Author Archives: shealy

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AFF621: Remaking the Physical – 3D Recording Assignment: Introduction

  By shealy • 27/03/2015 Digital Culture, Heritage Recording

  As part of the AFF621: Remaking the Physical module in the MA for Digital Humanities (NUIM), students were assigned to do 3D recording exercises for the purpose of evaluating their skills in digital recording and to assess their abilities to carry out effective workflows for 3D recording cultural heritage projects. Students were requested to focus on two case studies for the digital recordings. The first case study involved the capturing … Continue reading

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What is GIS Data?

  By shealy • 20/03/2015 DH Practicum
Raster Data Cell (Image source: ArcGIS ““What is raster data?”).

This semester I am undergoing an internship with the Irish Military Archive (IMA) as part of the Practicum module for the MA in Digital Humanities (DH) at National University of Ireland, Maynooth (NUIM). The purpose of the internship is to gain practical experience on an active DH project. The DH project I am engaged with involves the development of a web-based resource for making available the Aer Corps Aerial Photographs and Vertical Negative collections online. The vertical negatives are … Continue reading

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Using Voyant: Text Analysis meets Historical Research

  By shealy • 03/12/2014 Doing Digital History
VOYANTlogo

Text analysis is described as “the use of computers as an aide in the interpretation of electronic texts” (Sinclair and Rockwell 242), and is often used as an aid to understand large document collections that are too extensive for a close-reading (Huijnen et al. 72). However, a study by Gibbs and Owens, using a sampling of historians, found that the respondents had little interest in using digital tools as a … Continue reading

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A Critique of Culturomics: An Annotated Bibliography

  By shealy • 28/11/2014 DH Theory and Practice
BlindBeggar

  The term culturomics was coined in 2010 and coincided with the launch of Google Labs Ngram Viewer. “Culturomics is the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture.” (Michel et al. 181). However, in order to understand how culturomics has come into being, it might be useful to initiate with some background information. The Google Books project was officially launched in October, 2004, and … Continue reading

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From Humanism to Humanities Computing

  By shealy • 14/11/2014 DH Theory and Practice

This post briefly explores the origins of the humanities and the transition to humanities computing. From the Renaissance, human thought and inquiry began to shift from a “theocratic worldview to a human-centred one” (Burdick et al. 4). The Renaissance was further promulgated in Europe through the founding of schools and universities, and the invention of the printing press.  Indeed, the printing press revolutionised the dissemination of information in Europe, and … Continue reading

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Crowdsourcing: Should Practitioners in Digital Humanities be Wary of the Term?

  By shealy • 24/10/2014 DH Theory and Practice
Wales_image

  Crowdsourcing is applied as a model by the private and public sector and also, more recently by the non-profit, voluntary and educational sectors. While, all sectors use the same term – but does it mean the same thing? Brabham proposes crowdsourcing as “an online, distributed problem solving and production model where organizations leverage the collective intelligence of online communities for their benefit” (“Research”). Pierre Levy coined the term collective … Continue reading

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Review: 1641 Depositions Project

  By shealy • 20/10/2014 Doing Digital History
1641_Depositions_Project2

  The 1641 Depositions collection consists of 8,000 witness statements recorded by commissions from the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and continuing through to the 1650s. The depositions were deposited in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin in 1741 where they have remained ever since (“The 1641 Depositions Project”; Darcy and Purvis; Clarke 112). They are regarded as a unique corpus of primary source documentation for the time-period; … Continue reading

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Archiving History since 1985: The National Security Archive

  By shealy • 17/10/2014 Doing Digital History
tom blanton and white house email

  Information doesn’t belong to the government, it belongs to all of us.  (Blanton in Carlson)     Located in the Gelman Library at the George Washington University, USA, the National Security Archive (NS-Archive) is a non-governmental research centre, library and repository for government records and declassified documents. It was founded in 1985 by academics, journalists and historians as an independent non-profit organisation to monitor and challenge the increase of … Continue reading

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Brief Overview: The National Security Archive

  By shealy • 15/10/2014 Doing Digital History
The_National_Security_Archive

Since 1985, the National Security Archive has provided a significant resource for diplomatic, political, and foreign policy historians, researchers in international relations, current affairs, communications and political science, as well as investigative journalists. However, it is not merely a resource for researchers and academic scholarship; it is a resource for the public to access information, become more informed, and so, come up with their own conclusions. A brief overview of their … Continue reading

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What is DH?

  By shealy • 02/10/2014 DH Theory and Practice

  A Work in Progress   Defining digital humanities is problematic as definitions are widely contested, thus, this blog-post is a work in progress to document definitions that are offered by various scholars and digital humanists. It is hoped that by documenting different definitions in one space, this will assist me to synthesise the various schools of thought, and so, provide me with a better understanding of the debates in question. … Continue reading