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Progress Report

1) Working title: Somerville College and its Literary Heritage 2) Abstract: Somerville College was one of the first Oxford colleges to admit women, during the period leading up to Somerville’s first granting of degrees—1920—the school was attended many writers and literary figures. Vera Brittain and Dorothy Sayers are perhaps the best-known of Somerville’s literary alumni, but many other female fiction writers who attended during approximately the same period have received little attention or recognition for their contributions to their respective genres and to women’s writing as a whole. This project sheds light on the literary figures who attended Somerville College between approximately 1910 and 1920. It provides both a visual representation of Somerville’s overlooked literary alumni and a digital catalogue of authors from this period. In doing so, this project seeks to highlight the lives and works of authors overlooked by the literary canon and demonstrate the powe
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VisualEyes/Somerville College project update

For my Somerville College project, I’ve begun constructing the project itself in VisualEyes and getting familiar with the platform. So far, I’m taking a “layered” approach to constructing my project: I’m using VisualEyes story feature to make one story per author as a find authors to include as a way to organize the data (basically, if I add a story for the individual it means they meet at least my minimum criteria to be included in my data set). For the stories so far, I’m just included author name and birth/death years. Once I narrow down further to who is being included, I’ll go back and add the next layer: biographical info and writings and timelines. Then I’ll add yet another layer with the images. It’s definitely an evolving project—similar to writing a paper, I’d say—in that I knew I needed to stop collecting data and start giving life to the data (and learn to use VisualEyes—one big difference from writing), but as I continue to dig deeper into the information and fin
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ASSERT model and my project

1) Ask a Question             At this time, my question is: how can I meaningfully represent the lives and intersections of Somerville College’s female literary community in a way that is informative and brings attention to an under-examined group of authors/literary influencers? I think I’ve sufficiently narrowed down my question, as, per Ferster’s advice, I’ve narrowed by time period (approx 1900-1920; this may change slightly), place, and people . This chapter reminded me that, in all the thinking I’ve done about what I want to represent/what argument I want to make about the particular group I’m looking into, I’ve yet to define my audience in order to follow Ferster’s advice of personifying them (48). I envision my audience as individuals like me: readers interested in fiction produced in particular time and place who would find aggregated information about lesser-known/out-of-print authors useful. I think this could be scholars—but I want it to be accessible/useful to a no
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Interactive Visualization

In the introduction to Interactive Visualizaton, Bill Ferster defines the term “information visualization” and provides a history of its uses, going all the way back to Leonardo DaVinci’s illustration of Vitruvian man and illustrations of London’s cholera epidemic in the nineteenth century. He states the current definition of information visualization as “the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition” (4). In providing a history of information visualization, Ferster further explains how the evolution of personal computing has taken information visualization to new heights, allowing for its uses especially in the academy and in journalism. He also further defines interactive visualization as “a subset of information visualization” that “share[s] most of its features. Specifically, they add the ability for the end user to interact dynamically with the visualization in a reflexive manner” 8). Ferster also breaks down thre
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Review of Power of Attorney

I’ve chosen to review Power of Attorney in Oaxaca, Mexico: Native People, Legal Culture, and Social Networks because I am interested in digital history/humanities projects that visually display social networks. Although I don’t study indigenous Mexican culture, mapping individuals in relation to each other and in relation to power structures (in this instance, the court system) connects to my interest in visualizing social networks, particularly among authors/intellectual communities and networks of distribution of their works and ideas. Power of Attorney in Oaxaca, Mexico: Native People, Legal Culture, and Social Networks ( https://www.powerofattorneynative.com/ ) is a mapping and visualization site which displays connections among “people, places, and courts created by a common legal procedure: the granting of power of attorney” during Spain’s colonization of Mexico ( Power of Attorney ). The project aims to “Contribute[s] to interdisciplinary scholarship that shows how nativ
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Geographies of the Holocaust

Chapter 1 of Geographies of the Holocaust defines the purpose, theoretical grounding, and history of the Geographies of the Holocaust mapping project, which is an interdisciplinary effort by a wide range of scholars to take spatial analysis of the Holocaust into new domain through mapping techniques. This effort is meant to work with, rather than replace, text-based Holocaust histories in order to “gain insight and understanding” by “asking spatial questions and employing spatial methods to investigate…the history of the holocaust” (1-2). In terms of scholarly significance, this work takes holocaust studies (which the authors point out is an interdisciplinary area of study) into new directions to cultivate a broader understanding of it as a “profoundly geographical phenomenon” (1). One of the aims of the project is to show how geographical/spatial analysis can contribute to a body of knowledge, which, based on the chapters I’ve studied, they appear to have been successful in doi
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Historical GIS

1) Historical GIS is the pairing of the mapping capabilities of geographic information systems with the study of history for the purpose of illustrating or shedding light on historical narratives or phenomena. 2) Robert Churchill identifies four distinct purposes for using GIS in history education. First, he mentions the analytical and problem-solving practice that using GIS provides for students. Next, GIS helps students understand the power and potential in visualization. Also, he sees GIS as a means of helping students understand sociopolitical issues and controversies (giving an example of personal privacy and the web), and lastly, he views it as a “pedagogic context” through which teachers can explore issues, such as gerrymandering, that can best be explained and understood through GIS (71). Amy Hillier also sees GIS as a useful teaching tool in that it will engage students in new ways with technology with which they’re already familiar (through the use of navigational tec
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