As is to be expected, planning could be described as the most integral and vital stage of the project. Planning for the Woodman Diary began as early as October wherein the team considered similar projects; the Diary of Mary Martin and the diary of Dorothy Price respectively. The team felt it important to analyse the successes and shortcomings of multiple digital editions and how to adapt said strengths and avoid what were seen as common pitfalls. Careful planning and the attentive leadership of our project manager ensured that the project kept on top of its deadlines. Coordination between the team was essential, to this end the team utilised the project management tool JIRA. Through JIRA our team were able to appoint tasks, subtasks, announce project sprints and close them off. It had a simple, yet psychological, effect on the team as we strived to finish out our sprints in before deadlines. JIRA, combined with the creation of a Gantt chart ensured that our goals, deadlines, predicted outcome and backup plans were well documented and disseminated between the team. Everyone knew the role that they had to play. It really cannot be stressed enough how important the planning process is to the success of the project.

Following on from this, the team began to dissolve into their various roles. For example, I took upon the role of content manager for the Diary, a role wherein I was (as the name suggests) largely responsible for the content of the site. Hand in hand with our ‘official’ tasks was an ever growing list of further responsibilities, such as my own coordination with the press and the post processing of the diary scans. This expanding series of tasks indicates the nebulous nature of the project that despite our plans, scope creep is a likely issue to affect the creation of a digital edition.

An example of an unedited diary scan along side an edited version.

Creating a DSE requires an understanding and appreciation of the analogue object in question. When planning the project, one must consider the envisaged outcome of said edition; will the project be faithful to the source material by utilising diplomatic and documentary edits? The aforementioned examples, the Diary of Mary Martin and the diary of Dorothy Price, were documentary in their approach; the design of their sites mirrored the stylistic handwriting of the analogue editions with misspellings, line breaks and page breaks emulated faithfully. With the Woodman Diary, it was decided to follow the documentary approach made with these editions. Stylistically, we felt it appropriate to use Woodman’s own handwriting for the design of our site, tying the digital and analogue together in both design and functionality. With the design questions answered, the issue facing the team was the encoding of the diary. The issue of encoding was discussed in an earlier blogpost, available here, but it goes without saying that this was the most strenuous task to date. While this blogpost is not concerned with the nature of encoding, it goes without saying that in producing a digital edition the encoding is the most important task facing a developer. With regards to the Woodman diary, some of the most pressing issues were linked to the artefact’s place in time. Woodman’s writings reflect a specific time and place, as such annotating his comments and abbreviations required a substantial amount of research into the First World War, the final year of the war in particular.

The issue of annotating the diary was considered in the planning stage when it was necessary to consider who the project’s intended audience would be. Assuming it to be the general public, a degree of familiarity with the Great War was to be expected (as we are currently in the midst of the centenary commemorations). Thus, specific military terms and place names which may not seem, at least to the intended reader, were annotated to help deliver context to Albert’s writings. Woodman’s unique position in the war as a signaler delivers a much different context to the war. Positioned behind the lines in a nexus of mail, telecommunications and troop movements, Albert is well informed about events unfolding across the world stage. With such a unique perspective on the Great War, we felt it necessary to do Woodman’s story justice, it was obvious that a documentary approach was the one best suited for the project.

The logo of the site is actually Woodman’s own handwriting.

As I type this post the project has entered its final phase. The design of the site (visible in this post) is finalised, as are the annotations and the TEI encoding. Facing the team now are the final edits of the additional, supplementary and contextual, material and coordination with the media. That the team has reached this point without much issue is a testament to the degree of planning and management conducted in the early months of the project. As repeated throughout this post, having worked on the creation of a DSE for several months, the importance of planning when creating a DSE is essential to its success.

The WIP Woodman Diary site.

Further Reading:

Duffin, Brendan. Digital Scholarly Editions (2014) Web, available at http://www.library.nuigalway.ie/researchsupport/digitisationcentre/digitisingtosupportscholarship/digitalscholarlyeditions/

The Diary of Mary Martin (2014) Online, available at http://dh.tcd.ie/martindiary/

The Diary of Dorothy Price (2013) Online, available at http://dh.tcd.ie/pricediary/about-dorothy-price-her-family/about-dorothy-price/

The ability to place pins is rather universal, the previous blog post covers this information in detail with regards to 7scenes and Mapbox, yet the ability to place related media within these pins is a boon to historical mapping. Granted, 7scenes allows this ability with regards to jpegs, but the ability to place media and text on a non-cluttered display is hugely advantageous. Likewise the ability to change street names is well suited to this project. Dublin culture mapping relies upon the old names of imperial Dublin wherein locations such as O’Connell Street must become Sackville Street. Thus, we can replicate the original Ordnance Survey Map of 1911 in digital without the need to digitise and procure copyright for the material. These different features can exist as layers upon the initial map. This is the feature with the most potential for the practicum; we can layer culture, urban conflict, commerce and other features individually. As such we can avoid overwhelming the user with pins, media and coordinates and let them search through the layers as they see fit. Furthermore, Maps4News allows a developer to import addresses and locations via csv, kml and gpx files. In our own experience with mapping Dublin, one of the larger challenges is placing pins on geographical accurate locations, especially on the Google Earth platform due to the limitations of street view. The ability to import addresses allows us to work side by side with historical sources such as Thom’s directory (what’s what and who’s who of Dublin businesses) to create a database and then allow the tool to place the pins rather than painstakingly place them ourselves.

One of the OS maps of Dublin that the project will use. Maps4News allows us to take a contemporary digital map of Dublin and change street names, draw on the tram lines and identity property and addresses via spreadsheet upload.

As one can see, Maps4news provides useful avenues for the proposal stage of this project as it allows us to take shortcuts to presenting an effective demo build. The’ custom created maps are copyright-free for all your uses, including print, media and online.’ It must be noted that this is a commercial tool that requires a licence. At time of writing the project’s trial of the tool has run its course and we are currently unable to access our maps and therefore our screenshots. The PR team have assured us that our material is safe on the cloud however should we decide to purchase a licence. For the purpose of this practicum, the trial run has provided the required information for the upcoming practicum whitepaper. While the project has utilised the open source tool Mapbox to this point, it is becoming clear that there is only so much that can be done without purchasing a dedicated tool. For our project to progress to the next stage while managing to sidestep certain boundaries and would be shortfalls, such as copyright, purchasing a licence for this tool may be required.

To return to the theme of this blog post, it is clear to see the potential of Maps4News for historical mapping. It is worth noting again that the PR team of the Maps4News were surprised to discover the rationale behind our usage of the site, university research was not one of their intended vectors when developing the tool. As discussed above, the tool possesses a wide variety of advantages over similar mapping tools, at least those that have been utilised within this practicum. It is true that necessity is the mother of invention and with the current swathe of cultural mapping projects such a usage of the tool will come as less of a surprise to the developers. Throughout its development this project has been piggybacking off other industries in order to present its data; 7Scenes is a tourism application, Maps4News is a journalistic tool whereas Mapbox is considered for urban planning. Yet all present unique and powerful opportunities to the historian. As the title of this post suggests, the needs of the media industry in delivering to a far more tech savvy audience meets those of the digital humanities. These tools are designed to be efficient and easy to use so as to allow journalists to meet their deadlines. One useful by product of this is that it allows for quick yet efficient visualisations that bypass the need to learn complex new tools such as GIS software.

Despite how powerful this tool is the final version of the Dublin Cultural map will be developed with GIS software such as QGIS, we simply cannot contemplate how much data is required yet nor what limitations Maps4News may have. It does allow us to complete a much more visually impressive model for the alpha build which will allow us a stable platform from which to begin closed testing of the map. The delivery date for the alpha and the whitepaper is fast approaching, as you can see the project is advancing in step alongside it. One can expect a final blog post to accompany the alpha sometime in late May.

Further Reading:

Hurme, Maija, Heselius, Bjorn. Maps4News: no need for panic calls. (2015) SNDS Magazine, pp.28-29

Mapbox (2015) Web, available at https://www.mapbox.com/
(Accessed on 08/04/15)

Maps4News. Blogs. (2015) available online at http://maps4news.com/blog/
(Accessed on 08/04/15)

7Scenes (2015) Web, available at http://7scenes.com/
(Accessed on 06/04/15)

At time of writing, the Digital Scholarly Editing class has progressed impressively with the Albert Woodman Diary project; the digitisation of the diary of a Royal Engineer stationed at Dunkirk during the First World War. Albert’s diary is divided by month throughout the year of 1918. Albert writes through numerous exciting events (at least for a Great War historian) such as the German Spring Offensives and the Hundred Days Offensive. This blog post is concerned with the technical aspect of the project and the significant hurdle that is facing the team now; the encoding of the diary for the forthcoming site.

It is worth mentioning that this post is written from the experience of an absolute beginner to TEI, XML and coding in general. Previous to this, my only experience with coding was a brief three week crash course in Java back in September. As such, the concept of encoding several month’s worth of Albert’s diary was a compelling albeit overwhelming one. Fortunately several members of the team are competent users of XML and were more than happy to assist the less knowledgeable members of the team. Despite this advantage the task that lay ahead indeed seemed insurmountable.

Our team was given a gentle introduction to the TEI encoding principle throughout the semester, experience that proved invaluable to dealing with some of the issues (which will be described below in further detail) that would arise from digitising Albert’s diary. Furthermore the TEI site guidelines proved invaluable in assisting the team with their work.

The diary was divided by month which gave the members of the team two months each to encode. The team was quite fortunate to have access to a detailed transcription of the diary, granted to us by Albert’s granddaughter. From the transcription the team adapted the text for coding via the editing platform oXygen or notepad +. Early in the project development it was decided to take a documentary or diplomatic approach to the design, according to Stephen R Reimer a diplomatic edition is responsible for ‘indicating as far as possible the “state” of the text in this manuscript.’ (1998, online) In terms of the Woodman Diary, this made it necessary to follow Albert’s writing character for character including spelling errors, punctuation and line breaks.

(The above images are of the Diary entry for the 8th of February and the encoded version. One can see that the structure of the physical copy has been emulated with linebreaks)

It was this design choice that lead to some of the aforementioned issues, namely the division of dates and pages. The Diary is divided up by date wherein each entry (Albert kept daily entries) is wrapped in [div] tags. The new entry is wrapped in a [head] tag inside which the entry is labelled according to its date and which journal (Albert wrote two, the Wilson and Butterfly diaries) it was taken from, eg: w_1918-03-16. However, on occasion Albert’s entries span more than one page where a day starts on one page then concludes on the next. As the two pages are wrapped under the one [div type=”day”] tag, it was impossible to wrap the date under a fresh [head] tag, thus sabotaging the design choice we made. Needless to say, this issue lead to some frantic brainstorming. Once it was established that the issue lay with overarching hierarchies it was possible to overcome the obstacle. The solution lay with changing the [date] tag to a [type =”head”], therefore allowing it to function similar to the [head] but without disrupting the hierarchy. Thus, the code could validate.

Another issue lay with the extra content contained within the Diary, namely newspaper clippings, photographs and other inserts that Albert included with his writings. It was decided that the Diary itself took precedence over the additional content but we would try to include as much as possible if we had the time. The issue with the additional content is that inserts and diary pages would often share the same date, thus leading to naming issues. Earlier in the project, when editing the images, I was responsible for establishing a naming convention for the diary. This convention, as mentioned above, was the page number, date and initial of the diary eg, 087-September16-B. During the process the inserts were labelled with an ‘r’ for ‘reverse of page.’ This scheme worked once implemented into the XML editor; the [div] tags reserved for date would clash whenever the two entries shared the same date, so the inserts were clearly marked with an ‘r’.

At the time of writing the encoding of the related media / additional content remains a pressing issue. The concern lies with the [div] tags once more and whether or not the additional material is assigned [div type=”related-media”], [div type=”other-image”] or some other title.

Aside from these small issues the progress of the coding is astounding. As an absolute beginner I dreaded the task but must state how enjoyable the process was. The guidelines of the TEI eased many concerns and once some initial progress was made with the work it became less of a task and more of a enjoyable exercise. The Oxygen editor is extremely useful for a beginner thanks to its clear, clean interface and the use of colour coding to aid with validation, a factor that allows one to locate the problems with the code instantly, freeing time and effort.

Further Reading:

oXygen XML editor. ‘Video Demonstrations.’ (2014) Web, available at http://www.oxygenxml.com/videos.html
Accessed on 20/3/15

Reimer, Stephen. R. ‘Manuscript Studies: Textual Bibliography: Kinds of Edition.’ University of Alberta (1998) Web, available at http://www.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/ms-course/course/editns.htm
Accessed on 22/3/15

TEI.’Home.’ Text Encoding Initiative (2014) Web, available at http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml
Accessed on 22/3/15

Historically mapping an urban center would seem to be a popular project in the digital humanities as projects such as Museum of London ‘Street Museum’ Project, Street Museum NL, Then & Now by rightmove and others will attest to. This popularity may be attested to the power of mobile technology to “transport” their user to the past with the aid of augmented reality. Furthermore, mapping projects such as Bomb Sight and NUKEMAP act as keen learning aids through their implementation of readable visualisations. The majority of these projects share the Google earth platform (or one very similar in design), possibly to provide the user with ease of access or possibly due to the scale and scope of the maps provided by the platform (the ability to move from satellite to street view for example).

It was necessary to analyse these projects prior to approaching this mapping project; what were their successes, what did we consider to be lacking and how might our own project counteract such shortcomings. Taking these factors into account I sat down with my colleagues on the project and began to plan out what exactly entailed ‘Culture Mapping.’ This was the easy stage; cultural establishments such as theaters and cinemas were established next to hotels, tobacconists and other businesses that dotted the Georgian cityscape. Therein lay the first hurdle, do we be selective and only represent the largest and most successful commercial chains like Clerys and Arnotts? Or do we only include those properties that we have photographs for? At the time of writing we have decided to gather as large a collection of images as possible and to map all that we have information about; we can afford to be selective once we establish an impressive library of images.

From this point onward it was established that in order to appeal to a larger audience it was necessary to address the impact of the First World War upon Dublin city. This effect is twofold – Irish troops departed from Dublin for service in France and further afield (Dublin was a garrison city) and the city itself erupted into conflict during the Easter week of 1916. While some individuals may divorce the Easter Rising from the First World War, the dictum of ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’ (BBC, online) raises no doubts that the two events are intrinsically linked. As the conflict in the streets subsided many photographers (particularly the Keogh brothers and the Independent) flocked to the ruined streetscape and provided us with a wealth of material generously digitised by the National Library. Thus the Easter Rising provides us with a bounty of material yet it also raises more questions. Do we wish to provide a temporal time map where we animate the gradual shift in battle lines and barricades near Mount Street Bridge? Furthermore, the digitised Tara Street Fire Brigade logs(courtesy of Dublin City Council) allow us to map the routes and locations that the Dublin Fire Brigade were called out to during the week. So do we visualise these temporal shifts on the map? Again, these are questions that will need to be addressed further in the development (and possibly in a later blog post).

With a central theme decided, we began to delve into collections to find photographs of these premises and of the Rising itself wherein the team was confronted with another issue. Many of the older premises, the cinemas in particular, were photographed outside of the time frame that this project is focused upon. Should the eventual outcome of the project be an augmented reality application for smart phone or tablet, the issue of immersion and the role that these photographs play in creating such an immersive environment for the user will be a critical one. Again, as mentioned numerous times above, we have decided to focus on more pressing concerns for the immediate future as dissemination is a year away at the very least.

As is to be expected, photographs of the era are limited. Those that exist in collections largely concern the Easter Rising and the immediate aftermath and as a result we turned to crowdsourcing for discovering further material. The image hosting site Pinterest has yielded the most results, especially the ‘Old Dublin Cinema’ board, but it is necessary to credit the hard work done by local historical groups such as Photos of Dublin and Old Dublin Town on Twitter. From their collections we were able to build upon our own library and begin to plot those collected images on a prototype map.

For this stage the team adapted the third party mapping software 7Scenes, a tourism application for smartphones, to help visualise what the eventual deliverable will look like. The eventual outcome is to import the work done with 7Scenes onto a historical Ordnance Survey Map of Dublin (the 1911 OS Map providing the most accuracy to our time period). Much more work needs to be done before we can even consider broaching this topic yet we remain on course. The project has, at time of writing, moved to a new platform entitled Mapbox. The move was enabled due to Mapbox’s inbuilt GPS system, html plugins and colour coding for map points – a small but necessary feature when placing so much data onto a map. The header image of this article represents the current status of the project as it exists on Mapbox.

(The above image is a screenshot of the Project in 7Scenes. Hovering the cursor over a node on the map will reveal a photograph and historical context to the image)

The difficulties described above are those that the team encountered while working with the project over the course of two months and how we adapted and countered them. The challenges encountered mapping Dublin are unique to this project (and others concerned with this exact place and time period); the loss of records from the Irish Civil War and the lack of photographic material that reveals the cultural details of this European capital requires us as historians to ‘fill in the gaps’ by making educated judgments on locations and other issues with the help of historical sources such as Thom’s Directory (available in the National Library).

Aside from these challenges the project is progressing rapidly – the next blog post shall shine light on more of our methodology. However it must be stated that dealing with these challenges is one of the more enjoyable aspects of this project, discovering workarounds and adapting to the situation is a tremendous working experience. To quickly conclude, work is progressing well despite set backs – watch this space for future updates.

Further Reading:

BBC. ‘Wars and Conflict: 1916 Easter Rising.’ BBC (2014) Web. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/easterrising/insurrection/in06.shtml
Accessed on 19/03/15

Dublin City Council. ‘1916 Rising Dublin Fire Brigade log book goes on display.’ Dublin City Council (2014) Web. Available at http://www.dublincity.ie/1916-rising-dublin-fire-brigade-log-book-goes-display
Accessed on 19/03/15

Floatingsheep (2015) Web. Available at http://www.floatingsheep.org/p/about-us.html
Accessed on 19/03/15

A quote taken from the RTÉ archives sums up these three points quite well: “…this collection of RTÉ archive material is a microcosm of that Irish psyche. RTÉ (in the shape of 2RN) dates from the year prior to the Silver Tassie [Irish anti-war play written by Seán O’Casey] controversy. Its archive reflects Irish preoccupations. Its omissions point towards our blind spots. On the debit side is the fact that, as a repository of oral history the RTÉ catalogue includes barely thirty first-hand Irish witnesses of the First World War. On the merit side is the fact that it includes all of thirty first-hand witnesses of the Great War in a time of calculated and culpable amnesia.” (2014, online) Concerning the centenary, Taoiseach Enda Kenny and British Prime Minister David Cameron declared that 2012 “marked the beginning of a decade of centenary commemorations of events that helped shape our political destinies. This series of commemorations offers us an opportunity to explore and reflect on key episodes of our past. We will do so in a spirit of historical accuracy, mutual respect, inclusiveness and reconciliation.” (2014, online)

Unsurprisingly, the decade of centenaries carries a great deal of importance to both nations. Regarding the task of digitising, Katherine McSharry, the head of service with the National Library of Ireland, stated “the huge interest in the forthcoming 100-year anniversary of the outbreak of World War One reminds us how important it is to ensure physical memorabilia of key historical events, brought to life with people’s stories and memories, are recorded for posterity.” (2014, online) The rising prominence of genealogy sites such as Ancestry reflect the surging public interest in discovering family ties to the Great War. Such sites require a tremendous amount of digitised data; birth certs, death certs, medical cards, index cards, medal citations etc.

Appendix 1.3 of the Decade of Centenaries Webpage declares that: “Many libraries and archives outside Ireland also hold material that is relevant, and it is vital to connect with these and to create digital links to these holdings. This should be done by creating a commemoration portal, which can be accessed and searched.” (2014, online) Digitising allows for a wider audience saturation. Concerning Irish documents such as the Letters of 1916, hundreds thousands of Irish expats situated in the United States and Australia can access and view historical information that impacts upon them, something that would not be possible without the availability of digitised copies online. In a greater European perspective, such digital collections can be gathered together under the umbrella portal of Europeana. Such a portal functions as a nexus for the European public and allows for a wider dissemination of knowledge through a digital landscape unimpeded by geographical boundaries. The decade of centenary and commemoration is a shared European experience, not simply an Irish one.

Europeana is authorised by the Data Exchange Agreement to release the metadata of collections hosted on it into the public domain using the creative commons. Utilising one universal standard of metadata operated by Europeana is a sensible solution seeing as “about 48% of the respondents do not have a solution yet for long term preservation based on international standards for digital preservation… National libraries are clear ‘front runners’, the performing arts institutes have still a long way to go.” (2014, online)

Concerning the collections of these institutes, the ENUMERATE digitisation survey revealed that “Text based and Visual 2D resources are in the collections of 84% of the institutions. Archival records (64%) and time based resources (sound, film, etc.) are included in 56% of the collections.” (2014, online) The 2010 Comité des Sage report states that “National Libraries in the EU contain more than 26.98 billion pages of archival records, of which approximately 17.27 billion are eligible/appropriate for Digitisation.” Combine these statistics and it becomes apparent that “Mass-Digitisation is an industrial process, and hence is very susceptible to efficiency gains at scale. Broadly, the larger a Digitisation project becomes, the lower the unit cost of Digitisation due to the dispersal of overhead and up front capital costs over a larger body of material.” (2010, online)

Thus if digitisation projects become cheaper the larger that they grow in scale as the Comité des Sage report states, it seems to be sensible decision to join the Europeanna scheme. The Digital Agenda for Europe recommends member states to “Reinforce their strategies and adapt their legislation to ensure long-term preservation of digital material, by -for example- ensuring the material deposited is not protected by technical measures that impede librarians from preserving it.” (2014, online)

Now two years into the decade of centenaries, writing as an Irish citizen, I can appreciate the efforts made by RTÉ to digitise their collection and place it online. Likewise, the National Library of Ireland maintains a fantastic flickr commons that display a wealth of images ranging over two hundred years of history. Steps like this must be taken to safeguard our heritage, as we’ve learned from our destructive past (the Irish Civil War, the Blitz of London) it is so easy to lose information forever. The decade of centenaries is rekindling interest in our past, now is the time to make that information available to all who would wish to see it.

Works cited:

Department of Art, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. “Decade of Centenaries.” (2014) Web,
(Accessed on 6/12/14)

European Commission. “Digital Agenda for Europe. A Europe 2020 initiative.” (2014) Web,
(Accessed on 7/12/14)

Poole, Nick. “The cost of digitising Europe’s cultural heritage. A report for the Comité des Sages of the European Commission.” Collections Trust. (2010) Web,
(Accessed on 7/12/14)

RTÉ Archives. “Ireland and the Great War.” (2014) Web,
(Accessed on 6/12/14)

Stroeker, Natasha, Vogels, René. “Survey Report on Digitisation in European Cultural Heritage Institutions 2014.” ENUMERATE Thematic Network (2014) Web,
(Accessed on 9/12/14)

SIMILE is an acronym for the “Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unlike Environments,” the toolset itself is extremely similar to its progenitor, MIT’s Dspace, it being an open source and customizable academic software. Thus we have the SIMILE widgets, an open source variation of the greater SIMILE release presented for public use. Exhibit is but one of six tools available but one most suited (in this blogger’s opinion) to a digital historian. According to the Digital Research Tools wiki, Exhibit is an example of a “Data visualising, collection building and citation management tool.” (2012) Exhibit’s primary advantage for a historian is its multi-faceted structure – historians can visualise and present data sets in a non-linear manner enabling, as the name suggests, an exhibit of their choice.

Exhibit comes in two forms, Scripted mode and Staged mode, with the former running in browser and the later requiring the user to host the server themselves. With the onsite example of the American Presidents project Exhibit demonstrates how one central and overarching theme, in this case presidents of the United States, can be represented from a variety of perspectives; birth year, death place, political party, religion etc. The multifaceted approach is immensely beneficial to historical projects with huge data sets linked together by a common theme. Perhaps the Letters of 1916 project could benefit from such a tool to aid with presenting where individual letters were written, by whom and by theme. In this regard Exhibit seems similar to a set of HTML tags; that clicking one displays data that seems to fall within the purview of the aforementioned overarching tag.

With all that being said, how does Exhibit work? As an open source tool, Exhibit is remarkably user friendly; its free, it scales in association with the project (more on this later) and is available in a multitude of languages. Accompanying these advantages is an active community who are more than willing to help new members adapt and utilise the software to their own advantage via in code commenting (made with JSDocToolKit) and an active developer wiki. Having such helpful features readily available is a tremendous boon for the tool. By their very nature open source digital tools are often complex and rather difficult to come to grips with, possessing a helpful and supportive infrastructure akin to SIMILE makes the this learning curve less steep as a result. The tool itself requires little to no coding experience at the Scripted stage although basic HTML is recommended. The tool itself utilises basic HTML configurations which grants the user quite a flexible base to work from, as stated by the site Exhibit can “publish and visualize data collections ranging from small personal collections in Scripted mode, up to large data sets in the server – based Staged mode” (2012).

However, now we come to the tool’s rather noticeable disadvantage: to run Staged mode requires quite the amount of technical knowledge. The active community described above is necessary to the success of Exhibit as a tool due to its tendency to grow rapidly when running in Staged Mode. The amount of tertiary readings and further third party software required increases in scale with the data sets used by the user. Thus, in Staged mode Exhibit runs the risk of becoming increasingly bloated and flabby to use in step with the difficulty of a particular field of research. Understandably, one cannot expect to run hundreds of thousands of data sets in browser, but having the user required to download and install JVM, Maven and SIMILE butterfly increases the amount of time required to supplement one’s knowledge before they can even work with the tool. Another disadvantage lies with the query mentioned above; is Exhibit simply a flashy set of tags and categories? That comes down to the scale of the project and the vision that the historian has in store for it. Comparing the Presidents project with the Cereal character’s project reinforces this point rather well; the president’s project utilises a Google maps plug-in to visualise these tags whereas the cereals projects simply displays a jpg next to text on a rather stark white background. Both are running in browser though with the code accessible through hyperlink, thus both are examples of Scripted mode. While these examples highlight the tremendous potential offered by Scripted mode the lack of Staged mode examples leaves much to be desired.

According to Exhibit’s official blurb “The previous version of Exhibit, [is] currently used on thousands of websites around the web…” Yet the webpage does not possess any links out to any of these sites. As such, saturation of the tool is rather difficult to ascertain. A quick Google search reveals instances of other SIMILE tools such as Timeline being used, but none for Exhibit. Does this suggest that Exhibit is not as widely circulated as the other SIMILE tools? In actually there simply isn’t enough data present to accurately suggest one or another eventuality.

To conclude, would it be possible to recommend Exhibit to a historian? The answer is undoubtedly yes, with that being said the yes comes with an important “but” tied to it. A historian is recommended to use Exhibit for their project BUT must be aware that they will need to relinquish quite a sizable amount of time to realise the potential of the tool. For smaller data sets (easily over a thousand) the tool is quite useful at providing a multi-faceted hierarchy to the given subject. As stated by the Tool Wiki – Exhibit is a well-rounded tool capable of Data visualising, collection building and citation management tool. When using Exhibit the historian must have a clear topic or umbrella term in mind. As mentioned above, the tool is akin to a series of tags and without a central topic to tag out from, for without such a term the tool is virtually useless.

Sources:

Digital Research Tools Wiki. Web (2012) Accessed on 29/11/14

SIMILE. “Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments.” Web (2012) Accessed on 1/12/14

Simile Widgets. “Exhibit 3.0 documentation.” Web (2012) Accessed on 1/12/14

DeKanter, Nick. “Gaming Refines Interactivity for Learning.” Tech Trends Vol 49, issue 3 (2005), pp.26-31

“We see interactive video games as a complement to, not a replacement for, other teaching tools and methods.” As of the time that this piece was written, DeKanter notes that over half the population of the United States plays video games – that is quite a substantial audience. He continues that his team “believe Making History [his own historical project] and future games of this type will bridge the widening gap between the digital teenager and the traditions of bricks-and-mortar classroom teaching.” DeKanter’s argument for the advantage of video games compliments Eric Eve’s article, both highlight the increasing trend of faceted classification – a video game may have one overarching theme but the player’s actions allow them to access it from a multitude of ways. Intriguingly, DeKanter approaches the concept of interactivity from a reverse perspective to the academics, that digital projects need to be more consumer friendly rather than academically constructed.

Eve, Eric. All Hope Abandon: Biblical Text and Interactive Fiction. (2007) Web
(Accessed on 23/11/14)

Eve approaches the concept of interactivity from a fresh view point – that of interactive fiction or text based adventure games using the example of All Hope Abandon, a biblical text adventure. Eve notes that the game makes assumptions of the behalf of the player, with All Hope Abandon the player inhabits an avatar who is assumed to be a Biblical Scholar, yet the majority of the audience may not be. Initially implementing footnoting into the world, the developer soon learned that a fresh (think command) “approach also opens up further educational potential for the game; those players can learn quite a lot about the biblical text and scholarly approaches to it if they are so minded, but none is compelled to do so, though hopefully the context of the game makes it an enjoyable way to learn.” Eve’s article highlights the difficulty associated with creating interactive and educational processes to intrigue audiences. It shows the public model or the Borderlands of interactivity straddle a difficult line of having to appeal to a wide audience and yet remain functional and traditional in the eyes of academics.

Fornäs, Johan, Klein, Kajsa, Ladendorf, Martina, Sundén, Jenny. “Digital Borderlands: Cultural Studies of Identity and Interactivity on the Internet.” New York, Peter Lang Publishing (2002)

This reading introduces a remarkable term: Digital Borderlands. This term implies that the world of digital interactivity is akin a new frontier being colonised. This frontier or borderland is made up of three distinctions: “free fields, intellectual free zones or third spaces of refuge in between established closures. Second, as battlefields, fields of fighting contradiction on the very borderline where struggles take place. Third, as cultivation fields, fields of hybridizing bricolage construction in the overlap between what is elsewhere separated.” This concept informs the overlaying argument that conflict arises from the introduction of new methods, similar to the taming of the American frontier throughout the 19th century.

Hand, Martin. “Making Digital Cultures: Access, Interactivity and Authenticity.” Surray, Ashgate Publishing LTD, (2012)

“It [this book] is often about the rather uneasy alliances between analogue and digital objects, practices and processes, and how we might understand this from both the lofty heights of theory and the grounded practices of those directly engaged with taking the digital turn.” Hand’s book delves into the issues of access, interactivity and authenticity from the cyberpace of the 1990s to the advent of web 2.0 in tremendous detail, describing the cyclical argument that digital sources are “dumbing down” or lead to the “banalisation” of academia with “information overload.” Furthermore, Hand addresses digital terminology such as the empowerment and democratization that interactivity brings, that audiences are more than ever capable of self learning. Hand’s discussion simultaneously provides a close reading of these various trends while retaining enough of a distant critical eye to allow the reader’s own opinion to formulate, rather than simply repeat Hand’s.

Hosseini, Motahereh, Zamanian, Mostafa. “The position of interactivity in electronic education and learning system.” Academia Arena, Vol.6, no.4 (2014) pp.1-5

The authors approach the concept of e-training audiences, a new trend that “doesn’t need the presence of the student in the scheduled class.” They go on to state that “Interactivity is a mutual connection which both the sender and receiver receive the information and provide a feedback through it.” The modernisation of technology such as E-learning encourages a form of triple interactivity – student-student, student-professor and student-content. In essence, interactivity provides an asynchronous form of education to students in a manner somewhat similar to the advantages of multi-faceted classification. “Interactivities in virtual environment is not restricted to walls of the classes, the books of one or some libraries and a limited number of teachers and students, it provides a class with the extent of the virtual boundless space without the constraints of times and space for the student.”

Levin, Ilya. “Academic Education in Era of Digital Culture.” (2013) Web
(Accessed on 20/11/14)

Levin describes the “postindustrial academic educational system” existing within the realms of social media. The paper goes on to describe the Personal Identity On-Line (Or PIO). “The concept of PIO personifies a specific characteristic of an individual’s behavior in a network environment, which manifests itself in a unique opportunity to form the individual’s identity differently from that in reality.” This trend has been observed with video game avatar creators but also in Digital Humanity projects (such as Letters of 1916) where the simple act of choosing the username allows the individual to hide behind a layer of anonymity or adopt a persona. This concept highlights a potential fear of increased interaction with the audience as there is little to no way of activity knowing who these individuals are.

Reading, Anne. “Digital Interactivity in public memory institutions: the uses of new technologies in Holocaust Museums.” Media Culture and Society, vol 23, no.1 (2003) pp.67-85

Reading uses empirical analysis to note the changes made to interactivity. Concerning the use of the Holocaust as her example Reading quotes Jurgen Habermas: “Auschwitz has changed the basis for the continuity of the conditions of life within history (1989: 251-2).” In essence, Reading is using the example of a subject matter that the vast majority of people, academics or not, can claim to have a substantial degree of knowledge on – it exists as public history without needing to be claimed as such. More so than any other historical incident, the Holocaust is very much informed by memory, that the “actions taken by those involved – as victims, perpetrators, rescuers and bystanders – were influenced by socially inherited myths, ideas and cultural forms.” Thus Reading contemplates the purpose of museums as cultural memory institutions and how interactivity can “allow for artefacts to be seen from a variety of perspectives and contexts, unrestricted by location within an exhibition narrative.” Reading’s article can be used to augment the overarching argument through her analysis of the success of interactivity in dispelling some commonly held myths and challenging cultural memory.

Robinson, John. “Being Undisciplined: Transgressions and intersections in academia and beyond.” Futures, Vol 40, Issue 1 (2008) pp. 70-86

Robinson deals with the concept of the prefix that accompanies the word disciplinary, that it’s the interpretation of this prefix that leads to the cyclical argument described by Martin Hand. “The art of problem-based interdisciplinary lies in the choice of problems that will be both academically and socially fruitful. Too heavy emphasis on the former leads to research that may successfully address problems within a particular field of study and make a contribution to the literature but that are of limited value or interest beyond the academy. Too much emphasis on the latter leads to work that is indistinguishable from consulting or pure advocacy work.”

Thayer, Alexander, Lee, Charlotte P, Hwang, Linda H, Sales, Heidi, Sen, Pausali, Dalal, Ninad. “The Imposition and Superimposition of Digital Reading Technology: The Academic Potential of E-Readers.” (2011) Web
(Accessed on 21/11/14)

This article takes a look at the technology that enables interaction rather than the act itself, namely E-readers. The findings contained within this report highlight an intriguing similarity to the web based development of technology; the audience’s mindset still lingers on the analogue. Through substituting a variety of readings with e-readers, the researchers discovered that “students in our study struggled, and sometimes succeeded, at integrating the e-reader into their academic reading practices.” These findings reinforce the borderlands theory put forth by Ladendorf et al – it appears that technologically at least, the advancement of the field and the development of interactivity is engaged in the battlefield of fighting contradiction.

Zimmerman, Eric. “Narrative, Interactivity, Play and Games: Four Naughty Concepts in need of Discipline.” First Person (2004) pp.154-164

Zimmerman issues a bold statement regarding how the public is frustrated; “Frustration with the lack of cultural sophistication of the gaming industry; frustration with the limitations of current technology; frustration with a lack of critical theory for properly understanding the medium.” Perhaps it is this frustration that some academic circles focus against the rise of a new field that they do not understand. Regarding interactivity, Zimmerman deems that “interactivity can occur on a cultural level.” Perhaps this explains why museums and other public history and remembrance locations are keen to utilise interactive means to engage their audience and engage with them on a cultural level.

Id software’s DOOM revolutionised the genre of first person shooters almost twenty five years ago. Since then the genre has grown increasingly po-faced from the hyper violent and admittedly silly “You versus the minions of Hell” premise that held up in the nineties. While the subject matter and themes may have changed, the mechanics haven’t necessarily varied that much. The code embedded and the mechanics of player input present in DOOM is still visible today in the likes of Call of Duty and Half Life. Does this make DOOM the born digital equivalent to Gutenberg’s Bible? Personally I’d disagree, Pong or the very first arcade games would be the correct comparison there. Rather, DOOM is similar to the novels circulated about Romantic Europe’s printing house culture. It set a template, a mould rather than invented the wheel as Gutenberg did when he introduced print culture in the 1450s.

As I type this blog post- two significant gaming milestones have come to pass; the ten year anniversary of both Halo 2 and Half Life 2, both games influenced by the above mentioned DOOM. Both games are seen as landmark achievements of the genre and are multi-award winning, million dollar earning releases. Yet, Halo 2 on its tenth anniversary received what Microsoft deem the “anniversary treatment.” This treatment sees the game itself upscaled to a new resolution, remastered to run at a smoother frame rate and given current generation standard of graphics. Is this a peculiar trend? Technically Nintendo have been pursuing the same philosophy with Mario for quite some time. What makes the Halo 2 example so interesting is the conscious design decision to keep the re-release on the same engine as the 2004 original. Indeed, at the push of a button the player is able to transition between the original graphics and the updated modern coat of paint.

This ability leads to two instances of the game running at one time, both utilising the same code but with different graphical settings on display. Ten years is a remarkably long time in the gaming world, that Halo 2 stands the test of time (albeit with new engine) is a testament to how well designed it is. But is such an anniversary treatment required? Analogue media equivalents do experience similar re-releases, whether through a new printed edition or director’s cut, rarely is it as bombastic and brash as the Halo 2 remaster where the original game is in essence hidden behind a pretty facade; it still lingers behind the veneer but it evidently is not the main focus. Compare this with the other example mentioned above, Half Life 2.

Half Life 2 has remained virtually untouched since its first incarnation, granted the initial release has received numerous updates to its performance; it remains the same game through and through. Ten years on, Half Life 2 mirrors a digital collection of artefacts, a museum of code and modelling assets that are occasionally dusted off by the developer to remain relevant. The repackaging of Halo 2 as a new release, while intriguing to watch, is a peculiar move that carries strange connotations. Are born digital examples of media expected to do this now? Can we expect that tomorrow’s new release is going to be repackaged in ten years time with an increased price?

What does all this mean to the humanities though? It’s been noted that web design is a key component in attracting audiences (rather akin to the graphics in a video game), does this infer that websites will need to keep updating their visual design to stay relevant to their audience? Or do the examples of DOOM and Half Life show that there is a place for archaic representations of the past to exist alongside these slick and newer alternatives?

To briefly conclude this train of thought, analogue equivalents have a rigid model to follow – a book is made of paper collected with a spine and read from beginning to end, a compact disk carries data read by a machine, but with born digital the rigid model doesn’t necessarily exist in the same capacity. The digital builds itself upon that which came before but this remake culture, the demand to continuously reinvent, seems to suggest that the past is best hidden behind a veneer.

Perhaps I’m completely wrong (and am quite willing to be schooled on it) but I’ll certainly be following this trend with a great interest.

The Twitter revolution must be noted; although it’s a silly sounding term it seems quite apt. Despite being as Carole McGranahan states “an empty space each user individually transforms into a public, dynamic space” (2013, online) Twitter has found its way into the academic sphere. The LSE has even published a twitter guide for academics! As such, this blog post is going to delve into how the Letters team communicates through Twitter.

Letters utilities Twitter to engage with its audience to a great degree, from tweeting a particular letter that was written on that date 98 years ago to full on discourse with ask the team segments. The basis of this blog post concerning the Letters of 1916 project will be the Twitter discourse held on the fourth of November available here.

On this occasion the basis of discussion was text analysis of the letters project. Intriguingly, the Letters team left the interpretation of this concept entirely up to the audience. As such the ensuing conversation grew dynamically and organically stretching into fresh perspectives and discourse over a multitude of sources. The idea of a project conducting something like this, an open chat with the audience and asking them to bring forth their own consensus and draw their own conclusions is remarkably fresh. Something as simple as retweeting the opinion of one individual to the projects thousands of followers creates a cohesive network. The Twitter platform functions as a nexus or hub for varying ideas and opinions to impact off one another, akin to a scholarly debate (albeit confined to 140 characters).

With the ongoing debate of academic versus public history, Letters firmly plants its feet in the field of the latter. As stated by Alastair Harper of the Guardian “The academic grove no longer warmly welcomes the rest of the world – so it has became the role of the amateur, the red-blooded lover of history as it happened – to fill it.” (2008, online) By encouraging the audience to engage, the act of transcribing and uploading the letters themselves (at over 1600, a colossal task) is trusted to the public realm and thus the entire process is invariably sped up. The concept that many hands make light work seems relevant.

The Letters team display a great knowledge of the Twitter platform, by maintaining a single hash tag for the conversation the Letters team is able to bundle and tie the strands of the ensuing conversation together. Furthermore, utilising the Storify tool enables the team to present a digital record or collection of conversations past. Thus the Letters team are able to package these conversations together as one volume, akin to a chapter in a print book. These factors make it abundantly clear that the Letters project represents both sides of the coin that is digital history; it simultaneously does digital history (creating born digital archives and compilations of the tweets themselves) and does history digitally (the actual letters project itself).

As mentioned above, moving history into the public realm has benefits for the audience but may inadvertently lead to opposition from academics. Harper deems public history to be “comfortable, unchallenging nostalgia-fodder.”(2008, online) In one sense he is correct. There is a challenge in differentiating between commemoration and interpretation of the truth. Regarding the Letters Project a number of issues may arise from public source; the letters uploaded may be fraudulent, the sources may not be visible and the quality of the material may prove insignificant in scope for the project. Yet, as the Letters site itself states “creating an online collection for the public, created by the public, which will add a new perspective to the events of the period, a confidential and intimate glimpse into early 20th Century life in Ireland, as well as how Irish politics was received and viewed internationally.” (Online, 10/11/14) Even in doing this, the Letters project is still hampered by its representation of only a vocal minority of the time. Due to the nature of the sources available, the Letters project provides a confidential and intimate glimpse into the lives of those who could write, leaving those who could not or did not leave letters on the sidelines. Granted, this is a rather flimsy complaint to point at a public history project that is providing a phenomenal glimpse into life at the time of the Easter rising.

The aforementioned discussion on textual analysis highlights this feat. Glancing over the tweets compiled together reveals a multitude of meanings that can be construed from the hour long communal distant reading of the corpus generated by the themes inherent in the letters. In other words, the public discussed and generated meaning through a twitter discourse of information maps. The Twitter discourse is open to both academics and public, thus there is often a go between wherein questions and ideas are answered and exchanged by both sides of the collaboration, reinforcing the hub or nexus like nature of the platform as discussed above.

To conclude briefly, the Letters Project maintains a simple and effective public history model through its Twitter presence. It avoids many of the trappings of other public history projects because, as stated in its mission statement, the Project is concerned with the public.

For more information on the Letters of 1916 project or to contribute to its fantastic work visit the site or follow them on twitter.

Bibliography:

Harper, Alistair. “The Popular History of History.” The Guardian (2008) Web. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/aug/26/history.celebrity Accessed on 13 November 2014.

Letters of 1916 (2014) Web. Available at http://dh.tcd.ie/letters1916/ Accessed on 10 November 2014.

LSE. “LSE produces new Twitter guide for Academics” (2011) Web. Available at http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2011/10/twitter_guide.aspx Accessed on 13 November 2014.

McGranahan, Carole. “The Academic Benefits of Twitter” (2013) Web. Available at http://savageminds.org/2013/05/08/the-academic-benefits-of-twitter/ Accessed on 13 November 2014.

One letter in particular stood out, that of Lieutenant Richard Henry Perceval-Maxwell to his father Colonel Robert David Perceval-Maxwell on the 7th of October 1916 (thanks to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland!). Richard or Dick’s letter home to his father caught my eye because of the jarring juxtaposition between the horror of the trenches and the banality of war evident in his writing. Dick is a junior officer writing about how “the Bosche dropped a few high explosives here and caused a few casualties” in one sentence and about how “we have had rain every day since I came up” in the next. In short, Dick’s letter describes the almost eerie nature that death and danger had taken on in the front – it was an everyday occurrence.

From Sassoon and Wilson’s poetry to the songs of the era, cultural memory of the Great War has always manifested itself in a twofold manner. Nowadays we often take the Blackadder approach to the war, the popular “lions led by donkeys” idea, when the reality is far more complex. At the time the Defense of the Realm Act maintained a strict policy against naysayers, thus letters from the front often contained a false sense of cheer; the stiff upper lip as it were. Dick’s letters emphasize this, he maintains that he’s doing well, that the “Padré” is looking after the men and they are content in their lot. Reading Dick’s words was both a chilling and deeply personal experience, something that the Letters of 1916 project should be lauded for. At times transcribing, you have to take a step back and think about the context of what you’re actually reading.

For example, digging through Ancestry.com (UK WW1 Service Medal and Award Rolls 1914-1920) reveals that Dick served with the Cameronian or Scottish Rifles regiment and was awarded both the British War medal and the Victory medal, making him one of the lucky ones to make it through the war. Looking into the regimental history of the Scottish Rifles makes it likely that Dick took part in the Battle of the Somme at the time the letter was written, either at the Battle of le Transloy or the Battle of Ancre Heights.

That such information is available at our fingertips highlights the inherent value of projects like the Letters of 1916 and the field of Digital Humanities itself. History is moving increasingly into the realm of the public and granting that public a privilege to actively ensure the preservation of the past into the future. The Letters project is ongoing, do your part and help out. Contribute, transcribe, commemorate.