Audience: Since my project covers race riots and massacres during the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, one of my target audiences are be those thirteen and over. My project will obviously not appeal to most young kids. While, I feel the project will especially appeal to African Americans, my target audience is the overall American population. In addition, I want my project to appeal to the general public, but especially young adult audiences who do not commonly understand the importance of history nor intrigued by it. History scholars will most likely know about the history of these riots, thus this project is designed to appeal to those who do not possess a great understanding of this aspect of American history.

Platforms: I am not an avid social media user, however I can encourage those in my social circle to promote my project on their social media. Seemingly, Facebook would be the premier source that they would use to spread the word about my project.

Message: I want my audience to understand that race riots have occurred almost in every state and have been a part of U.S. history which has not been commonly told. I want them to recognize the other reality of America. They commonly may know of the America which espouses freedom and equality, but not much about the America which allowed these riots to occur while simultaneously supposedly, fighting for democracy during WW 1 and oppressing its minority population while also fighting the Nazis. Once light is shed on the two differing realities of America, freedom and equality for whites and historically subjugation of blacks and other minorities, then true and constructive dialogue can occur about the changes that need to take place in the U.S. Overall, I want the audience to have a better understanding of history of violence against African Americans in this country and thus comprehend their continued grievances.

Measure: I will measure the success of my strategy by analyzing the comments I receive about my project. I’m more concerned with the project causing better race relations through the accurate understanding of violence against blacks and thus ways to heal the divide between black and whites, than the project attaining a huge audience.

In recent years the amount and types of documents that have been digitized have drastically increased. Some of this has not been so much due to the work of digital specialists, but rather because ordinary individuals can now participate in digitizing documents through various projects. I myself, recently contributed to two digital projects. I transcribed part of a document for the War Papers project. Admittedly, I found this work to be quite difficult because of the many words that were hard for me to make out and thus transcribe. In addition, interface of the War Papers project was kind of lackluster and needs to become more user friendly and engaging. However this would be a great project to contribute to if you are someone who enjoys transcribing and particularly if you are interested in American wars.

I had a completely different experience when contributing to the Building Inspector project. This project asks individuals to verify if their maps of buildings in New York, match their computer generated outlines of these buildings. The other tasks of this project asks contributors to place pins around the perimeter of buildings on the map they provide. Together these two tasks help generate accurate maps of New York for the city’s library. Overall, I found verifying the outlines of buildings and placing pins around them to be quite easy. Thus this I feel this project to be much more user friendly. I especially found the introduction videos showing users how to complete the task to be helpful.

Overall, crowdsourcing can prove quite useful to digital projects. However it is important to make contributing to the project, easy and somewhat rewardable.

No Wikipedia may not be as academically astute as JSTOR or the American National Biography, nonetheless this shouldn’t deter individuals from using Wikipedia. It is a great resource which not only provides information about varying topics for free but also allows users the ability to use articles on the site for their own purpose. However, when using Wikipedia its important to know certain things about the encyclopedia. For instance, Wikipedia articles are purposively written in a non biased fashion. No, the entries on Wikipedia may not be 100% non biased however they are not created to be persuasive but strictly act as an encyclopedia.

Yes, some information on Wikipedia is incorrect. Users can edit articles and thus introduce false information into an entry. However, there are many editors who can quickly remove the errors. Nonetheless, it’s best to use articles which were not recently created and thus not having yet been vetted as accurate. Overall, Wikipedia is a great resource which can inform individuals about topics which they know little or nothing about. For instance, the Digital Humanities entry on Wikipedia gives a decent overview of the field and particularly its changing nature. That being said, Wikipedia should not be used as an official source that is cited in a research paper. Thus all these things should be kept in mind when using Wikipedia. If used properly, is a great resource which can be of immense help to researchers.

After reading about projects like Republic of Letters , Linked Jazz, Robots Reading Vogue, and Viral Texts, I now realize how important visual depictions can be in conveying networking. For instance, the Republic of Letters Project uses letters from correspondence between scholars in North America and Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth century to show how networking occurred in the past.

I found the Robots Reading Vogue project to be quite interesting. This project combined the front covers of Vogue magazines from one decade, into one. Thus, all of the vogue front covers from 1900-1910 were combined into one, all Vogue front covers from 19190-1920 were combined into once, and so on until the year 2000. What this project revealed was that, Vogue front covers were uniquely designed and that each issue differed from others at least until the 1980s. In the 80s, the Vogue front covers began becoming less distinct and rather mirrored each other.

The Linked Jazz project also effectively uses visuals to convey networking. The project provides insight and information about famous jazz artists via interviews with other jazz musicians. For instance, if you search the project for information about John Coltrane, you would probably find interviews of differing jazz artists talking about John Coltrane. By providing information on musicians this way, the project depicts the large networking of jazz artists.

Lastly the Viral Texts project, uses visualization to show how new stories during the nineteenth century spread throughout the country. In short, it shows how newspapers copied stories from other newspapers, thus spreading the same stories throughout the country. The visuals in this project as well as the ones already discussed, depict networking in various forms and thus convey it to readers.

Sources
Ryan Cordell and David Smith, Viral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines (2017), http://viraltexts.org.

Weingart, Scott, “Demystifying Networks”. December 14, 2011.

Lange, Lea and Patteulli, Cristina, “Linked Jazz: Building with Linked Open Data”, Educause Review, June 30, 2014.

“Linked Jazz Revealing the Relationships of the Jazz Community”, n.d.

Dan Edelstein, Paula Findlen, Giovanna Ceserani, Caroline Winterer, Nicole Coleman, Historical Research in a Digital Age: Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project, The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 2, April 2017, Pages 400–424, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.2.400

Visualization: Robots Reading Vogue, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYYdMVqS9Jw&feature=emb_logo

Visualization: Mapping the Republic of Letters, https://mycourses.siu.edu/d2l/le/enhancedSequenceViewer/440552?url=https%3A%2F%2F3491bd3f-f173-4aee-951e-dcd7adef86a6.sequences.api.brightspace.com%2F440552%2Factivity%2F2957685%3FfilterOnDatesAndDepth%3D1

Voyant, Kepler.gl, and Palladio are all great tools researchers should use. Voyant is especially useful to researchers who are interested in looking at patterns within their data. It can produce world clouds and frequency chart which will help you better analyze your data. In particular, Voyant was helpful in showing me words that were frequently used in interviews of former slaves. It also showed me differing aspects of the data that I had not noticed before. For instance, analyzing the data about word frequencies showed me how the interviews varied from region to region.

Kepler.gl is a great tool to use when wanting to create a map to better reflect your research. It can create a variety of maps like point map, base map, or heat map. I recommend using Kepler.gl if you desire to create a network map and especially if you want to create detailed maps which can convey important aspects of your research. For instance, I enjoyed the differing maps and specifically the time map and its display slave narratives data. The time map I created on Kepler.gl, depicted on the map when interviews of former were conducted on the map.

Palladio is also a great resource to use. It’s excellent at depicting networking of your data. It also has multiple features which you can use to examine your data in differing ways. It was helpful in depicting the networking of the former slave interview data.
Overall, Voyant, Kepler.gl, and Palladio are great tools that will help you visualize your data. They will also cause you to interact with your data in new and exciting ways.

Palladio is an excellent source for researchers. It allows users to create a map or graph that reflects their data. In an activity for one of my courses, I used Palladio to create a graph which depicted data from narrative slave interviews. I believe its great to use Palladio especially if you desire to create a networking map.
To use Palladio, go to http://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/
Click start and then load the data you would like to use into the space provided on Palladio. On Palladio you can create maps or graphs and add various features or filters to your map or graph. Overall, Palladio is a great resource for researchers to use. It gives your data visualizations which will help your audience better understand your research.

A revolution is currently underway. More and more the usefulness of digital maps is being made known. Technological advancement has broadened the practicality of digital maps to researchers and their audiences. For example, exciting things are occurring in the field of geospatial mapping. Digital reconstructions of ancient structures such as the Temple at Karnak and the Roman Forum have been created. These digital reconstructions allow people to virtually tour these world famous structures from the comfort of their own home. In addition, Oribis is a great tool to explore the Ancient Roman world. It uses networking maps to depict movement in within the Roman empire and allows users to see how interconnected differing regions of the empire were.

The Digital Harlem project is another example of a revolution in mapping that has occurred. The project showed the limited capabilities of certain geospatial tools in creating multifaceted maps and conveying encompassing depictions of Harlem. However, those behind the project were able to use Geographic Information Systems to create a map that better depicted Harlem.
In addition to the Digital Harlem Project, Photo Grammar is an excellent site which also gives users a better sense of an American city or town. It primarily depicts pictures of cities across the country on a large Map spanning the entire country.

Lastly a great mobile site called the Histories of the National Mall, has been created. This site allows visitors to explore a point map of the Mall which also provides the history of the Mall to the users. Overall, the creation of all of these differing projects and sites have led to better maps which depict data.

References
Presner, Todd and Shepard, David, “Mapping the Geospatial Turn” n.d.
Meeks, Elijah, and Grossner, Karl, “Modeling Networks and Scholarship with Orbis” Journal of Digital Humanities. Vol. 1 No 3. 2012.
Robinson, Stephen “Putting Harlem on the Map”, 2012.
Brenan, Sheila. “Outstanding public history project award Histories of the National Mall”, March 8 2015.

Kepler.gl. is an excellent tool for researchers to use when wanting to give their respective audience a visual depiction of their research through the use of interactive maps. For example, I used slave narrative data and through Kepler .gl., easily created a map which depicted where and when the interviews of former slaves occurred.
To use your own data on Kepler.gl.:
1. Go to https://kepler.gl/
2. Click on “Get Started” and then upload your data.

Once you have uploaded your data to Kepler.gl. you can create a range of differing maps. Point Map, Base Map, and Heat Map are but just a few of the types of maps you can make. The map at the top of this post is a network map which depicts the varying regions Chinese immigrants to the U.S. came from. To create a map which best depicts your data, click on whatever map option that suits what you are looking for and fill out all the information needed for that map.

Voyant is a wonderful tool for researchers to use when analyzing frequencies of words within documents. By using Voyant to explore slave narratives, I found that “dey”, “br”, and “dem” were commonly used by former slaves. I also noticed that certain slang used by freedmen were popular in certain regions of the U.S. than others. For instance “dey” is not as common in Indiana, Kansas and many other northern states as it is in Mississippi and Texas.

To get started in Voyant add the url of a document you wish to analyze to the text box that appears after opening the following link. https://voyant-tools.org/

Once you add the url and click reveal you will see the wonderful tools available to you in Voyant. A world cloud will appear in the Cirrus box and a line graph shall appear in the trend box. Both of these tools as well as others will show you the frequencies of the words in your document.
The reader box will allow you to examine your document in detail. By hovering over a word you can see how frequent it was used in your document but you must first select your document by first clicking summary in the bottom left corner and then clicking the document you plan to analyze further. After doing this your document will appear in the box below the reader tab.
In the bottom right corner there are also context, bubblelines, and correlation tabs. These tools are also helpful.
Overall, Voyant is a great tool which once you learn how to use, can be of great help to you.