the website and also put in an example. I also made a page for the last project, the video, and attached a link to my blog as well. I put in a home page and made other pages as well as links to them and links in them to get back to the home page. To end this “Failure Blog” positively and truthfully, for me, this is progress! It was a ton of hard work and a lot of time and frustration, but I did it! Feel free to check it out: maggiewaring.net!

Gaining Conceptual Understanding As We Go

This semester is blowing by fast. For Digital Humanities, I'm a little behind schedule. I am still trying to work through Python and understand it. I am also having the same trouble with the Control Panel, as they are related. I could follow the steps in the Python tutorial pretty well, but was having trouble using my own Control Panel. I am still having trouble wrapping my head the whole process (and even, to an extent, the purpose) of the Command Line and Python, as well as having trouble understanding how to run and use them. However, after reading and discussing about text mining and topic modeling, I can better see what Python and the Command Line are actually for, at least in one respect: topic modeling. Especially after looking at the readings for this week for topic modeling, I could see that Python cleans texts with OCR. At the beginning of the month, I was less sure about how this was going to fit into the course and what I was supposed to use it for. Now I can see it’s for cleaning PDFs so they can be mined, which is cool. I have not finished the whole tutorial yet but I had to come back to it after working with Voyant last week to get ready to work with Mallet. I haven’t started on Mallet yet, though. I did the readings for topic modeling, so I feel I know at least in theory, what I’ll be working with and for. I have not programmed the OCR yet either, which I will need to do before I start Mallet as well, at least if I am to going to try using my own PDFs (although I will probably end up using stock ones or finding full text URLs that have already been cleaned to use instead of my PDFs, which need to be cleaned with OCR). In all, I’m behind, but I will get there and I feel I know more about the things we are supposed to be doing. And even though I'm really struggling with being able to understand how to actually do these things step by step, I feel I conceptually understand what the programs are and what they are supposed to do. I feel I have progressed in general understanding, which is a comfort.

Text Mining Comments

So far this has been the most understandable week, in logic more than implementation, but I have had more success with applying this topic than the others throughout this course. Honestly this is not at all what I thought this class was going to be. I thought the “digital methods for the humanities” that we would be using would be more like text mining and even GIS (not programming), things that would be used more for researching, not for displaying it. But I felt I understood both of these topics better than the others in the class, and I think I could use them in my research. I still do not have a firm grasp of actually working these programs yet, but I'm getting there. For both, I just need to play with it more. I am so slow with figuring all this out that it takes me forever, and honestly, I want to devote more time to my other classes and my research. For this week, I did work through Voyant and I feel I understand it pretty well. The only problem I had while working on Voyant was that I was unable to get any PDFs to upload, even the neatly scanned, one page per slide ones. When I selected a word document, however, it was able to upload. The “Cirrus” was helpful to see the frequency of the words (once I edited it against common words). The graph of the word trends is cool to see where in the document a word occurs most often and in relation to the other words. This was fairly easy to navigate compared to what else we have done in this course. It was also very simple and a helpful visual tool that could also be used in a presentation as well as research. I feel close to fully understanding Voyant, but I have not gotten through Bookworm yet. I got registered and set up, but I am still working through the instructions. This is more difficult than Voyant and has more steps and more to do in general. I am slowly working through it though. I think I will be able to do this program better and faster than the other ones this semester, which is a little boost of encouragement I could use at this point in the semester and the class!

Looking at GIS

I have always loved maps, and looking into GIS this week has been really cool. All the different things that you can do with existing maps and Google Maps, and even old maps, to make a visual representation of research is very intriguing. I especially find this helpful because I am a visual learner. Seeing the actual places of a historical event or seeing the geography of a region, etc., helps me to better understand and internalize the subject matter. Maps and other visual representations can deliver information about lots of different things, not just where things are. It is also cool to see the change over time of something. For class I looked at The Atlas for Early Printing (http://t.co/D5iAKX1odX) and it shows the growth of the printing press and related entities such as paper mills. This site did have some issues, but the idea was good. Animating change is extremely helpful. I don’t know if or how we could do this for our ABQ Airport project, but I think we need to do something to show change, whether through animation (if we’re ambitious) or through a chronological slideshow of pictures. These could be of the airport layout, popular destinations people go to in or from or through Albuquerque and New Mexico, tourism in general (like the postcards we saw in the library), tourism in general, etc. This would maybe show the reasons people come here and would be like a travel brochure too in that way. And then adding in pictures would not only make it more aesthetically appealing, but also more informative. But our main focus would of course be the history of the airport. And with all of the GIS we have been looking into I think we could really do some cool things with mapping. A map of Albuquerque would of course be our base picture and we could lay our data points on top to show data such as where the airport is and where the flights go to and from it. With all of us working together we could even make one map with different categories of data to lay over it, like the one in The Atlas for Early Printing. However, it turns out, it will be cool to see the collaboration of so many people on one project!

Archiving Our Own Age

Reading through Anne Burdick's Digital_Humanities for this class was difficult for me. To be honest I was lost and confused much of the time within all of the jargon and structure. But there was one point that stood out to me and made me really think about and appreciate all that we are able to do now with the digital technology. I never thought about it before, but we are able to archive our own age. That blows my mind. Books, magazines, pictures, and more can be uploaded into the computer system to be forever protected on this invisible thing called the Internet. Not only that, our social media can be saved on the Internet as well. This will be such a different age for future historians to research than what we modern historians study. There will be so much data from all different types of sources. This blows my mind.

I study medieval times where only the literate could write and leave us people in the future guessing what the illiterate thought. In modern times we have an incredible amount of people who are literate. But more than that, we have a huge number of people writing almost constantly. Before the Internet but in a time where more people were literate, in nineteenth century America or Europe for example, people wrote “snail mail” letters to a very small audience of mostly one person (per letter). Now, we have nearly everyone (in these same countries and others) writing to a gigantic audience whenever they want. Anyone can talk to potentially millions of people all at once. And it is not often just a statement, but a start to a conversation. And it is immediate. We can instant message someone across the room or across the world. And going beyond that, we can actually have a “face to face” conversation with anyone anywhere in the world with such things as Skype. It is incredible to me that we are able to be so instantly and constantly connected with other people.

Coming back to my original point of archiving our age, we have written evidence from people of all kinds about what they thought, felt, and believed in this twenty-first century because of social media and the Internet. Future people won't have to wonder what the people not in power thought about at this time because all income-levels, jobs, etc. have an equal opportunity to write whatever they want on the Internet through blogs, Twitter, FaceBook, etc., and then they are archived in the Internet so that future generations studying our time will have a more complete picture of what life was like now than we have of what medieval times were like. And that is truly incredible to me.