Wow, I am recently back from a long vacation and reading up on all the posts. This weekend should prove very interesting! Several posts have resonated with projects I’m designing at Alexander Street Press, a scholarly publisher of online databases in the humanities. I know I’m rather late to suggest a session, so I’ll be happy to play it by ear and demo what we are up to in relevant sessions. Here is some background before Camp:

•  Krissy’s post on oral histories and Vertov was relevant to what we are working on in video. In opera, dance, and history, we are developing Critical Video Editions that allow for a more scholarly analysis of video. The problem with most video currently online is that access is almost always at the full work level or at the small clip level with no context of the overall piece. Just as technology enables text analysis, data mining, and other advanced research with texts, we are aiming to create tools to enable that kind of study with video. In particular, we are working on ways to clip, annotate, and segment video at a more granular level as well as enable searching on the subtitles or transcript of a video. I’ll be happy to share a beta of what we are working on, and I’d love to see other ideas.
• Several posts mention visualizing time and place. We have implemented the Simile timeline in The Gilded Age and would like to learn more about how others are using timelines. We are in the planning stages integrating our content into Google Maps, especially with historical letters and diaries and local history images. Tom, Sean, Anna, and others all touch on aspects of this. I’m wondering how others have dealt with a large amount of information on a map (how to represent 500 letters from a single town, for example.) We are also playing with the intersection of space and time (letters over time in a city, etc.). I’d love to see how you are thinking through these issues.
• Text mining is of particular interest, especially as described in Rob’s post. We are beginning similar experiments with our nineteenth-century American documents. In particular we are looking at how the controlled subject vocabulary we’ve developed in our Civil War Letters and Diaries database can be used as training data to mine for dates, events, and people in our Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines database. We are collaborating on this with ARTFL at the University of Chicago and are just in the beginning stages.

My background is in instructional design, so I’m personally curious about the pedagogical implications of all our ideas. How can a technology create a way of teaching and/or learning that previously wasn’t possible? How are we advancing scholarship and learning?

I look forward to meeting you all Saturday.

 Andrea

Tags: maps, text mining, timeline, video

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