Digital Archive

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

Digital Archive of Korean Culture and Media

psingh308 — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 13:48:32 +0000

Digital Archive of Korean Culture and Media

This project involves creating a digital archive of Korean media, with the aim of supporting Korean culture and media studies and relevant course teachings.The Korean language represents the most-spoken language in Georgia with the exception of English and Spanish (Demographics of Georgia, 2010), and a new undergraduate Korean program was established in Georgia Tech last year. The Korean program offers new content courses related to Korean culture, created in response to the growing interest in Korean studies and the global impact of the Korean Wave (Hallyu; this term refers to the phenomenal popularity of Korean culture, including K-pop, drama, movies, entertainments, cuisine, and beauty). However, given that the field of Korean culture and media at Georgia Tech is a relatively new initiative, the necessary resources are extremely limited. A digital archive with various formats of media connected with Korean cultures will provide meaningful and practical resources to researchers, students, and instructors. In the current project, various media resources with sorted cultural topics will be provided.

This digital library will enrich not only cultural studies and teaching but also Korean language and other content courses at all levels. Cultures are closely entwined with language, history, literature, and society, and the availability of this intercultural media resource will afford valuable insights and conversation to all campus communities both within and beyond the Korean community.

psingh308 Wed, 09/11/2019 - 09:48

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Publications, Exhibitions, Other Products

1. Book: Media, Culture, and Debate in Korean. Routledge. 2021.
2. Journal article: Exploring media curation and sociocultural competence in asynchronous language course. The Korean Language in America, 24(2), 85-96. 2021.

Project Year

2019-20

2020-21

Project Leads

Seung-Eun Chang

Students

Ye Jun Kim

Samuel Weiss-Cowie

Philip Glover

Genre Tags

Digital Archive

Project Site

Project Website

Contact Email

schang323@gatech.edu

The Hip Hop Archive as Design Issue

mmoattari3 — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 03:13:09 +0000

The Hip Hop Archive as Design Issue

The Four Four Beat Labs is a digital pedagogies incubator located in the School of LMC. It houses the HipHop2020 Maker Space, which is the developer of the HipHop2020 Curriculum Project or simply HipHop2020.

HipHop2020 is an interactive, hip-hop-inspired digital archive that guides users through a series of “storied spaces” representative of hip hop’s cultural impact, its transglobal sociopolitical influence, its canonical contributions to Black media studies, and its pedagogical sensibilities in K-12, post-secondary humanities instruction. We endeavor to intersect the design of play and design of pedagogy to enhance HipHop2020’s interactivity across multiple platforms (including personal computers, tablets, and mobile devices) and access points (including a website, WebGL, and VR).

To this aim, we currently have two design issues: narrative interactivity and database development, that is nuanced according to the three ways in which the archive is accessed: website, 3D immersion through desktop or tablet, and VR. The project will address these issues over the next year.

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During the 2018-2019 cycle, the web platform was redesigned to host basic content about the lab and archive with particular focus on the documentation of the archive’s acquisition via oral history; the creation of the lab’s podcast studio “FourCast”, with access to seasons 1 and 2 of “Hacking Hip Hop”, a podcast series produced by students enrolled in LMC 3206, 3306, as well as LMC 3258. Its goal is to use the podcast platform to “Crack the codes of critical activism through culture, media, and hip hop. We also integrated a membership/subscription plug-in through our web platform to provide potential subscribers access to hip-hop-inspired curriculum projects that are aligned with 9-12 and post-secondary educational standards for humanities as well as computational media instruction. The web platform will also link to hip-hop-inspired pedagogical approaches used in LMC 4720/4730. Although we endeavored to launch the web platform in Fall 2018, we demo’d in Spring 2019 and will have a soft launch at the end of June 2019. We also expanded both the interactivity and data management infrastructure of the digital archive. During the last phase of development for the Unity environment, we integrated an API which allows us to expand the scope of information made available to users in the Unity archive environment. In order to meet new demands, we intend to start leveraging multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS). Through AWS, we have been able to host digitized archival artifacts and musical metadata, and make data available to HipHop2020 applications through a custom-built API and make files available through a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This data infrastructure will not only make archival content available to HipHop2020 applications, but we can also use it to expose select data externally to 3rd parties. 3 Through collaborations with two community partners, one working with the Cartoon Network and the other an independent UX designer, one of the projects biggest accomplishments that I look forward to continuing with these senior designers is the buildout of the web platform, which has use positioned to scale to a mobile application, along with the 3D environment and our custom data management system are the three main accomplishments this year. We are better positioned to advance the web platform to a mobile application. We are poised to also license our own API to 3rd parties.

mmoattari3 Wed, 09/12/2018 - 23:13

Publications, Exhibitions, Other Products

Delacoudray, C., Newton, S.H., Alemdar, M., Grossman, S., Garrett, S., Freeman, J., Wilson, J., Barbot, H., Moore, R.A., “Your Voice is Power: Integrating Computing, Music, Entrepreneurship, and Social Justice Learning,” Proceedings of Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), Virtual Conference, May 23-27, 2021. (Extended Abstract & Poster)
HipHop2020 Innovation Archive. Michael Webster Collection. Preserving Hip Hop Culture, Atlanta GA. Google Arts & Culture.
Wilson, J. (March 2021). On the capabilities of hip hop-inspired design thinking: An annotated syllabus. In E. Navas, O. Gallagher and X. Burrough (Eds.), The handbook of remix studies and digital humanities. United Kingdom: Routledge.

Project Year

2018-19

2019-20

2020-21

2021-22

Project Leads

Joycelyn Wilson

Genre Tags

Project Site

Contact Email

joycelyn.wilson@lmc.gatech.edu

Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive

kkim733 — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 16:18:07 +0000

Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive

For more than 40 years, the US Navy maintained two military facilities in Vieques, a storage space for explosive and a bombing site to test weapons and conduct military exercises. In 2003, after years of community struggle against the military presence of the US Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico, President Bush transferred the military facilities to the United States Fish and Wild Life Service. The struggle for the demilitarization of Vieques has become a symbol of the resistance against colonial rule in Puerto Rico. In 2004, I had the opportunity of travelling to Vieques to record in video the testimonies of many Viequenses who participated in the struggle against the US Navy military presence in the island. These testimonies are an invaluable historical source to understand the history of Vieques in the context of two major transitions: a political transition from military to demilitarized zone, and an economic transition driven by tourism, real state investment, and farming as competing alternatives for development. These stories offer an intimate portrait of people who survived years of social exclusion in order to become protagonists of their own history. They also highlight the environmental and health problems created by the military uses of land as bombing sites, as well as the challenges of cleaning up vast areas of an island polluted with toxic waste. The story of Vieques can teach us how demilitarized communities confront social, economic, and environmental challenges while struggling to create civic-driven opportunities of sustainable development.

In order to share the lessons of the Vieques history with my students, and to honor the Vieques community by making their testimonies available to the general public, it is crucial to digitize and categorize this video archive composed of 107 hours of video footage. The purpose of this project is to:

Digitize all the videos
Transcribe all the interviews included in the videos to facilitate text searches of relevant topics
Create an annotation system based on categories that will facilitate the navigation of the digital video archive
Design a multi-semester course on digital video archives in which undergraduate students will participate in the various tasks involved in creating and using a digital video archive.
Travel to Vieques to conduct additional interviews for the archive, with a focus on the challenges that the island is facing after Hurricane Maria (losses in farming, lack of electricity, etc.)
Invite speakers to provide feedback on student projects

kkim733 Tue, 04/24/2018 - 12:18

Project Year

2018-19

2019-20

2020-21

Project Leads

Juan C Rodriguez

Students

Mariam Moattari

Xinyi Chen

Genre Tags

Digital Archive

Civic Media

Project Site

Vieques Project Site

Contact Email

juan.rodriguez@modlangs.gatech.edu

Atlanta Map Room

kkim733 — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 16:12:55 +0000

Atlanta Map Room

This past year, the Local Data Design Lab joined with data artist Jer Thorp to undertake a new design research project called the “Map Room.” The overarching goal of the Map Room is to develop local spaces for grassroots map-making, where people can creatively and collaboratively explore data. Initial funding in the summer of 2018 enabled our team to build a map-making space on the Georgia Tech campus using our own custom software. We received support from the National Science Foundation (through the Civic Data Science program) in addition to the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center. The project has since grown into a multi-site research endeavour focused on understanding how local conditions can productively shape critical and creative inquiry into data. Our regional partners include ATL Maps, the Atlanta Department of City Planning, and the Atlanta History Center. We have also been invited to bring the project to other contexts, such as Savannah, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Boston, Dublin, Istanbul, and Washington D.C.

Our goal is to eventually support the development of 100 or more Map Rooms with arts and education-oriented foundation funding. Several publications about the Map Room are out or currently in the pipeline. An essay on our use of the project with Georgia Tech students to map the Atlanta BeltLine appeared in the Atlanta Studies Journal. The project is also introduced in a paper for CHI, the top conference in human-computer interaction, entitled “Engaging Gentrification as a Social Justice Issue in HCI.” Our paper scored in the top 3.5% of almost 3000 submissions. Coming up, the Map Room will be part of a juried exhibition at the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science. It is also the subject of a new article, currently under review for the “essays and provocations” section of the journal Big Data & Society.

kkim733 Mon, 04/23/2018 - 12:12

Project Year

2018-19

2019-20

Project Leads

Yanni A Loukissas

Genre Tags

Civic Media

Digital Archive

Installation

Project Site

Atlanta Map Room Project Site

Contact Email

yanni.loukissas@lmc.gatech.edu

Building a Digital Resource Center for the Cultural Study of Chinese Dialects

kkim733 — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 17:07:46 +0000

Building a Digital Resource Center for the Cultural Study of Chinese Dialects

This project will build a digital resource center for the cultural study of Chinese dialects.

Much of this will take the shape of a database of fangyan media, the media productions rendered in various Chinese dialects or local languages in contemporary China. Preliminary work can be found at https://sites.gatech.edu/liu/media/.

DILAC funding will also be used to attend the upcoming conference at Stanford on DH and Asian Studies, entitled “Digital Humanities Asia: Harnessing Digital Technologies to Advance the Study of Asia and the Non-Western World,” in order to gain skills and knowledge necessary to create a successful digital resource center.

kkim733 Fri, 04/20/2018 - 13:07

Publications, Exhibitions, Other Products

1. Jin Liu, "Language, Identity and Unintelligibility: A Case Study of the Rap Group Higher Brothers,” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, submitted and under peer review.

2. Jin Liu, Workshop participant, “The UN’s Sustainability Goals & Teaching World Cultures, Social Studies, and Foreign Languages,” the Inaugural Annual Atlanta Global Studies Symposium on April 27, 2019.

3. Presented in the workshop . “The UN’s Sustainability Goals &Teaching World Cultures, Social Studies, and Foreign Languages,” the Inaugural Annual Atlanta Global Studies Symposium on April 27, 2019.

Project Year

2018-19

Project Leads

Jin Liu

Genre Tags

Digital Archive

Project Site

Digital Resource Center for the Cultural Study of Chinese Dialects

Contact Email

jin.liu@modlangs.gatech.edu

Building Memories Podcast

kkim733 — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 19:50:23 +0000

Building Memories Podcast

In the spirit of Mayor Allen’s abiding love for Atlanta, we offer the podcast “Building Memories” as a venue for telling stories about iconic places of Atlanta and the people who have occupied them. With the ever-changing cityscape of Atlanta, our commitment is to document the people and places whose stories should not be lost from public memory amidst Atlanta’s continual drive for redevelopment. The mission of “Building Memories” is to preserve and share community stories from Atlanta’s past in order to remember a more diversely rendered citizenry, those – famous and not so famous – who, like Ivan Allen, Jr., helped lay the foundation for what Atlanta is today.

The podcast is organized around thematic threads and is prepared by teams of faculty, students, and community members.

Topics of current and future podcasts:

Herndon Home
Herren’s Restaurant and The Balzer Theater
Auburn Avenue Research Library
Atlanta Daily World
Friendship Baptist Church
Fountain Hall – Morris Brown College
Carrie Steele-Pitts Home
Phyllis Wheatley YWCA
Booker T Washington High
McClendon Hospital
Southview Cemetery
The Royal Peacock
Paschal’s Restaurant
Prince Hall

Initial work on Building Memories (through mid-Fall 2017) focused on developing the theme and processes for the podcast; this phase was primarily the work of faculty and other professionals.

In late Fall 2017, the team identified three student interns who will learn the art of podcasting: writing, interviewing, and producing the content. The goal for Spring 2017 is for our student crew to gain sufficient skill in these techniques to produce the final episode of the semester on their own. Tentatively, the subject of this episode will be Friendship Baptist Church, Atlanta's first autonomous black Baptist congregation; founded in 1862, the church has played a significant role in the founding of institutions of higher education and has been at the center of African American political power in Atlanta for many decades.

kkim733 Mon, 01/22/2018 - 14:50

Project Year

2016-17

2017-18

2019-20

Project Leads

Faculty: Peter Brecke (PI), Jacqueline Royster (Executive Producer), Steve Hodges (Advisor)

Community Partners: Gene Kansas (Creative Partner and Host) and Stephen Key (Technical Producer)

Students

Charles Cardot

Maura Currie

Prachi Mehta

Genre Tags

Podcast

Digital Storytelling

Digital Archive

Project Site

Building Memories Project Site

Contact Email

building-memories@iac.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

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Project Year

2016-17

2017-18

2018-19

2019-20

Project Leads

Todd Michney

Ronald Bayor

Steven Hodges

Students