Digital Humanities

An Interactive History of Atomic Models

aanupam3 — Wed, 13 May 2020 02:49:30 +0000

An Interactive History of Atomic Models

Link to the interactive demo: http://designstudio.gatech.edu/atomhistory/

The history of the atom is commonly illustrated as a linear monotonic improvement in atomic models driven by lone scientists. Such depictions have been challenged on the grounds that they paint a reductive picture of science that disregards the role of community, alternate hypotheses, and local circumstances in scientific inquiry. Yet, there is an absence of alternative visualizations that engage such factors. Drawing on Historical Research and Feminist and STS studies, this project aims to develop an alternative and interactive visualization of the history of atomic science that highlights these factors and their relationships.

The goals of this historiography are threefold. First, we aim to show how the subject-matter (and not just the context) of science is entangled in its circumstances and consequently, demonstrate the value of Haraway’s concept of ’situated knowledges’ to the historical analysis of science. Second, we aim to provide an alternative approach to the visualization of science history that goes beyond linear ‘factual’ timelines and embraces the inherent non-linearity, simultaneity, and diversity of scientific research while being reflective of its own limitations. Finally, through our process of reviewing literature on atomic history, we aim to investigate how and why certain scientific models are historically prioritized over others despite being comparably (in)valid in those times.

aanupam3 Tue, 05/12/2020 - 22:49

Project Year

2019-20

2020-21

Project Leads

Nassim Parvin

Students

Aditya Anupam

Genre Tags

Info viz

Digital Humanities

Contact Email

aanupam3@gatech.edu

Digital Guidance for Community-Engaged Student Projects with the Reflect! Platform

psingh308 — Sat, 18 Apr 2020 19:26:13 +0000

Digital Guidance for Community-Engaged Student Projects with the Reflect! Platform

Four teams of students in the class “Intro to Social Justice: Gentrification, The City, and Social Justice” determined their own community-engaged research project within the general question: “How can we grow cities in a way that is both equitable and sustainable?” Their workflow was structured by the Reflect! platform. The user guidance provided by the platform helped the teams to identify the relevant stakeholders; analyze their positions and understand their legitimacy; develop an encompassing formulation of their specific problem; and to engage in developing a proposal to solve the problem by reflective consensus building. The project was a collaboration between the Reflect! Lab and Serve-Learn-Sustain.

Our DILAC grant funded several undergraduate students: a teaching assistant for the class and students who worked on the Reflect! software and the design of its user interface. Additionally, there was support for the instructor, the developer of the platform, and the leader of the NGO “Mad Housers” that develops low-cost housing for people who need it, improves the quality of housing options, and advocates for homeless people to “ensure their moral and civil rights are protected” (http://madhousers.org).

psingh308 Sat, 04/18/2020 - 15:26

Play Video

Project Year

2019-20

Project Leads

Michael Hoffmann

Ruthie Yow

George Thomas

Students

Ale Silcott

Isabel Knofczynski

Theresa Hsieh

Sheryl Ratnam

Genre Tags

Digital Humanities

Project Site

Project Prototype

Contact Email

m.hoffmann@gatech.edu

The Future of the Talmud

mmoattari3 — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 03:36:23 +0000

The Future of the Talmud

A Digital Humanities Case Study

Design plan for highlighting and note-taking features

The goal of this lab is to use the Talmud as a primary example of using digital tools to provide new experiences and methods of engagement with traditionally-printed content that are not possible with printed texts.

The Talmud is a collection of religious works that represents the core canon of Jewish law, lore, and wisdom. It is studied by hundreds of thousands of people today around the world. Aside from constituting the standard curriculum for Jewish seminaries and yeshivot and the launching point for Jewish legal discussions, it is also studied by a growing number of layman and scholars alike in the ever-popular Daf Yomi (daily page) learning program.

The vast majority of this study is done through the printed text, paginated into 2,711 folios. The page has a distinct and standardized visual form (tzurat hadaf). It is this unique—and culturally revered—form, which visually relates commentaries, related texts, and references, as well as the inherent hypertextuality of the main text, that makes the Talmud a compelling case study for the enhancement that digital affordances can provide.

With the rise of web technologies in the 21st century, various digital platforms have come about, providing tools such as translation and easy-access to external sources. These projects are used widely, but we believe there is much improvement to be made.

While the largest free projects (Sefaria and AlHatorah, for instance) allow access to the text of the Talmud and its commentaries for free, they do not provide the classic and integrative visual form of the Talmud. This visual form has great historical, cultural, and pragmatic significance, and we believe that it has been and will continue to be important for beginner and advanced users alike. We wish to emulate more of the print-based experience online, while taking advantage of the unique digital affordances of the web to provide accessibility and enhancement tools. Thus, we will continue to make learning online an attractive and expansive option without sacrificing the standardized and familiar tzurat hadaf.

The few projects that do seek to implement the tzurat hadaf using web technologies are not open source, and thus their digital tooling ends with their specific implementation. In addition to our prototypes, we wish to provide an open-source base that others can build upon, adding to the small-but-growing library of tools and platforms that are available for digital Talmud. It has been noted that the daf did not start with the Talmud—the format of main text and wrap-around commentaries has been used in both Latin and Hebrew Bibles, as well as canon law—and it does not need to end with it. Our generalized framework will enable new uses for the daf, including and beyond the Talmud.

Aramaic dictionary integration

Our goal this semester is (1) to develop a Javascript framework that will allow anyone to render a daf or daf-like page on the web and (2) to use that framework to build a prototype for an interactive Talmud learning platform. The framework will render the static daf using web technologies. Then, for the prototype we will build upon that to develop new features uniquely enabled by the digital, interactive medium of the web.

So far, we have begun the development of the open source package allowing anyone to create daf-like media on the Web, and we’ve also made significant progress creating the algorithm that renders Talmud pages automatically. We’ve also designed and begun development on various translation and notetaking tools that enhance the study of the Talmud using the digital affordances of the Web.

By the end of the Spring semester, we will present a fully interactive demo as well as a prototype to demonstrate the ideal use case of our software. If we are approved for the fall, we plan to create modern commentary glosses that aggregate recent English-speaking Talmud scholars.

mmoattari3 Tue, 03/03/2020 - 22:36

Publications, Exhibitions, Other Products

We've published an open source library.

Project Year

2019-20

2020-21

Project Leads

Janet Murray

Students

Dan Jutan

Shaun Regenbaum

Genre Tags

Digital Archive

Digital Humanities

Project Site

Interactive Prototype

Contact Email

danjutan@gatech.edu

Communicating and Visualizing Uncertainty of Climate Change Forecasts and Impacts

psingh308 — Sat, 27 Jul 2019 15:49:56 +0000

Communicating and Visualizing Uncertainty of Climate Change Forecasts and Impacts

This project develops a web interface to communicate and visualize the uncertainty of climate change
forecasts and impacts on the economy. This tool will disseminate a great deal of data with a high
degree of spatial resolution, in an interactive, informative and visually compelling way. This wealth of
data cannot be typically published in peer-reviewed articles due to space limitations and it never
reaches other scientists, policymakers and the publicat large. For example, it is now possible to
estimate probability density functions of climate change impacts on the economy at the county level,
for different scenarios of emissions, over different time horizons. These probability density functions
allow displaying the full range of potential impacts, including rare outcomes. Unfortunately, it is hard
to imagine how to display thousands of graphs or tables – one for each county of the USA – using
traditional methods. The application that will be developed will make it easy to quickly access large
datasets on future climate change projections and economic impacts, using interactive maps, tables
and animations.

Impact of climate change on US agriculture in 2055 – high emissions scenario – different
climate models.

psingh308 Sat, 07/27/2019 - 11:49

Publications, Exhibitions, Other Products

Emanuele Massetti. “Chaos in Climate Change Impacts Estimates” presented at the Southern Economics Association meeting in November 2019 and (remotely) at the European Geological Union Assembly in April 2020.

Project Year

2019-20

Project Leads

Massetti, Emanuele

Genre Tags

Info viz

Digital Humanities

Project Site

https://vectoraster.shinyapps.io/climatechange/

Contact Email

emanuele.massetti@pubpolicy.gatech.edu

TMI: A Curatorial Approach to Finding Data in a Literary Corpus

morangi3 — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 16:10:37 +0000

TMI: A Curatorial Approach to Finding Data in a Literary Corpus

Principal Investigator: Brad Rittenhouse
Project Team: Sudeep Agarwal, Taha Merghani, Madison McRoy, Nate Knauf, Sidharth Potdar, and Kevin Kusuma

Informationally-dense literature, sometimes referred to as “encyclopedic narrative,” has often been prized by scholars, and afforded a prestigious place in the literary canon. However, these works and the prestige that comes with them tend to be overwhelmingly male: books like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, for instance, assemble knowledge on topics like ballistics and whaling. This project explores methods for agnostically identifying instances of information aggregation across a literary corpus, sidestepping human biases that overvalue data from mathematics and the hard sciences.

Working on the Wright American Fiction corpus, which includes nearly every work of American fiction written between 1850 and 1875, we have developed a curatorial process that points to specific passages where material information—the people, products, and print that proliferated during this period of American history—accretes. Manifested as noun density, this measure allows us to quantify literary data at a suitable level of specificity: it allows us to find writers who are struggling to represent their newly dense material reality aesthetically, but stops short of proscribing specific types of material data. Writers who catalogue whales, like Melville, are counted equally to writers who may concern themselves more with, say, household items.

Moving forward, we hope to refine our algorithm to detect not just the presence of information, but its absence. African-American writers, for instance, often struggled with assembling hereditary information, which was often kept from them, or in representing experiences too traumatic to be told. We are also working on interactive frameworks for visualizing our data and allowing others to explore it.

morangi3 Tue, 01/16/2018 - 11:10

Project Year

2017-18

Project Leads

Brad Rittenhouse

Students

Sudeep Agarwal

Taha Merghani

Madison McRoy

Genre Tags

Project Site

Contact Email

bcrittenhouse@gatech.edu

TOME: Interactive TOpic Model and MEtadata Visualization

morangi3 — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 20:06:17 +0000

TOME: Interactive TOpic Model and MEtadata Visualization

TOME is a tool to support the interactive exploration and visualization of text-based archives, supported by a Digital Humanities Startup Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (Lauren Klein and Jacob Eisenstein, co-PIs). Drawing upon the technique of topic modeling—a computational method for identifying themes that recur across a collection—our tool allows humanities scholars to trace the evolution and circulation of these themes across printing networks and over time.

Publications related to this project include:

Klein, L., J. Eisenstein, and I. Sun. “Exploratory Thematic Analysis for Digitized Archival Collections.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30.1 (2015).
Eisenstein, J., I. Sun and L. Klein. “Exploratory Text Analysis for Large Document Archives.’ Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2014. Hamburg: Univ. of Hamburg, 2014.
Eisenstein, J. and L. Klein. “Reading Thomas Jefferson with TopicViz: Towards a Thematic Method for Exploring Large Cultural Archives.” Proceedings of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Annual Meeting 2012. Vancouver: Scholarly and Research Communication, 2013.
Presentations related to this project include:
“Developing and Sustaining Collaborative Research.” Roundtable. Modern Language Association, Austin, TX, January 2016.
“The Carework and Codework of Nineteenth-Century Abolitionist Newspapers.” The Digital Antiquarian, American Antiquarian Society, May 2015.
“Beyond the Digital Surrogate: Discovery and Analysis of Digital Collections.” Roundtable. Digital Library Federation Forum, Atlanta, GA, October 2014.
“The Best-Laid Schemes: Reflections on Three Years of the NEH ODH Data Management Plan Requirement.” Roundtable. Digital Library Federation Forum, Atlanta, GA, October 2014.
“Exploratory Thematic Analysis for Historical Newspaper Archives.” Institute for Quantitative Theory and Methods. Emory University, April 2015. Also presented at Digital Humanities, Hamburg, Germany, July 2014.
“Towards a Thematic Method for Exploring Large Cultural Archives,” with Jacob Eisenstein. Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age, Havana, Cuba, December 2012.

morangi3 Sun, 10/29/2017 - 16:06

Project Year

2016-17

2017-18

Project Leads

Lauren Klein

Genre Tags

Project Site

Contact Email

lauren.klein@lmc.gatech.edu

The Shape of History

morangi3 — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 14:04:55 +0000

The Shape of History

What is the story we tell about the origins of modern data visualization? What alternate histories might emerge, what new forms might we imagine, and what new arguments might we make, if we told that story differently?

The Shape of History presents one such story, drawing from the understudied visualization work of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. The project combines original archival research with interactive visualizations in order to demonstrate how the tools and techniques of data visualization carry very specific assumptions about how knowledge is produced and perceived.

In Spring 2017, the project team launched shapeofhistory.net, an interactive website that guides viewers through Peabody's images and ideas. The team is also working to recreate Peabody's lost "floor charts" using physical computing materials. The floor charts were rug-sized versions of her images that she designed for classroom use. Follow the progress of this project on the DH Lab research blog.

“This project has been instrumental for me as an undergraduate student. Not only did it build me into a better web developer, it also taught me an invaluable lesson about working on real-world projects. The Shape of History [the funded project] was the first DH Lab project at Georgia Tech utilizing both graduates and undergraduates, and now every member of that project is connected to the following: a published paper, a completed website, and a peer-reviewed journal article… Programs like [DILAC] create success stories like mine. We need more programs like this-- programs which bring college freshman into the research community. I now have a lasting connection to research, in fact, next week I will be continuing work on our next DH Lab project. I could not be more grateful for this opportunity.”

- Adam Hayward, second-year computational media student, quoted in remarks delivered at the Digital Humanities annual conference, held in Montreal, Canada, in August 2017

Play Video

morangi3 Sat, 07/22/2017 - 10:04

Project Year

2016-17

Project Leads

Lauren Klein

Genre Tags

Digital Storytelling

Info viz

Digital Humanities

Project Site

Shape of History Project Site

Contact Email

lauren.klein@lmc.gatech.edu

Mayor Ivan Allen Digital Archive

morangi3 — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 01:53:32 +0000

Mayor Ivan Allen Digital Archive

Goal

Developing a user portal (graphical user interface) able to display content from scanned archival documents in ways that reveal previously hidden or unknown connections, based on tagging of named entities like individuals and organizations, dates, and other algorithmically-identified content.

Description

Traditional (paper-based) archives and repositories hold a tremendous amount of historical information of continuing relevance to local communities, yet accessing this information remains a challenging, time-consuming, and sometimes prohibitive process for students and members of the general public. In particular, the papers of mayoral administrations from the mid-late 20th century reveal how local decisions regarding economic development, housing policy, employment, transportation, law enforcement, and the environment produced the metropolitan settings that a majority of Americans live in today. However, revealing this past’s continuity with contemporary socioeconomic issues is typically left to professional scholars or the handful of amateurs with the time and patience to extract the relevant information.

We propose to dramatically expand access to one city’s recent past – and thereby open new collaborative and interpretive spaces – through the Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. Digital Archive, a joint project of the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Atlanta History Center. As mayor from 1962 to 1970 – and namesake for Georgia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts established in 1990 – Mr. Allen oversaw a period of Atlanta’ s history widely identified with economic dynamism but also characterized by protracted challenges to both the racial status quo and the particular development strategies pursued by his administration and the local business community. By building a networked, digital archive using a wide selection from the Allen mayoral papers – only recently made publicly available – we will enable diverse stakeholders, including student and community researchers as well as traditional academics, to pursue more open-ended interpretive experiences that can potentially enhance and empower civic participation.

Scanning a significant portion of the Allen mayoral records was only the first step in the creation of what will be a new portal for understanding Atlanta history in a more inclusive, fair, and balanced way. In ongoing iterations, a succession of innovative data processing tools will be applied to the digitized records, including optical character recognition for full-text searching, tagging (including georeferencing), embedding hyperlinks to similar or related documents, and ultimately big-data approaches like topic modeling and data visualization. We also imagine creating curricular approaches to the archive for students — lists, themes, glossary, or other meta-information that can help students engage with cultural and historical issues in multiple courses.

Completed 2016-17

We identified significant content within the physical papers, then commenced with digitization (scanning), quality-checking and an initial description of the contents. A Brittain fellow, Joshua Hussey, also developed content for his course using some of the scanned artifacts.

Completed 2017-18

GRA Christopher Long continued the process of evaluating the scanned documents, and acted as a liaison between PI Michney and the Junior CS Capstone team developing a prototype of the interface, in consultation with Co-PI Hodges. Michney and Hodges unsuccessfully sought an NEH Digital Humanities grant, with the goal of increasing funding for project development. Michney also met with staff at iPaT and IMTC for suggestions regarding future collaboration.

Completed 2018-19

Michney and Professor Emeritus Ronald Bayor identified significant documents within the collection that will be useful in constructing Omeka-based virtual “exhibits” on some of the significant topics represented in the collection. GRA Christopher Long continued manually weeding out and consolidating duplicate tags identified algorithmically by the user interface.

Michney also joined the new “Community and Digital Archives” VIP team, with faculty co-advisers Brad Rittenhouse and Wendy Hagenmaier, in order to further develop the user interface; six undergraduate students made improvements to the project website’s front and back end. Michney, Rittenhouse, and Hagenmaier also wrote an NEH Digital Humanities grant application for the project.

Summary of our work published on Atlanta Studies

Future Work

The project was funded with a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities DHAG grant. The grant funds work on an Omeka-based natural language processing visualization of the archive and other archives, shown below.

morangi3 Wed, 10/05/2016 - 21:53

Play Video

Project Year

2016-17

2017-18

2018-19

2019-20

Project Leads

Todd Michney

Ronald Bayor

Steven Hodges

Students