Remake of My grand padlet by Serenity Sutherland

M. Mychajluk

2016-10-11 14:34:23 UTC

From what I read in the article, XML is used to group and organize large amounts of information. The second article goes more in depth about how this can be used. It is about how researchers were able to input different things like marriage certificates and biographies to find connections between people. Today, we also saw another example of this with the family's letters. This technology is important to historians because it can find previously unknown relationships or knowledge. It also can provide insight into the everyday thoughts and opinions of normal people that lived long ago.

T. Polashenski

2016-10-11 14:34:25 UTC

In the DHQ article, I was mainly interested in the section titled "Expert Validation." In this section, it discusses how they try to validate their findings to "confirm that [their] results were consistent with statistical theory." This was interesting to me because it seems that for some things, the data in the historical database would be correct even if it contradicts supposed statistical data. For example, in the Seward family, it is thought that Frances was a recluse and women were not involved in politics, but the data from the letters shows quite the opposite to be true--so it would seem inaccurate to then check the statistics when the statistics should be created from the letters. Perhaps they are not talking about the specific statistics of the project but some other broad statistical theory? Or they are looking for consistencies within the same project, so that they can detect any glaring inconsistencies in history or character to double check that statistic.

H. Hansen

2016-10-11 14:34:27 UTC

This is the first time I am reading and learning about XML. It seems to be a simple way to organize data based on similarities (so long as you format it correctly like the shopping list example). The coding does not seem hard, but it does seem like it is easy to mess up.

The 6 Degrees of Francis Bacon reminded me a lot of the Finding Paul Revere article, in the fact that we are finding historical people and information through connections. Is SDFB a type of Metadata? The article mentioned JSTOR, which is a website I have actually used to find primary documents for a paper. It is interesting to see the process behind how it works and makes me really appreciate the technology I have access to. I can't imagine having to spend hours looking through the actual print documents.

I enjoyed seeing the Seward Project. I find it incredible that we are able to find and learn about people based solely on connections such as people mentioned in letters.

M. Keane

2016-10-11 14:34:28 UTC

Overall the project is very impressive. It has a huge scope, but manages to find a way to organize and sift through the data easily and organically. However, I think the graph representation of the connections was underwhelming and needs to be revisited; it didn't really give me a better idea of the connections between everyone, and without interactivity it felt sort of pointless.

In the Francis Bacon research, I was impressed with the procedure and the mathematics behind finding the connections. A lot of it was too technical for me to completely understand, but it was still shocking, more so than the finding Paul Revere article. I wish they had shown a visualization of their findings, as I wasn't completely sure what the outcome of their method was.

I'd heard of XML before, but never had a great understanding of what it was. Despite the article being more technical, I found it relatively approachable. XML definitely seems to have its perks due to its categorical nature, although at the end of the reading I felt like I needed a more detailed / realistic example. Conveniently, the Seward Family presentation gave me just that.

Sammi Shan Wang

2016-10-11 14:34:32 UTC

Reading "Introduction to XML" was interesting, because I rarely thought of the use of our linguistic structures. The website review I did last time also used XML for their data base, and knowing more about XML now has helped me understand the structure of that site better. The reading also helped me understand the Francis Bacon reading--otherwise I would be very confused when the authors mention terms such as "a nod" or "an edge." After learning about the Seward Family Digital Archive today, I think it is interesting how there seems to be a "trend" in digitizing historical archives and constructing human social networks using computer softwares. Both the Francis Bacon essay and today's talk mention how time-consuming it is to manually go over and analyze the materials (letters, papers, etc.), and creating a "common language" that connects the materials automatically is really the more

N. Rutagarama

2016-10-11 14:34:33 UTC

Seeing the Seward Family archive really put this whole idea of digitalizing large historical networks into perspective for me. The reading for today exposed the technical and statistical side of projects like these, but I still did not understand how they would work practically. Some questions that I had while reading "Six Degrees of Franic Bacon" were "how would you know the depth and type of relationship between two figures from an algorithm?". I am glad to see the Seward Family Archive because it revealed that these projects can be personable.

W Guo

2016-10-11 14:34:34 UTC

When I start to read the article Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, I believe that to show complicated social network is really hard. I have heard of Six Degrees of Separation, a theory which indicates that everyone is no more then six steps away. According to wikipedia, "by way of introduction, from any other person in the world, so that a chain of ‘a friend of a friend’ statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps”. The connections between people are so complicated that I cannot imagine how to establish such a project to reconstruct social networks. The method told by Six Degrees of Francis Bacon seems too professional for me to understand. But after reading the introduction to XML and getting some information of the lecture, I got to know how do they reconstruct-by using the language of “computer". XML works as great language to contain important information. In the same time, XML uses “tree structure”, which is well-organized. And in today’s lecture, I know about TEI language. Editors can use such language to represent people with codes, which make it convenient to translate actual message to digital datas and arrange information.

Y.Yao

2016-10-11 14:34:35 UTC

For the idea that XML can actually represent ordered hierarchy, it makes me realize that it is of a great importance to look beyond the message of the text.To make the humanity “digital”, people should automatically consider to put the structure of the text .In order to let computers access the text as people do, people should always find a way to corporate the text in to a machine readable manner.Even though I am still confused by the functioning of how exactly XML and TEI can be used, I am still amazed by the flexibility of those digital tools to find the connections between letters and objects.The interaction between people and the text intrigues me a lot.

D. Rieth

2016-10-11 14:34:37 UTC

I found the presentation and the project in general extremely interesting. What I found particularly intriguing about the Seward Family archive and the readings was the way in which we are able to make connections and tag people using XML, not only connecting them with other letters and documents but establishing a model of an individual's social network. Even hundreds of years after the passing of these individuals, we can get an idea of their social connections and social life, just from the digitization and analysis of letters they wrote. I have zero experience in coding, but the presentation and readings helped me to understand what we are able to do using XML in the digital humanities.

M Bushoy

2016-10-11 14:34:38 UTC

I thought the presentation gave a great explanation of XML and how it can be used to establish a project like this one, and the readings served as a great introduction to that. The second reading gave a great baseline for digitizing text, and I think that was really informative in explaining the process. The use of XML to digitize and lay out the information in the Seward Family Archive really helped make connections for the viewer, and that is really important for a digital humanities project like this one. Without these connections, it’s unlikely that a viewer can adequately take in the information, as a chunk of it would be missing. I think that in order to learn about something like this, especially where its based off of letters and text written from person to person, it’s extremely beneficial to know who connects to who, and how that connection is made. The use of XML makes that structure for the viewer, and helps set all of that in stone.

V. Li

2016-10-11 14:34:39 UTC

I’m glad to see that my background in computer science is becoming more connected with the digital humanities. In his article, Warren discusses how he collects data from documents and then uses data structures, learning algorithms, and statistics to create a weighted social network. Through that process, he carefully filters through the documents, weeding out sparse data and then runs through several validation processes to analyze the precision of his methods. I think this is article highlights the intersection of data science and digital humanities and is an area that I may want to explore.

In several of the web programming based classes I’ve taken, we’ve always mentioned XML but only in passing as an older standard whereas in the present, HTML is used in favor for marking documents and JSON formats for storing data. The article on XML gives me better insight into why the XML standard is more effective, in the case of the digital humanities. In particular, HTML has a fixed set of tags whereas with XML you’d like the flexibility of creating your own tags, as the author did with his tags. In the case of XML vs JSON, the digital humanities use XML for the purpose of hierarchy and structure instead of pure object attributes. Overall, from this reading I have a better understanding of the practical significance of XML in digital archiving and access.

O. Schifferli

2016-10-11 14:34:40 UTC

A. Gallagher

2016-10-11 14:34:41 UTC

I find XML to be extremely fascinating, and I appreciated both the reading and today’s lecture. Right now, I am learning HTML, and some of the syntax is similar, so it is very cool for me to recognize the syntax and structure. I have heard about XML in passing before, but I didn’t know until the reading that HTML is a form of XML. I find the idea of tagging people, both in the reading for today and in the Seward Family Archive, to be very interesting. I like the concept of looking at connections between people on a web, and the sheer number of people that were mentioned in the family letters is insane to me, I can’t wrap my head around it!

M.Elmahgoub

2016-10-11 14:34:48 UTC

It was really interesting to read through the process of creating historical social networks. Nowadays we take your own social networks and their accessibility for granted and that all stems from digital media. I enjoyed seeing the other side of digital humanities, especially looking at its uses in history. The reading also shows the extent to which the digital humanities crosses between disciplines. Looking at statistics from biographies is such a clever way to see how people in another time were connected.

Reading about XML was quite dense and informative, but Im very new to all this and so it really does get me thinking about my own interactions online and how the layout of certain websites allow me to communicate within my own social network. Something which is now so easy as opposed to say the 1800’s. It was interesting to listen to Camden speak about the archive and the use of TEI. It all just showed the hard work that goes behind making things accessible and easier for the audience

A. Griffiths

2016-10-11 14:34:49 UTC

It's so interesting seeing exactly how a whole web chart of your life could and will be broadcasted online. In the past letters and maybe news articles were the primary documents that could be used (maybe journal entries as well).

Q.Hong

2016-10-11 14:34:56 UTC

In the article describing XML and why it matters, it clearly defines the why we need computation methods in digital humanities. I think so far the core value of computational methods in DH field is " to interrogate those texts and obtain original research results that would not be attainable without the tools". Document analysis might be more important than I realize right now. I was confused about the uses of tags in XLM and how that relates to our research and studies, and I am very glad that the project of Seward Family Digital Archive helps demonstrate that by introducing the concepts that tagging is "Finding people and make biography", which essentially creates connection between letters and people.

Also, the things we discuss today reminds me of my second project review which examines Jane Austen's diction and language in her major works. The project uses coding technique to visualize the word frequency for certain traits and utilizes visualization of diction. This also reminds me of the TED talk about visualizing email and connection between people. I am still thinking about how this can be extremely interesting and informative, but also might raises moral issues.

Y. Wang

2016-10-11 14:35:08 UTC

The difficulties of constructing social relations can be well understood, as the existence of huge amount of population, the daily changes in population. The part I found the most challenging is to find to appropriate sources that can provide the relationships between actors in the network. However, the accomplishment of constructing the social network helps human beings to find out the integration, or re-integration, of disparate threads of network scholarship. Personally, I found the reading of XML more interesting, as it is more likely to be connected with science. XML, the extensive markup language, models the hierarchy of documents by listing the elements that include start tag, end tag and content in the middle. All XML documents have to be well formed, that includes the quotation marks and other required structures.
From today's presentation, I have a better understanding about the interrelationship among people. It is amazing to see such a diagram with so complicated relations.

X. Zhao

2016-10-11 14:35:11 UTC

As someone who has no previous experience in computer science field, reading the article “What is XML and why should humanists care?” is very instructive and useful. Though the dense text information confused me in the very beginning, the sample XML documents gave me a direct guide of what it is. When typing in “XML” in online search engine, questions such as “what’s the difference between HTML and XML” cover a great deal of the results. But without explaining too much about why XML is better, the article mainly focuses on the structure of XML tree and its reference. As it points out, nowadays most digital humanities projects are using the effective XML as document format, and the popularity and usefulness of XML really make it an essential part of digital humanities. The importance of XML makes me realized that how structures work in documents besides linguistic content, and that without computational assistance, some of the essential humanities research would be unachievable. It reminds me that I have to learn some computer science in order to involve more in digital humanities.

K. Shapiro

2016-10-11 14:35:23 UTC

I've been coding my own database for another project so I feel like I really kinda understand at least some of the struggles that the Seward Family archivists face. Databases can be annoying and difficult with no reason sometimes so, honestly, I'm beyond impressed with this project. The Francis Bacon article talked about the statistical analysis necessary for this kind of work. I think this is a perfect example of how technology has positively changed how we interact with history.

Personally, this type of computing is not interesting to me at all BUT I do appreciate the amount of effort and the importance of binding tech and humanities together.

I. Pope

2016-10-11 14:35:49 UTC

For the first article about what is xml… I don’t really know what to say. I already knew a lot of this sort of thing from an app development class I took last summer. Although, I did learn about how HTML is a form of XML, and how versatile the tags of XML really can be. I used XML in developing Android apps. Although, now I feel that it wasn't strictly XML, but rather a form adapted to making Android

The second article was the hard core, technical implementation of the concepts from the Paul Revere article. It is interesting to read about all the EXTREME RADICAL STRING PARSING!!!! If they had meta data back in the 1700s, this job would be trivial, the kind of thing I would do in CSC172. This is also an application of AI. With enough material, a scholar could train an AI to tell the syntax of that sort of writing. However, why do all this? While it is fun to think of relationship webs in previous centuries, what purpose does it serve? I guess I just don't put much of an importance on in depth history because to me, it feels rather pointless and arbitrary. ... I'm sorry, but this is just not what I expected from DMS.

What I'd be more interested in, for both the article and today's presentation, is how the computer is coded. Like what kind of data structure holds everything and what kind of search algorithm does it use? What's its big O access time?

...

USE METADATA TO ANALYZE THAT GENJI IS OVERPOWERED!

D.Kim

2016-10-11 14:35:54 UTC

I found the article "What is XML and why should Humanists Care" to be a little confusing and complex with new vocabulary and terms being thrown at me. However, I did found the article to be a good introduction to what XML is and the benefits of it. The presentation offered me a visual of how XML can be used in a educational setting/project. The DHQ article offered another example of digital media which created a social network from history using algorithms and statistical methods to organize the data. All of the computer science and coding used in all of the projects was new to me but the intersection to digital humanities was cool to see and i recognize the importance in terms of preserving history and furthering education.

G. Vasile

2016-10-11 14:36:05 UTC

As I have mentioned before I am in no way shape or form familiar with coding and the various programs out there that can help one code. However, based off the reading for today and the presentation, I am very intrigued in XTL and the Texting Encode Initiative (TEI). The connections that were able to be made on the Seward Family Digital Archive based off of using TEI was amazing to see. The fact that one program can lead to so much connection and learning and history is something I wasn't even aware of and something I would love to learn more about.

F.Gonzalez

2016-10-11 14:36:13 UTC

Watching the Seward family archive at work was a great experience. It helped me visualize the connection between the digital humanities and computer science and how both contribute greatly to the overall appeal and design of the archive. It really is incredible at the amount of data that is being archived and how much more will continue to do so for the years to come. On a more personal level, Camden's presentation and his knowledge of the many people in the archive was also very interesting. All these connections and branches of other people containing more information is something no one would've predicted in the past. It makes me wonder of what we might behold in the future allong with the continuing strives in Computer Science.

S.

2016-10-11 14:37:00 UTC

S. Ogunji

2016-10-11 14:37:23 UTC

The XML reading was very informative in that I was able to learn that it was a way of modeling textual document in a tree way or hierarchal way. This structure is helpful in presenting and describing documents in archives and is very helpful in digital humanities.
The Six Degree of Francis Bacon and the presentation enabled me to see how digital projects used XML in their projects. I was very confused with the equation in SDOFB. I also found the graphs using the nodes very interesting because they were able to map out the lives of individuals from history. This process always people to learn the way people lived in the past and how that may be similar or different from now.

Z. Alabo

2016-10-11 14:37:31 UTC

It was interesting to see the use of XML through the Seward Family Archive. It puts into perspective how important and beneficial advanced technology could be. Without XML this project would be almost impossible to replicate and it wouldn't have half as much depth.

It brings me back to the idea of metadata and how it has helped us better navigate the internet to find sources/ information. We're able to learn about anything using appropriate searching methods.

A. Griffiths

2016-10-11 14:39:17 UTC

So yeah it's crazy that through that advent of technology there is now multiple primary documents people can use to make a web chart of your life.

O. Schifferli

2016-10-11 14:40:26 UTC

The project shifts the focus to study history in a way that I have not seen before, and I found that novelty compelling. I think the focus on what 19th century family life was like is important, and not often discussed in typical historic literature. While these letters don’t depict game-changing events, and the family life of Francis Seward is in no way a truly significant effector of history, the insight into 19th century family structure is highly compelling.
XML is a markup language, and seeing it in Oxygen reminded me of all the HTML I worked with this summer. From my understanding, XML offers more flexibility in the form of custom tags, but also a has become a bit outdated, and not very useful in typical web-based projects. However, it has certainly proved useful here.

Z. Guan

2016-10-11 14:43:53 UTC

We are talking about digital humanities all day, but how is the humanities transformed digitally? Throughout the studies before, I have learned about the 3D modeling, the interactive map, and of course, all the sites include exhibition of old documents or old photos, drawings. I have some idea about how the modeling is constructed, and how they create the interactive map, but how is the exhibition and digital archive work? From the reading and the lecture today, I begin to learn about XML and TEI. In the beginning I just think that they look really similar with Python, the computer language that I have learned about. However, after a thorough reading of the article, I know about why digital humanities always choose the XML or TEI, as their logic of construction behind is so similar. Understanding the logic behind really helps us about how to choose the right tool to construct the project.

K. Martinez

2016-10-11 14:44:54 UTC

After seeing the Seward Family Archive, I now have a better understanding of how information can be organized and classified using XML. The large "map" that shows everyone mentioned in the letters and their connection each other was interesting, but I feel like there should be a way to display even more information. It's an impressive display of information, but I would like to see it go a little more in depth. I'm not sure if this is at all possible with the tool used, but definitely something cool to think about. In the Introduction to XML article, it talked about the different types of markups. The markup used in digital humanities is typically descriptive, which means that the markup tells the viewer what a textual subcomponent is. This is different from other forms of markups, such as presentational and procedural.

M Vakhitova

2016-10-11 14:45:03 UTC

I loved today’s lecture. I find the Seward family archive to be fascinating. It was really interesting to see how programming and history collaborated and created a unique project that demonstrates personal connections. It reminded me of “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon”, which is a digital reconstruction of the early modern social network (EMSN). This project was made in order to recreate a historical network of sixteenth and seventeenth century Britain. It is built upon centuries of books, documents and manuscripts that have been collected and organized in a way that allows us to understand the importance of linked connections in spreading ideas in that period of time. I find this example of data mining fascinating because of the enormous amount of data used in creating this project. I like how the document points out the ongoing bias towards men. It’s disturbing to see how DNB primarily reflected accomplishments of famous men and not women. I actually checked out the website and found it very engaging, informative and well-made.

Another reading “What is XML and why should humanists care? An even gentler introduction to XML” suggests a different approach on how humanities scholars should view a webpage. XML is what an HTML document looks like underneath the interface. XML is more about the structure behind the texts and not the linguistic context. During today’s lecture I got more familiar with the nature of XML. Overall this reading was interesting since I’ve never actually thought about the hidden world of the formal schema languages behind the HTML documents. I am more of a visual personal definitely not a programmer. It is simply fascinating how this hierarchical, patterned and complex system is literally the base of every webpage we view.

Verona S.Wang

2016-10-11 14:45:23 UTC

I think it’s really cool to make such connections between historical materials and statistical searching methods. According to today’s lecture, I noticed that it’s really hard to analyze a person’s characteristics and his or her relationships with others back then, since the information people can find is always quite limited. It’s clearly that letters can become significant databases for researchers to use in order to understand a person. However, writing letters, as the main way of communication back in the 19th century, there’s a huge amounts of information. With the help of this searching method, more related sources can be brought up, and thus, we can have better understandings toward specific person that lived hundreds years before.

J. Yencik

2016-10-11 14:49:02 UTC

Much like the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, the Seward family project seeks to present historical data by more or less constructing an “early social network”. After doing the reading for today, I was presented with the informational/ descriptive side of how exactly we can extract names and infer personal relationships between historical characters. I was unable to fully wrap my head around this, though, until we were presented today with the “web” that connected all of the dots (or people) from the Seward Family Project. This visual was a really great example for me because I was able to actually see the personal connections/relationships between all of the people.

In addition, I have been learning coding techniques and HTML but have not worked with XML. Even though I am not personally familiar with it, I was still able to comprehend from the text that it has a great ability to really help with digital archiving in a project such as the Seward Family Project.

I would definitely be interested in working with XML and this type of digital archiving in the near future.

Z. Chen

2016-10-11 14:49:29 UTC

From the first article I learned some basic knowledge of what XML is that gives me a better idea of how it works in the second reading to collect data from those textual documents. When it says that for this language the meaning is expressed by the structure of the text, not just by its linguistic content, it remind me of the reading “Medium is the Message”. I did not really understand how the NER works in section2 of the second article to process the unstructured text into structured data that is able to be statistical analyzed,until I learned about how TEI works to collect and present data. It’s impressive to see how those data extract from those archives being visualized and demonstrate relationships between those important people back then.

B.Turay

2016-10-11 14:51:08 UTC

The presentation by Camden Burd on how TEI is being used in the project is very interesting. I also found the reading on XML and it’s importance to the digital humanities very informative.
I had no knowledge of TEI and XML as a mark up before, but I have been able to get a fair knowledge of these computing concepts now.

It is interesting to see that with XML mark up one can come up with a common language to connect projects. It helps in finding information of people or events by creating a social network.

As XML is a way to model documents, it is very important to digital humanities, and I believe it will continue to be crucial to humanities research projects.

A. Griffiths 3

2016-10-11 14:53:20 UTC

I was originally typing my first two pad-let responses on my phone but they randomly disappeared while I was typing them. So here is my third attempt of typing up my Pad-let response. What I was essentially trying to say is that it is crazy that so much information from 1830 is readily available. When the primary documents that could be used are mostly letters, journals and maybe newspaper clippings. And it was possible for a whole web chart that shows their social network that can be made. Imagining the chart people can make today using peoples old Myspace account, their Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter its kind of scary. Its even more scary thinking about how letters are suppose to be a private message. I literally have thousands of private messages that I hope me and the person I sent it to would be the only one viewing it. So regardless of if its 70 years after my death I wouldn't want people reading my messages. Regardless of if my descendants think its okay. I get it how because of letters like these we see actual first hand accounts of what the past was like, but where do we stop what do we decide to not publish?

T Wang

2016-10-12 14:42:28 UTC

I really enjoyed reading about XML. Or should I say, I prefer to read article that points out the information. I am learning HTML in one of my class and I like it. But XML makes me realize HTML is actually a set of XML schemas.

The project that I was shown today is awesome. I read a lot about Ancient Roman history and lots of information we got comes from those letters especially ones from Cicero. I don't think revealing letter of people who have long gone is morally wrong. They should be regarded more than just letters but treasures for history study.

The dots and lines graph does not make much sense for me. Although you can see how they are related there's no name or other information on the dots for you to click on. The fact that a huge portion of names mentioned in letters are still not identified yet is also a shame.

H. Barkley

2016-10-13 04:22:54 UTC

Even after reading the last article, I don’t see the way that this all relates or would be so useful in Digital Media or why it really relates to the topics we study in class. While I agree that it is cool to see the different relationships I don’t see the necessity of it. Specifically, they discuss how it would be unrealistic to try and map the relationship of every person alive because the possible connections exceed 15 billion. While I agree that this is true, for whatever purpose you might be using this information for couldn’t you claim that the results are slightly inaccurate if you cannot see the connections between each person? Even with that said, I think the techniques used are very clever and would be interesting to try and apply to our own day and age.

I thought the concept of XML was also really interesting. Specifically, I found it really interesting how by tagging an item even mid sentence you would be able to create a list of all items tagged. I think it would be cool to see if any of the other sites, apart from the Seward family archive, that we have been reviewing use this technique, and if so the different hierarchies that they used in the coding of it. As we saw with the Seward project, it is incredible the amount of information that is able to be presented through this coding format. I am also curious as to if we will get the chance in this class to practice this type of coding.