Category: Trial Post

In this blog I will show how people from all over the world can come together to help dissect the manuscripts of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham, a renowned Anglo-American philosopher, was one of the most influential people of his era, which is why people are still trying to completely understand his work.

The primary DH focus of this site is to transcribe Bentham’s work with teamwork. As Bentham once said, “Many hands make light work. Many hands together make merry work.” Through things such as the Transcription Desk, historians from allover the world are able to dig through Bentham’s 26,796 manuscripts.

The Transcription Desk is the major initiative to deciphering Bentham’s manuscripts. With the archives coming from the University of College London and the funding from AHRC, anyone can join to see if they are able to transcribe. The manuscripts are also split up into Easy, Moderate and Hard. With this, transcribers can decide which difficulty fits them the most so they don’t become lost in Bentham’s many manuscripts.

 

 

 

Because Bentham is one of the most famous philosophers of all time, it is vital to come together as a single community to complete the never-ending journey of deciphering his manuscripts. These manuscripts vary in topic everywhere from capital punishment to sexual morality. With people from all over and so many different topics, anyone can choose a particular topic that interests them. If they are interested in science they won’t be forced to transcribe a manuscript about the arts. This is just another benefit of having a worldwide place to transcribe.

This project allows us to become better versed in Bentham’s work and to learn things that we may have never discovered if we were transcribing by ourselves. Ideas are brought together, people can discuss and our society can progress as a whole.

 

 

The Mapping the Republican Letters project, run by Stanford and several other academic institutions, has the goal of recreating the network of correspondence before email, social networking, and even the telephone. For centuries before texting, information traveled in these networks created by academic institutions and carried out by travelers on the fast trade routes.

One of the case studies follows Voltaire. This case studies looks at several important parts of Voltaire’s writing, including whether it was regional or international, whether he was truly capable of having a global network, and whether he wrote to some places more than others. Below, the project uses mapping to show his correspondence from 1755 to 1776. Mapping is the primary DH approach used for both this case study and the whole project. This method fits the project perfectly because it is trying to show how fast these networks really were.

Below is a breakdown of Voltaire’s total correspondence by nationality and number of letters per nationality. He sent most of his letter to French correspondents. Although he had about the same amount of British as German and Italian correspondents, he sent them less letters. Almost one third of all the letters sent to England from Voltaire were to either George Keate or Sir Everard Fawkener. Voltaire sent 38 and 23 letters to each of these men, respectively. 

Another interesting point is that although Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire never came in contact as far as they can tell, they have many correspondents in common. This begins to show how vast the network was during this time even with the lack of global communication. Because of the vastness of information that was sent during this time, it is very difficult to track all of it let alone represent it using interactive visualization tools. As well as the Voltaire study, the website has links to many others, such as Galileo, Franklin, and Kircher.

 

 

In this post I will go over the Kindred Britain. I will talk about the use of digital humanities in Kindred. The kindred Britain was created by Stanford University. It was created to help us connect many of the iconic figures in the British culture through family relationships of blood, marriage, or affiliation.

 

The primary focus of this use of digital humanities is connecting people in a visual way. The individuals are “connected through family relationships of blood, marriage, or affiliation”. When two people are matched together a data graph will trace the connections and ties of the two people.

 

 

 

The visual diagram contains a bunch of circles that you can click on and then the name of an iconic British person will appear. You then can drag any two circles together and distinguish a connection between the two random people you  chose.

 

 

 

 

On the top of the webpage there are tabs that include: “people”, “connections” and “stories” . When you click on each of the three different tabs you are able to discover the iconic figures professions, you are able to see how two random people are connected to one another and lastly you are able to read about interesting stories that are shared.

 

 

 

Personally, I think that the Kindred Britain project does a great job of connecting iconic British figures in a visual way. It is a very easy website to navigate on and it is fun to explore. It breaks down a lot of research into an easy comprehensive way.

 

In this post I will explain how the Lincoln at 200 project uses digital humanities to commemorate the Lincoln bicentennial. There are three sections to the website, Lincoln & The West, The Fiery Trial, and Archives.The primary DH focus on this website is transcription. There are hundreds of archives on the website open to the public eye. These archives are anything from maps to reward posters to portraits of Abraham Lincoln. With the use of a website called Zoomify it is possible to look at the archives in a whole different way. While before it was very difficult to make out some of the writing in letters, records, etc., now it allows anybody to just click on the image and zoom in to what they would like to read.

The other important approach this website uses is mapping. In almost every single section there are maps of Kentucky, the Western States, etc.  The Lincoln & The West section of the website uses maps and other archives to show and explain the land on which the president was born and raised.  Lincoln was born in 1809 in a one-room log cabin on farmland near Nolin Creek in Kentucky. Through Zoomify it is even possible to see the creek on a map printed twenty-five years before Lincoln was even born. (The creek is in the bottom left hand corner)

An additional approach that this project used was visualization. The Fiery Trial section of the website works as a digital version of an exhibition at Chicago History Museum that ended in 2010. Using the visual part of this website, you can not only read about Lincoln’s presidency but also see portraits of what is being discussed, and letters written by the president himself.

 

I think this website is a very good tool for anyone who wants an inside look into the 19th century and Lincoln’s life. This website did a fantastic job by putting so many archives up for the public to see, and it is just a sample of all the amazing things digital humanities can do.