I was born and raised in Northern Virginia and began learning to figure skate at the age of five. At the age of eight, I started competitive synchronized figure skating and competed until I was eighteen. While competing, I had the opportunity to travel around the country. I am a history major in my junior year at Roanoke College, and I want to pursue a career in library science after completing my undergraduate degree. I am a part of a service fraternity at the College, where I have helped with many service opportunities around campus and the community.
Metadata and Digitization
The physical form of a newsletter was digitized. I then stitched pages of my newsletter together into a pdf. The confirmation email presents the metadata of the newsletter, which describes the given information about the images (location, date, description).
Machine-Reading and Distant Reading
The New Orleans Democrat. (New Orleans, La.), February 20, 1876. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88064616/1876-02-20/ed-1/seq-3/>
OCR Search Technology
OCR, or optical character recognition, is a technology that reads a photograph and the text that’s in the image. This allows users to find keywords in the photograph. Some drawbacks can be seen, such as the software misreading the image text. I used the OCR word search technology for “Victoria Woodhull” in a Southern Newspaper. The newspaper clip discusses her upcoming and past lecture, “The True and False Socially.” They highlight how her bold advocacy sometimes introduced abuse by the American people by being misrepresented by others. It then praised her qualities and incredible abilities as a woman while advocating for rights.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 4, 1933, Inaugural Address Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/208712
Theodore Roosevelt, March 4, 1905, Inaugural Address Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/206052
Google Doc Word Cloud
The word cloud lets people take a document and put it through a generator to get the most frequent words that pop up in the document, keywords. The inaugural speech is an example of using small data. Small data is a small amount of text that can be easily interpreted with little to no digital processing. Still, the distant learning technique allows us to learn unique information about the text that the human eyes can not see with youth software. I looked at both word clouds Theodore & Franklin Roosevelt, to see what their speeches’ similarities and differences were. I wanted to interpret their speeches. I wanted to see if they were a correlation between them being related and their inaugural speeches. The first thing I noticed was that they highlighted different areas. My interpretation is that the speeches were given at different times in the United States’ history, with different political events occurring. For FDR, he focused a lot more on ensuring the people that we would get out of the Great Depression, while Theodore Roosevelt talked about past success and how future success would come with hard work. Two words stuck with me in both speeches: “people” and “nation.” I believe they both mention this word a lot because they address the people of the United States and the whole nation.
Google Ngram Viewer, eugenics, sterilization, retarded, & imbecile. From 1900-2000, English, Case-Sensitive, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sterilization%2C+eugenic%2C+imbecile%2C+retarded&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
Ngram chart
The Ngram chart allows people to see when words or phrases were most used during a period of time. This uses distant reading and uses the methodology of big data. Distant reading is taking large amounts of data and interpreting it. The historical event that I focused on was the Eugenics movement. The Eugenics Movement was a set of beliefs & practices that aimed to improve the genetic quality of the human race through harsh means. The words that I used were eugenics, sterilization, retarded, & imbecile. I interpret from the Ngram that between the years 1910 to 1940, all the terms were in high use due to the eugenics movement at its highest during the 1920s until the 1940s. While most of the words leveled out or to little mention, the word retarded continued to increase with it peaking in the 1970s. I believe this is because it was the popular word for addressing mental disabilities. Sterilization peaked in the late 1970s and dropped off because this was when the serialization laws were eradicated. We see that all words are declining in use as we move into the 2000s because the commonality of the words has declined, with people being more sensitive and respectful of individuals with mental disabilities.
Google Maps
“Lindsay’s Home Town” (2023) was produced using data imported, in part, from the Programming Historian.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1Z9eL6Rweclqx1JVZgBv8hVrnTJiy_pQ&usp=sharing
“Lindsay’s Home Town” (2023) was produced using data imported, in part, from the Programming Historian.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1Z9eL6Rweclqx1JVZgBv8hVrnTJiy_pQ&usp=sharing
The Google maps represent the British global fat imports in the 1890s history and South Riding, Virginia’s history. The software program that is used is geographic information systems (GIS). GIS is defined as software that gathers data to use and then analyzes and interprets the patterns that emerge from the data. It shows the visualization of quantitative relationships. In the left map, we can see the patterns the British global fat imports in the 1890s data have visually represented on google maps. The viewer can learn from the South Riding, Virginia map some historical locations that have impacted South Riding, Virginia. The pinned locations all relate to the founding families that settled in South Riding.
Timeline
Audio
Citations
“Beach waves with children ambience,” Mixkit. Sound Effects.
“Sea birds squeak,” Mixkit. Sound Effects
“Sea waves loop,” Mixkit. Sound Effects.
“Passing car and urban ambience,” Mixkit. Sound Effects.
The Mazurka, “Chopin-Mazurka,” Blue Dot Sessions. Op6Nu2. July 6, 2020. Musical.
This audio is a story of my family’s beach house in LBI, New Jersey. I tell about what a day at the beach looks like for my family. The audio has many layers, with music background and ambient sound to help move my story along. Audio serves many different purposes, including using ambient sound to evoke time or place, site-specific sound installation, mobile apps for audio tours, and doing interviews in place or while moving. In the case of my audio story on a place, us of audio follows the use of ambient sound to evoke a time and place.
Making a text-based video game in Twine
Screenshot from the video game “Jamestown” 2023.
Check out my Twine, a text-based video game. To play, click on this link. The link will pull up an HTML file. Click “Download.” Now, open the website for Twine, and click “Use in your Browser.” Click “Library,” then “Import,” and choose the HTML file you just downloaded. Click on the imported story. Now click “Build,” then “Play.”