A good DH project

First and foremost I think it is important to actually keep up with the project if it is something like an archive and make sure everything works. For example Sherlockian.net for me was just not a good DH project at all, but aside from not being user friendly and not visually appealing it’s biggest problem is links not working. Clearly the owner does not check up on the links and keep up with the project entirely. It is not very useful because of this.

DHAdditionally, a project needs to be well researched. The Old Bailey Online project is great example of this. The project offers so much to user on the topics of old London. There are several tabs you can click on that lead you to even more tabs, like if you click “Historical Background” once you get to that section you get like 5 new tabs and those give way to even more options. The project is well researched and contains a lot on information.

A good DH project has to be visually appealing. Whenever I see a project that is too busy, or the colors just don’t work I usually get off the website right away. That is how I feel about BookTraces.org. Although, the project is amazing and so cool the website is an eyesore for me. The background is too busy, I don’t like the colors used and all the photographs right on the front page is too much.

It also have to be user friendly. London Gallery Project was very user friendly but, it did not let you search which then it makes it not user friendly anymore. The rest of the website was easy to navigate and nice to use until it was time to search which was a problem.

One last thing a could DH project needs is to be applicable to a variety of fields. You want the project to work for several topics so that a lot of people can utilize it.

DH projects lets scholars ask new questions because they can looks at things in ways they never have before. They can take an older project, topics or question and look at in a new light and ask the question in a different way. It also lets them ask new questions because they are able to work with a variety of people all over the world. They can ask questions over a lot of fields in ways not asked before because they have the resources like those we use in class. They can use the internet to work with others and look at things differently.

Wimpole Street

 I used the area of Wimpole Street from the Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Using the Charles Booth Online Archive I  was able to find my street and see how the area around it was wealth wise. You can see by the yellow on the right side of the street it is an Upper-Middle and Upper class area. The people who lived in this area were wealthy and respected. On the right side of the map the area is mainly Middle-Class people who were well to do. The divide is pretty clear but the classes are pretty close so I do not believe it would create a large conflict. There is one small area that is light blue meaning it is a poor area. This could create conflict and devalue the houses around the area. It could possibly be a small ghetto or maybe even a shelter of some sort. I also got information for the Old Bailey website, I was able to see about the crime that took place in the area. I was rather surprised by the crime since was a wealthy area. I thought that there would be less crime because of this but there are several cases of grand larceny. All the thefts could be due to the area being wealthy, they had more money to spend on nicer objects and others may want to still those. The small area of poorer people could also account for the crime, this is not to say that being who are poor are more likely to steal but they could be without certain objects that those in the richer area have.

Overall, I was not surprised to see that the area was more upper and middle class people because Sherlock himself is of middle-class so he would associate with people of similar class levels.

The first graph I did was comparing the topics of Money, Security/Protection and Detective. The clearest spike is for Security/Protection in June of 1904, historically I could not find anything that was happening at this time to explain this. There was a war involving and other small conflicts but nothing that could directly be pinpointed.  I then turned to Sherlockian-Sherlock.com to see what exact story was published at this time and the story is “The Adventure of Three Students.” The topics of money and detective also spike around this time which would lead one to think that the story mentions all three of those topics.  There is a spike with both security and money at the same time which is September 1917, which is due to the publishing of the story “His Last Bow”

This next graph surprised me a little. I wasn’t sure if there would be much of a relationship between the topics of money and room descriptions but surprisingly the two topics seem to move together along the graph in unison. Aside from money peaked around 1925 and room description does not they basically peak at the same times. One again I had trouble finding anything historical that explained this. They both peaked in 1904 and as I said earlier nothing too significant happened in 1904 that would affect these topics. There were some wars and what not but nothing related to rooms or money.  I once again looked at the Sherlock stories themselves using the same website. Money peaks in March 1904 but there were no Sherlock stories published during this month and room descriptions peaked during June which again is “The Adventure of the Three Students.”

 

This graph did not surprise as much because I assumed the topics of face/head and appearance would move together and I also figured that relationship was closely related to those two. The peaked of both relationships and face/head can be contributed to the story “The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk” The story is about brothers and talks about family resemblance with could attribute the face/head part and because it is about brothers discussing the family relations can account for the relationships topic.

This graph it was a little easier to find history to understand the peaks. There is a slight peak for time in September of 1908 and I believe this is because of information I found on semicolonblog.com that states that a German mathematician was the first person to ever define time as the fourth dimension in September of 1908. There is also a very noticeable peak in travel around 1908 and I believe there could be two reasons for this. According to inventors.com in 1908 Henry Ford improves the assembly lines for cars, and the Hydrofoil boat was invented. I was surprised that travel did peak in 1903 when the plane was invented but instead it actually had a low in that year.

 For this graph the travel peaks are obliviously the same as the last graph. I thought comparing the two would work because I thought that as travel improved writing especially letters may also improve since there was better transportation for sending of those letters and the two topics are not too far off in the graph.  I could not find a reason for writing peak when it did so it may once again relate to the Sherlock stories alone. I’m not too sure.

Overall, I found topic modeling and graphing to be a bit difficult and I feel that personally I was not able to see anything new about the stories or the topics because of the graphs. I think maybe in different situations topic modeling would be more useful but I had a tough time with it.

 

Topics

100 topics, 15  topic words, 5,000 iterations

Face/head: eyes face lips pale expression hands eager hot thin white cheeks fixed grey brow emotion

Realtionship: life woman love heart knew loved break mine truth evil power world women hands told

Money: hundred money ten business pounds year thousand worth large made pay paid price fifty sum

Detective: facts case theory simple fact points difficulty formed suggest correct impossible idea test remained explanation

Travel: train station carriage line reached journey started bridge drove return hurried cross roof passing save

Protection/Security: door room key opened safe closed inside long study lock locked shut entered bag fastened

Room Descriptions: round corner side table front left stood dressing covered top square carpet gown furnished books

Appearance: man face dark tall hair features eyes head middle thin figure clean beard cut gray

Writing: note letter paper book letters wrote written writing write read handed date envelope slip address

Time: years ago time twenty months thirty week age daughter weeks lives quiet meet retired engaged

 

The shows I love to binge

 

Ngram: Eyeglasses vs. Contact Lenses

For my Ngram I decided to compare Eyeglasses to Contact Lenses, mainly because I have been having my own struggle with my contacts lately but even more of struggle with my glasses so the two items have been on my mind. Once I discovered that contact lenses were created in the 1800’s I figured it could work.

 The contact lenses line is pretty easy to understand because the first example of wearable contacts were not invented until 1887 and they slowly but steadily grew in popularity. Although, the graph shows them increasing after the 1890’s because it wasn’t until a few years after their invention that contacts were being discussed in books. It was a tad harder to understand all the ups and downs of eyeglasses throughout the years. I did find that eyeglasses were not that popular in the early 1800’s because they were a sign of old age and weakness and also expensive so many did not wear them or even know they needed them. As for the boost in popularity in the 1820’s I believe that can be attributed to a new style of glasses becoming fashionable and the old round lenses going out of style and so more was probably written about on the topic of eyeglasses. The sharp decrease after this was a bit more difficult to understand but what I think may play a role in this decline is the financial crisis in the United States that began in 1837. I couldn’t find anything specifically related to eyeglasses themselves but if people had less money to spend that could be a cause. The rise during the 1850’s was tricky to decipher, the peak hits at 1854 but no history I found for 1854 explains this. It could be that people are coming out of the financial crisis and have more money but I don’t really know. There is also the founding of two large watch manufacturers during this time and this may be a stretch but there could be a correlation that with new watches and their prices increasing the price of glasses fell. This could also just be more written about glasses in this time and maybe more advertisements of sorts. I really can’t attribute it to one specific instance. The falls after this time is easily due to the civil war in America along with other political problems through the world. There were wars in New Zealand and South America during the 1860s as well as political issues between France and Mexico. There are also wars with Denmark and Prussia and then Prussia and Austria so in all there were political and economical issues throughout various countries. After the 1860’s eyeglasses steadily rise reaching their peak at the end of the 19th century this could be due to the end of many wars and political issues. People had more to spend and literature also seems to be on the rise during this time.  As far as my settings I did it with case sensitivity and from 1800 to 1900 from the corpus English.

Word Cloud: A Scandal in Bohemia

I have in the past used Wordle to create a word cloud for a school project so I had no trouble with that site but I did have issues using Voyant and could not get it to delete additional stop words beyond what were in the dictionary for the English option.

I think the Wordle word cloud makes it easier to understand the story because more of the stop words were not on it. You can clearly tell from both clouds that Holmes is the key component in the story. Additionally, “photograph” is one of the largest words in both clouds, it actually appears to be the second largest in the Wordle word cloud. This tells you that the main focus of the story is about a photograph which is important because that is exactly what Holmes is trying to retrieve throughout the tale. The words King, Majesty, and woman/Irene are also clearly visible. Irene is very important in the story not only because she is originally who Holmes is searching for but also because she changes Holmes’ view on woman in general.  King and Majesty appearing larger tells one that the story is about a case that entails some sort of royalty. Some words that are larger that do not play main roles in the plot are door, one, must, said, minutes, house, face, and hand. These words though not stop words per-say do not pertain to the plot in a way that one can understand through the word cloud.  This is a huge con of using a word cloud- that unimportant words are shown and can throw off the plot of the story. Words like that can make it more difficult to understand what the tale is about. A huge pro though is the complete opposite and that is being able to get the general idea of a story in just a glance. One can view a word cloud and get an overview of important parts or more of words within a story. Overall, I think word clouds are visually appealing but not that helpful in this instance.

Book Traces findings or lack there of.

I was rather upset to not find anything for the Book Traces website. I find the overall idea and assignment super fascinating and hoped to find something interesting or at least authentic in my search but I unfortunately had no luck. I spent over three hours searching the stacks for a book with some sort of writing in it. I looked all through poetry, literature, letters, history, religion and more. I really felt confident that poetry or literature would have something and spent most of my time in the PR and PS section. Overall, I was really disappointed.

I found a few books with pencils markings and writing in them but I had no way of telling when that was done for example, The Life of Sterne by Percy Fitzgerald and Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin. One book The English Poets  by T.H. Ward got me especially excited because it appeared to be marked all over with notes about the poems and inferred meanings behind certain symbols but on further examination I realized the writing was too current as on one of the final pages it was dated for a lesson plan. For a few others the writing was clearly done in ballpoint pen. I also found books that had what I thought to be markings but turned out to be printed that way like Life and Letters by Robert Browning which had what I thought was a signature but sadly wasn’t. One book tricked me because I thought it contained a handwritten letter from the late 1800s but the letter was bound into the book and was apart of the story. The closest I came to finding any sort of authentic ancient article was a receipt in a book from 2004. Everything else seemed to be a dead end.

I do not really understand how I did not find anything as I looked through a variety of books and focused on the two sections that seemed to have the most luck for other people. A section like poetry or literature would seem to have a lot of writing in it as people try to deceiver what the author is trying to say or as they make comparisons to their own life. There were also a few books that were about other languages such as Irish and Scottish books and I hoped that they would have markings about the translations or something along those lines but again nothing. In all, I enjoyed looking through the well over 50 books and wish I had found something but the appearance of the books themselves with interesting some had marble like patterns on the seems and one book had pink pages but I never found what I set out to find.

Victorian London Extra Credit

The tab I clicked on was the childhood because I was interested in learning the difference between childhood back then and childhood now as children now have many privileges and I wanted to see the comparison. The title that most intrigued me was “How to Amuse the Babies” the way the article itself was titled caught my eye.  Seemingly,  not much as appeared to change. It it noted that amusing a baby is very important because ” It awakens the intelligence of the child, it exercises its limbs, and all the muscles of those limbs” which is much of the same that we say today. Babies must be engaged because it is key in their development and that is no different. The article also discussed “baby language” and how not  a lot is understand about babies which has changed. Though, we can’t decipher was a baby may be trying to say there is more known about babies in general and the way they think and feel things in comparison to adults.  I was delighted to see familiar games being talked about like patty cake and the little piggies because I had not known how far back those rhymes dated. It is actually amazing that something as little as that has stood the test of time. The article goes into full detail of how to play patty cake and sing the little pigs which was funny to read written out.  I also read about street children and the games they would play and how their simple games were considered “nuisances.” For example, the hoop game (shown below) would cause adults to call the police if they felt the children were too much in the way.

 (Image from Google images)

Introduction Post

I’m Allie, I’m a PR major in my senior year. My interests include guacamole and this hairless cat.