Digital Humanities – Spring 2018

The website was an interesting experience.

The introduction video was cool and educational but the music toward the end when the narrator started talking about the fire became a little unsettling and demonic. It was borderline annoying over it meaning to sound ominous or spooky.

I definitely appreciate the SKIP feature for the intro video and other mini clips throughout exploration of the museum because it doesn’t lock any visitors into unwanted observations. I think using the point and click approach to be able to see certain parts of the museum can serve as an engaging experience for younger audiences (rather than just having a long video with slides of each room and lectures about each picture). The feature also gives a little free reign to users which caters to the museum atmosphere; yes there are tours, but in most cases, people are allowed to go through an actual museum in whatever way they like. This somewhat reminded me of the Oregon Trail game because of it’s early 2000s like academic gaming atmosphere and graphics. I didn’t interact with the mystery game in the museum but I’m sure it’s entertaining. What tells me that this website is still a work in progress (or perhaps an abandoned work) are the rooms that have no visiting or clicking features. Nonetheless, the website still does its job. This is off topic but I just watched The Showman not too long ago and in the movie/musical it showed that the fire was started by a scuff between rioters and the carnies but I have no idea if that is factual.

At the end of the day, I’d choose learning history from digital museums and maps rather than reading about it in a text book. But I think visualizing history comes with much more than just the entertainment value, it comes with uniquely acquired knowledge and stimulates the mind to think and visualize in different ways.

-Grant Boyd

 

 

In the first week of class we mapped out all of the origins where the students came from that went to the central college in McGraw. This was very interesting because this school was the first to let colored people in and also women. This school was very diverse for it’s time and this created a lot of interesting points on our map.

We each got a group of about 30 students and plugged in their coordinates of their hometown into our map. To see all of the points and see how far people came from for school during this time when travel wasn’t the easiest was interesting to say the least.

Mapping is a very important aspect of history and finding more about people you are learning about. This can be a very useful tool to all of us and can be used in many aspects of teaching and learning. To know how to do this now is important and I believe will be very useful. To be able to visually see all of the point is a lot easier and better to learn than just seeing locations on a page where everyone is from. This is a good tool to have when learning or teaching about different ovations and their relevance.

 

Garrett Sweeney

The Lost Museum website displays a virtual museum with information about P.T Barnum’s American Museum. This website opens with a short video that provides some background information about the museum. The video lets the visitor know some basics about when the museum opened, it’s popularity, displays and when it burned down. This short video is intended to peak the visitors interest in order to encourage them to continue looking through this virtual museum.The website offers different options after playing this clip. Visitors are able to explore the museum freely, engage in a game that allows them to look for clues throughout the museum, visit their archives or look at their options for the classroom.  I liked that this website offered the visitor the traditional path, of simply reading their information, as well as a more modern path with the interactivity.

        

Virtual Reality can be very helpful in gaining a deeper understanding of the past. The Lost Museum alone is a strong supporter of this claim. Understanding the past by simply reading about it in a text book does not always foster a deep understanding of a topic. However, when you are able to interact with the subject you wish to learn about and can manipulate it in a fun and interesting way, you are bound to retain much more information. Virtual reality can also be edited as new information arises. If suddenly new information about the Lost Museum came to light the creators can include this information much more easily than the publisher of a text book. This information is readily accessible at all times making it easy to learn about the past whenever you please. I think virtual reality is a great asset to have when looking to gain easily understood information about the past. For many people interactions like these allow them to create stronger memories about what they’ve learned, therefore, having a stronger memory of the past being displayed.

 

Kara Smith

Our job was to make a filter by column analysis within the studentorigins layer so that we were able to only see students from the state of New York. In addition to that, we also made a polygon analysis that split the groups of incoming students into five groups. Within this polygon analysis we edited it’s features to show pop- up displays of the amount of students enrolling from each group. All one must do is simply hover their cursor over the desired polygon to see it. The purpose of this map is to illustrate the changing population of each stationary polygon in order to see any peculiarities.

The following link is to the CARTO Map:

https://grantboyd.carto.com/builder/e07dd3c6-8194-4158-af51-283799c274f0/embed

While using the timeline we were able to witness significant changes with the northwest polygon from the between the year spans of 1850-1854 and 1855-1861. The population of enrollment from this particular polygon went from 19% to 9% in this time gap.

Only speculation can say, but we believe that the possible cause of this is due to the “scandal” that occurred with an African American Professor marrying a Caucasian student. This event received a lot of press which could have had influenced the people within this area of the polygon to not go to the college in McGrawville. This exact influence we are talking about is the Syracuse papers, since they were known to have a racial bias in their area. Some papers even displayed illustrations that were meant to cater against mixed racial marriages (the words they used were miscegenation and amalgamation).

Overall,  I think what we learned from this specific project is how visual/digital mapping can help correlate data with certain events, situations, and mysteries that we wouldn’t be able to pick up on otherwise.

– Grant Boyd and Grace Staudt

 

The Lost Museum is a digital, interactive museum that provides information about the showman Phineas Taylor (P.T) Barnum’s American Museum. When you first come to the website, you see a screen with a video that is about two minutes long, and I enjoyed it because it gives a lot of insight on the museum and what was happening at that time. Above the video, you can also find tabs that you can use to explore the digital museum as well, as pictured below.

If you click the “Home” button, it gives you these options seen below;

When you click on the “Explore The Museum” tab, it brings you to the virtual museum. I liked this aspect of the digital museum a lot because it almost feels as if you are walking around the museum. When you’re in the main room, you can click on other rooms to go into them. When I clicked on the room to the left with the dinosaur skeleton, a woman popped up and started talking, and then ran away before I entered the room which I thought was cool. Then when I did enter, I could see the dinosaur up close, and could even click on the little stand right in front of it that provided some information on the dinosaur. I really enjoyed that because it shows how much detail and consideration went into making this virtual museum feel like the real deal. I’ve been to a lot of museums before, and I always read the information pieces in front of the individual exhibits, so I liked that I could do that here even though I wasn’t physically in the museum.

The museum also offers a murder mystery game, which I believe would be very helpful to aid students in learning about the museum because while they are playing the game and having fun, they are also learning facts about it. Digital museums such as this one, virtual reality, or other graphic simulations of reality have so much potential to help people understand the past. For example, since The American museum in real life burnt to the ground in 1865, we would not be able to physically walk through it today. However, this online museum and this technology that we have today allows us to get pretty close to what the real thing was once like. Sites like this can and will be a major breakthrough when it comes to education as well, which I am always thinking about since I am going to be an educator. I could use this exact digital museum in my classroom one day, and my students could learn about the past without ever needing to leave the classroom, and I believe that is incredible. Though it is not what we are used to and will definitely take some adjusting too, VR and digital museums are at our fingertips- and we should take advantage of them!

 

 

Megan Bender