Reflections – Page 2 – Digital Humanities Fellows 2024

Project Name: In the Press: The Power and Struggle of LGBT+ People in Central Pennsylvania

Project Owner: Katie Lauriello

Project Summary

The experience of an LGBT+ person living in rural America is vastly different from those in urban populations, given the small population size and differing attitudes arising from such an environment. This project will document the struggles and accomplishments of those LGBT+ people within the local community beyond major cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh within Pennsylvania. I will examine local newspaper archives with the support from national papers and local LGBT+ papers of the time to document the struggles LGBT+ people faced as well as moments of pride, focusing especially on the first pride events in key areas, legal cases and policies changing the landscape for LGBT+ rights, and a survey of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Such topics will be placed on a digital timeline and map in an easy-to-use format for users who may not have the time or patience to search for individual events. A more in-depth analysis of such coverage will also be provided, as well as a small guide to LGBT+ newsletters published in Central Pennsylvania.

Deliverables

Persona
Digital assets
- Scanned newspaper clippings (headlines)
- Images for pages
Wireframe
Tools
- TimelineJS
- StoryMapsJS
- Flourish
- Microsoft Excel
- WordPress
Visualization
- Event timeline
- Location maps
  - Newspapers (50-70 words)
  - Events (50-70 words)
Digital Tools
- TimelineJS
- StorymapsJS
- Flourish
- WordPress
Event coverage pages (500-750 words)
- Exception: HIV/AIDS Crisis (1200 words max)
Home page
About section
- About the project
- About me
- About my tools
Sources
First draft
Second draft
Final project

Timeline

Week 2
- Personas (6/14)
- Source List/Database
Week 3
- Visit Dickinson (6/20)
- Wireframe (6/21)
- Newspaper/Newsletter Summaries
- 5 event coverages/analysis
Week 4
- 5 event coverages/analysis
- Completed timeline
- Completed map
Week 5
- Visualization (7/8)
- 10 event coverages/analysis
- Total source analysis
- About page content
Week 6
- Total source analysis
- Home page
- First project draft (7/15)
Week 7
- Second project draft (7/19)
Week 8
- Final Presentation (7/26)

End of Life/Future Plans

Much of this project is centered around specific legal cases and Pride events, but there are many other people who have their own stories to tell that have not been covered. This project could be extended beyond the broader struggles to individual ones, incorporating a broader perspective through a local newspaper’s coverage of that person and support from their own oral history. If such a characteristic were to be implemented, then visitors can also submit their own collection of stories to the project, expanding it even further.

Personas

Project Persona

Part 1

Name: Aaron Smith

Age: 25

Location: York, PA

Education: Bachelor’s

Occupation: Junior Accountant

Income: $50,000/year

Hobbies: Watching reality TV, working out, going to gay bars

Tech experience: Intermediate: Uses Microsoft Office Suite extensively, streams movies and TV shows

Part 2

Aaron Smith is a 25-year-old gay man who lives in Central PA. He’s been working in an entry-level office job for a couple of years and wants desperately to get a better salary away from his awful boss. He goes to the gym each morning before work and has a couple friends there. Once he gets home, Smith is always exhausted from the monotony. He usually puts on reality TV shows and competitions to turn his brain off, especially Rupaul’s Drag Race. Lately he’s been curious if there are any queer people in the area. He knows one or two from the gym, but they can’t be the only ones despite their town’s small population. He has also been wondering a bit if there were other LGBT communities in the area that have existed or might still be around. Sure, he saw the Philadelphia Pride Parade once when he was just discovering himself, and he’s been to a few gay bars in the city, but that can’t have just been it. Smith wants to find out if there were more LGBT+ communities in his area and what they have done, but he needs a place to start. While he may have the technical knowledge to go searching for something, he won’t stay on a website that’s unwieldy to use for very long.

Project Charter

DHF ’24 Project Charter

Project Name: “The Times They are a-Changin’”: A Look into Protest Music’s Evolution Throughout the 1950s-1970s

Project Owner: Heather Stokes

Project Summary:

Research Question: What was the evolution of protest music between 1950-1979 due to the events that occurred and how did the music connect with each other based on messages, themes, and events.

The aim of this project is to provide a definition of what protest music is in order to analyze how the music has evolved and how it is used to express opposition to injustice and unifies people from different backgrounds. To do this, there must be a basis for what protest music is, hence the definition, along with an understanding of what events took place over these 3 decades which will be presented as a timeline and event breakdown. There must also be a selection of songs that fit into this category, even those that are considered counterculture to traditional protest music, in which these songs will be broken down to their fundamentals, such as artist, genre, themes and messages, to provide a data analysis of how this music has evolved and stays connected to current events of the time. This analysis will provide context as to how music provides a voice to those who are not typically heard while also allowing for a large platform of the cause that is being sung about. The audience for this project will most likely be current or previous activists along with those who lived throughout the time period who would like context for the music of the time and the response to certain events.

Deliverables:

Home Page
- Explanation of Project and Definition of Protest Music
Data:
- Timeline
  - List of Overall Events
  - Events Tied to Songs
- Artists
  - Bios
- Songs
  - Genre
  - Year
  - Themes/Messages
  - Event
- Analysis
  - Data Visualizations
    - Graphs
    - Flourish
  - Connections
  - Anomalies
  - Holes
Tools
- TimelineJS
- Flourish
- Excel
- RAWGraphs
- Sites at Gettysburg
- WordPress and/or Scalar
- Maybe
  - SoundCiteJS
Digital Assets
- Images for Tools and Pages
- Spotify Playlist of Songs to Embed
- Youtube Videos to Embed
About Section
- About Me
- About the Project and Fellowship
- Sources

Timeline:

Week 1 – Start
- Learn the Basics of the Program
- Start Timeline Research
- Have Definition of Protest
Week 2 – Research Part 2 Electric Boogaloo
- Continue Timeline
- Start Event Research
- Choose List of Songs
- Project Charter
- Personal Narrative
Week 3 – Digital Tool Learning
- Experimentation of Tools
- Figure Out What Tools to Use
- Begin Implementation of Data Into Tools
- Wireframe
Week 4 – Music
- Artist and Song Data Collection
- Figure Out Artist Bios
- Figure Out What Song Goes to What Event
- Write the About Pages for Website
Week 5 – Breakdown of Data
- Create Graphs
- Figure Out How Tools and Data Connect
- Figure Out What Final Project Will Look Like
- Data Fully Implemented into Tools
- Visualizations
Week 6 – Website Implementation
- Create Website – Full Design
- Import Tools and Data into Website
- Bug Fixes
- First Project Draft
Week 7 – Research Completion and Finalize Website
- Implement Fixes from First Draft
- Smooth Out Design and Flaws
- Implement Any Remaining Info
- Second Project Draft
Week 8 – Final Wrap-Up
- Clean Everything Up
- Present
- End of Life Plan Implementation
- Party?

End of Life/Future Plans:

This project is primarily centered around music from 1950-1979 which is intended to be fully complete for the data achieved by the end of these 8 weeks. However, a plan for after the DHF is done would be to extend the timeline into the modern day to further see an evolution of this music. For example, asking the question, does protest music exist in the modern day? If this is unattainable, there are plans to preserve this project as it is by either archiving the website or keeping up with the data and tools used in order to ensure bugs or issues are not encountered.

Personas

Stokes Persona

Part 1: Create some basic information about your user. Be creative (and feel free to use humor!), but think about who may potentially view this website (professors, reporters, editors, students, etc.).

Name: Troy Mitchell

Age: 64

Location: Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada

Education: Master’s

Occupation: Retired Lumber Mill Operator and Mechanic

Family status: Married, 0 Kids

Income: $95,000/yr

Hobbies: Fixing odds and ends, drinking a beer with friends, enjoying life

Tech experience: Good at fixing mechanics like cars and fridges, not so great with a computer

Part 2: Drawing from the demographic information above, craft a 4-8 sentence narrative about your user. Explain who they are and why they would use the website you are creating. Think of the following concepts:

Tasks: What is your user trying do? What questions do they need to answer?
Feelings: What matters most to your user?
Influences: What influences how your user acts? This could be motivated by their job, education, age, technical experience, etc.
Problems and goals: What obstacles might your user encounter, and what do they want to accomplish? In other words, “My user needs to do _____ because _____.”

Troy is a retired Lumber Mill Operator and Mechanic born in 1960 in Scottsdale, Arizona who wants to show his wife the songs he grew up with as Norway had a very different music scene. While he knows how to pull up Spotify, he has some difficulties finding an all encompassing playlist. He himself was too young to get involved with the protests and hippie culture, but his parents were firm activists during the time, so he grew up with songs ranging over decades about what was wrong with the world at the time. He finds a playlist that has plenty of songs from his childhood which also has a link to a project looking at these songs. Though he was not intending to, he goes down a rabbit hole into his childhood and his parents’ lifestyle while also learning plenty he didn’t know.

Personas

Project Persona

Part 1:

Name: Alex Scrollman;
Age: Early 20s;
Location: Unspecified major Urban Sprawl
Education: College Education;
Occupation: College Student
Family Status: Single;
Income: Biweekly paycheck of 120 dollars
Hobbies: Model UN, Debate, College Newspaper;
Tech Experience: Chronic Scroller;

Part 2:

This user is primarily interested in general world politics, more specifically trying to expand their knowledge of African politics. They need to be able to concisely understand very complicated processes in order to keep up with current affairs. This user’s main priority is efficiency, they want to update themselves on the most important events quickly. Furthermore, acknowledging that politics is very complex, they value transparency of sources to make sure that the information displayed is accurate. They mainly use their phone, so the UX Design must be phone-friendly. They are fairly experienced with technology, being a heavy social media user, being more used to scrolling rather than clicking.

Project Charter

“Keeping Up With The Elections”
Owned by: Fatou Ndiaye ‘27

Project Summary

Since its conception, the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) has based itself on a mutual economic interest among its 8 member states to foster a forum for the exercise of democracy and regional cooperation. However, the interconnectivity of the region created a suitable environment for a cascade effect in which democratic instability in a country becomes a blueprint for the adjacent nations. This project aims to dissect the main events surrounding electoral policy and power transitions (including elections, uprisings coups d’etat, and conflicts) in the last 12 years in the 8 member countries of the WAEMU: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte D’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo. Through the use of digital tools, mainly maps, and timelines, this project will display the intricacies of the processes while raising questions and discussions about voter suppression, economics, neocolonialism, and the future of West African democracy.

Deliverables

Fellowship Requirements:

M-WEEK 2: REFLECTION #1: WHAT IS “MY” DH? (JUNE 10TH)
F-WEEK 2: PROJECT CHARTER AND PERSONA (JUNE 14TH)
F-WEEK 3: WIREFRAMES (JUNE 21ST)
M-WEEK 4: REFLECTION #2: DIGITAL PROJECT REVIEW (JULY 1ST)
M-WEEK 5 VISUALIZATION (JULY 8TH)
M-WEEK 6: FIRST PROJECT DRAFT (JULY 15TH)
F-WEEK 7: SECOND PROJECT DRAFT (JULY 19TH)
TH-WEEK 8: FINAL PRESENTATION (JULY 25TH)
F-WEEK 8: REFLECTION #3: COHORT DH MANIFESTO (JULY 26TH)

Internal Deadlines:

MAJOR EVENTS OUTLINE
COUNTRY PROFILE + CONTEXT
WIREFRAMES
MEDIA CURATION
TIMELINES
MAP
ABOUT TEXT

Timeline

Week 01:

MAP THE YEARS OF THE 3 LAST ELECTIONS IN EACH COUNTRY
MAP THE MAJOR EVENTS IN EACH COUNTRY
DEFINE THE TIMEFRAME

Week 02:

CONTEXTUALIZE THE DEMOCRATIC TRADITIONS (LITERATURE REVIEW)
UNDERSTANDING THE POLICY PROCESSES
WIREFRAMES

Week 03:

BENIN: NEWS ARTICLES
BENIN: DOCUMENTS & FILES
BENIN: IMAGES
BENIN: VIDEOS
BURKINA FASO: NEWS ARTICLES
BURKINA FASO: DOCUMENTS & FILES
BURKINA FASO: IMAGES
BURKINA FASO: VIDEOS
IVORY COAST: NEWS ARTICLES
IVORY COAST: DOCUMENTS & FILES
IVORY COAST: IMAGES
IVORY COAST: VIDEOS
GUINEA-BISSAU: NEWS ARTICLES
GUINEA-BISSAU: DOCUMENTS & FILES
GUINEA-BISSAU: IMAGES
GUINEA-BISSAU: VIDEOS

Week 04:

MALI: NEWS ARTICLES
MALI: DOCUMENTS & FILES
MALI: IMAGES
MALI: VIDEOS
NIGER: NEWS ARTICLES
NIGER: DOCUMENTS & FILES
NIGER: IMAGES
NIGER: VIDEOS
SENEGAL: NEWS ARTICLES
SENEGAL: DOCUMENTS & FILES
SENEGAL: IMAGES
SENEGAL: VIDEOS
TOGO: NEWS ARTICLES
TOGO: DOCUMENTS & FILES
TOGO: IMAGES
TOGO: VIDEOS

Week 05:

MAP
BENIN: TIMELIME
BURKINA FASO: TIMELINE
CÔTE D’IVOIRE: TIMELINE
GUINEA-BISSAU: TIMELINE

Week 06:

MALI: TIMELINE
NIGER: TIMELINE
SENEGAL: TIMELINE
TOGO: TIMELINE
SUMMARY TIMELINE

Week 07:

WEBSITE THEME
ABOUT SECTION

Week 08:

FINAL DETAILS
CORRECTIONS
PRESENTATION PREP

End of Life/Future Plans

Although the project has West Africa as its main focus, the goal is to expand its reach to Africa and more ambitiously the world. Through the collaboration of other politics and policy enthusiasts, the goal is to not only expand the project geographically but also temporarily, addressing the events post-2024.

Reflective Post 1

What is DH?

The definition of Digital Humanities (DH) by AI states DH as “an interdisciplinary field that integrates computational tools and methods with traditional humanities disciplines”.

As an international student, the word humanity is scary. Coming from a STEM-driven family, for the majority of my life I was indoctrinated to believe that the humanities are merely for appreciation, to make me look cultured at the dinner table. Developing any sort of humanistic work would sentence me to a life of unfulfillment and financial instability.

Mathematical Economics was my compromise. I have always been fascinated by statistics and data analysis, and it sounds mouthful enough to satisfy the STEM freaks that I call family. I was fortunate enough to fall in love with the field, but I always had a true passion: policy & politics.

My best, most honest, and raw work was produced in the context of policy. Watching the complicated balance between people, power, processes, society, and beliefs evolve with the rise of new technology fuels me to constantly learn and stay updated on what is happening in my surroundings, locally, regionally, and even globally.

This first week felt like a deja vu of my Introduction to Public Policy class in a very particular way. Thinking about UX Design immediately transported me to my class about stakeholder analysis and adapting to different needs and expectations; project management made me think about policy implementation; even our introductory section, about failure, collaboration, building castles and logs sounded familiar.

The common trait between policy and DH is people. Is made by people, for people. Regardless of whether it is a computer or a bill in between, my view of the Digital Humanities is extremely rooted in people. Just as policymaking, DH is born from a need. The need for accessibility of information in a digital era. I could send 1000 thesis to my grandmother in Senegal, she would probably not get past line 3, but sending her a link with a map, videos, and pictures would resonate with her, even though she does not speak a word of English.

DH becomes a language itself, challenging me to display knowledge in different, more creative ways. Reflecting upon my project itself, bringing a Digital Humanities context to electoral policy allowed me to view the same events from angles that I did not even know existed. I was able to draw connections between policies in different countries, and their effect on the democratic process, even creating my own metadata with symbols on a whiteboard.

In the following weeks, I look forward to expanding my own interpretations of Digital Humanities, thinking more about how the values of DH apply to not only my project but also my experience as a fellow. I hope that through openness, collaboration, and experimentation I am able to encompass a wider range of perspectives and stories, using different forms of data visualization to craft narratives that highlight the human stories behind the headlines.

While my STEM-driven family fostered in me a respect for data, analysis, and empirical rigor, DH is an opportunity to expand my perspectives, showing the value of human-centered approaches to technology and information.

Reflective Post 1

What is DH?

Both our introductory workshop as well as Dr. Amanda Visconti’s piece emphasized the complexity in identifying what makes a project something that falls under digital humanities. The key components, however, come down to an openness of the project to use digital tools in order to facilitate humanistic research. As we have discussed in class, such openness comes from several different angles. Not only must a project be accessible to the public, but it also must be open to feedback and critique. Visconti builds on this idea even more, using Document the Now and the Infinite Ulysses digital edition as digital humanities projects that build a community around the project, revealing both steps to their processes and setting up ways for their audience to communicate both with them as well as each other. As Visconti says, she values Digital Humanities for valuing interdisciplinarity and her connectedness to the community.

My DH tries to build on that same level of openness to the community through its collaboration. Gettysburg College’s Digital Humanities Fellowship is teaching me how to use digital tools effectively and giving me the space to complete my project, but there is no way I would have been able to pursue my project as effectively without the work that Dickinson College has done with the LGBT Center of Central Pennsylvania. Their work in documenting and digitizing the stories of LGBT people throughout the local area has been critical to spreading their stories, and my research is simply building upon those stories and boiling them down into a format that is easier to access.

My DH is also experimental in terms of what I will accomplish on a personal level. While I’m not treading any new ground in terms of digital tools, they are nonetheless very new. Visconti and everyone else involved in Digital Humanities has emphasized the importance of failure and trying new things. Learning digital tools and opening myself up to website design and data visualization is a whole new world, and DH has welcomed me into the fold eagerly.

Visconti’s piece has not changed much of what I learned throughout the first week, especially the first workshop. Instead, it has built upon the ideas of connection and collaboration that we agreed upon in our workshop and applied it further. She celebrates the idea that digital humanists value “a variety of skills and professional roles,” noting that all scholars are credited. While the space is not completely perfect, the attitude towards community and collaboration is something I value as well in my DH.

As Visconti has said in the beginning of her piece, my DH is rooted in the humanities both as a primary source and as a mode of inquiry. One of my central questions I will ask throughout my research is simply, “How are the language and tone shifting in each article?” Journalists are human, and they have their own biases. Part of my project involves analyzing where this bias will shine through and possibly discovering patterns between my sources.

My DH will be an effort in collaborating with both the local community and other people within the Digital Humanities Fellowship to perform humanistic research and learn digital tools along the way.

Reflective Post 1

What is DH?

For me, DH represents an encapsulation of man made items to create and collaborate with other cultures in order to document and preserve humanity’s creations. Let’s elaborate on this. DH allows for collaboration to places and people previously thought to be inaccessible. This is due to the “Digital” part of Digital Humanities. This new era of digitizing has given people a widespread reach not only to communicate but also to understand ideas and give answers that were only available to academics or independent cultures at one time or another. This reach can then lead to a group of people from different backgrounds to come together and create new projects in order to document and preserve these older ideas and answers with newer technologies. However, DH does not just represent older areas. New ideas for DH are being come up with every day which helps to have an ever evolving meaning and purpose for DH. It is important to recognize the ephemeral nature of DH as this is at its very core. DH in and of itself is a very new subject only created within the past few decades with the expanse of the Internet.

A curious question that has arisen for me is what discipline DH would be posed under, or is it now it’s own separate field? For me, DH reads as a subfield of Cultural Anthropology. Now, do I realise that this would give me a lot of heat just by others in Gettysburg’s Anthropology department? Absolutely. But let’s look at the similarities. The purpose of Cultural Anthropology according to Britannica is, “the study of culture in all of its aspects and that uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics in its descriptions and analyses of the diverse peoples of the world.” While this definition does not encapsulate everything both DH and Cultural Anthropology does, many similarities can be drawn between the two. They both study culture in some way along with using very similar methods and concepts with a combination of linguistics that combines the diverse peoples around the world. To me, this is the easiest way to understand DH as it combines a field that I am familiar with while also expounding upon and bringing that subject further into the digital. Again, I do recognise these are slightly fighting words, but DH seems to have a different meaning and classification for everyone, so what does DH actually stand for? I don’t think there will ever be one solid answer to this question.

DH, like the Internet, is going to constantly evolve and become more prevalent as the Digital Age continues. This can be a very good thing if used wisely, but like all things on the Internet that has to be said with a grain of salt. That being said, I am excited to see where DH ends up and expect to help be a part of that evolution even in the small time I am working in the field.