Facilitator: Kristine Hildebrandt

We looked at some example maps in addition to the ones I included in the session proposal:

medievaldigital.ace.fordham.edu/exhibits/show/oxford-outremer-map/interactive-map

neatline.dclure.org/neatline/show/declaration-of-independence#records/1329

datadrivenjournalism.net/featured_projects/uk_tech_landscape_where_do_they_meetup

We made a map on Google Maps: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qlVBH_C3O7Q032EvBdoOHMuZ20o&usp=sharing

And here are the basic instructions for creating maps in Google Maps and in R (we didn’t have time to cover R)

I. Getting Started with “My Maps” in Google:

1. You need to have a google/gmail account

2. You can manually type ‘my maps’ into Safari, Chrome or any other web browser, or use this URL, which will prompt you to log in: www.google.com/maps/d/

3. “Create New Map”

4. Name your map, and then begin by manually entering spatial data (latitude/longitude, a post code, a place name), you can draw (add a point) on the map and then name that, or else you can import data from an excel, csv, or tab-delineated file

5. I recommend clicking on the “learn more” buttons anytime they are available

6. You can tailor your map points, you can tailor your map to different base types, and you can add polygons (boundary markers) to connect specific points to highlight spatial connections

7. You can save your map, you can make it public and share it with selected people or make it totally open, and you can create images of various types.

II. Getting Started with R:

R is a statistics package, but it has become more powerful than just that. It now has the ability to help you create customized maps of all types (along with countless other visualizations and images). I am just getting started with learning about R for mapping, but I can share what I do know.

1. First you need to download and install R (the latest version as of June 10 was version 3.3.0.

www.r-project.org/

You can download it from any one of the multiple “mirror sites” (a network of servers which host R). Choose the one closest to you. Follow the install prompts.

By the way: R Studio is also R, but it is sometimes a bit more user-friendly because it makes use of a more Windows/Office/OS-like user interface: www.rstudio.com/

2. Launch R or RStudio

3. You must install some “software” packages from the R package installer. These packages are little packets of data for mapping. You want to make sure that “maps” and “mapdata” are installed. You can then check for their presence in the R library:

library(maps)

library(mapdata)

4. This will produce a default map of the world

map()

You can add axes and scale:

map.axes()

map.scale()

5. In R, remember the X axis is longitude and the Y axis is latitude

6. Here are some coordinates. See what type of map you get. See if you understand what the numbers are telling you.

map(xlim=c(140, 160), ylim=c(-20,10))

map(xlim=c(80, 110), ylim=c(20,35))

7. The map library has two types of maps: a default map “map” and a more high resolution map “worldHires”

You can compare: map(xlim=c(80, 110), ylim=c(20,35))

with

map(“worldHires”, xlim=c(80, 110), ylim=c(20,35))

Then, you can add your axes and scale again

8. You can import your own coordinates and place name labels, but you need to save the file as .txt or .csv tab or comma-delimited and quoted fields, and NOT as an excel file.

9. I have loaded this file: Languages_MapR.txt, which has the lat/long for 14 Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal, Tibet, China and India

View(Languages_MapR)

This gives me a spread-sheet type layout. Now I want to plot these language names accurately on the map

Here are the languages and their coordinates plotted on a scatter plot of lat X long: plot(Languages_MapR$longitude, Languages_MapR$latitude)

Here is how the map looks:

map(xlim=c(80, 110), ylim=c(20,35)) #this lets you zoom in to the region

points(Languages_MapR$longitude, Languages_MapR$latitude) #here are the labels plotted

text(Languages_MapR$longitude, Languages_MapR$latitude, labels=Languages_MapR$name) #this lets me add language names as labels

There are some other tricks on the following web pages that allow for color and shading

Here are some tutorial sites that I’ve found useful. There are many others.

www.mpi.nl/departments/former-independent-research-groups/evolutionary-processes/tools/mapping-with-r

rpubs.com/nickbearman/r-google-map-making

You can use R and Google Maps together, too, but I am not as familiar with this:

www.bnosac.be/index.php/blog/41-visualisation-with-r-and-google-maps

In this session, we’ll play and explore legacy text adventure games, take a look at free development software used to make them, and collaborate on an example of a text adventure game using primary documents from archival and special collections as its foundation. 

Text adventures were popularized in the early 1980s as text-only adventure games that required users to manually enter commands in order to navigate, explore, and interact with the game world.  Also known as “interactive fiction” these text-based adventure games were often unfair, frequently unbeatable by the average user, and often did not have happy endings.  Developers of these games had to form incredibly intricate storylines and develop sound programming using  conditional constructs in order to create interactive environments that were easy to navigate but frustrated users enough to keep them playing. Interactive fiction forces the user to interact with their world in order to change it and requires them to make a choice with every step they take.  This has led to a niche following that still exists today because the players become so immensely invested in the game.

So how does this relate to the digital humanities?  Game development requires serious attention to storyline, so text adventures lend themselves very well to narrative history.  By creating environments based on historical documentation, we are able to build games that can follow the real path of an historical figure, event, or movement.  We can use primary documents to build historically accurate game worlds that only allow users the options that a real person at the time would have had. Hopefully, the game that results is an immersive historical experience, providing context and insight that may have been overlooked before.

The Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics Scholarship (IRIS) Center (siueiris.com/) is a facility designed to support individual and collaborative scholarship at faculty and student levels that applies digital content as a primary methodology. IRIS facilitates cross-disciplinary and collaborative projects that involve applications, enhancements, or re-conceptualizations of technology in the humanities and social sciences.

The IRIS Center is home to a number of exciting faculty-student research projects, and IRIS-affiliated faculty have even launched a brand new interdisciplinary minor in digital humanities and social sciences.

The co-directors of the IRIS Center (Jessica DeSpain and Kristine Hildebrandt) would like to offer a tour of the Center, including some illustrations of current and past projects, conversations with IRIS faculty and student researchers, and a discussion of the minor.

We are planning two tours: one on Saturday June 11 @ 1.45pm and one on Sunday June 12 @ 10.10am. We will meet in the MUC Hickory-Hackberry Room and walk together to Peck Hall, where the IRIS Center is housed.

I have some experience with making custom maps using Google Maps and also using some free software called (R), which was originally developed for doing statistics, but has become much more powerful and useful through time. I’m interested in leading a hands-on session to demonstrate some of the features of both tools, and to briefly mention some other shareware that is out there for mapping and geospatial visualization, that I am less familiar with (e.g., QGIS). I would also be happy to have any other members participate in this session if they know about additional programs.

Why is this an interesting topic? Maps are useful beyond much more than just making travel plans or identifying places and objects in space. They help us to understand relationships and make connections (both spatial and temporal). They let us “see” relationships. They offer a sophisticated way to analyze very different types of information or variables (e.g. space, history, and politics). Here are some examples of some projects that incorporate geovisualization in with topics and disciplines that are more familiar to my own education and professional experience:

Civil War Washington

The Manang Languages Project & Atlas

Dialect maps, like this one featured in the NY Times

The World Atlas of Language Structures

It would be useful if you have your own laptop (any OS will do) with internet access. I’ll demonstrate whatever I can, but you will be able to download and sample different tools alongside me and others if you have your own computer.

Session Organizers: Sudhamadhuri Arvapally, Jessica DeSpain, Matt Johnson, Sharon Locke, & Mallory Maves

This presentation will share work underway with Digital East St. Louis, a project funded by a National Science Foundation Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers grant. Housed at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the project is a collaboration between the Science Technology and Math Center, the Interdisciplinary Research and Scholarship Center (SIUE’s digital humanities Center), and the East St. Louis Community. In addition to sharing information about the project, we’ll also give session attendees the chance to interact with and comment upon student work.

Faculty in English and History who specialize in the digital humanities work alongside middle school teachers in the East St. Louis school district to develop a comprehensive three-year summer and after-school program for a group of middle school students. The research component of Digital East St. Louis is assessing how a digital humanities, place-based approach inspires student interest in the computer sciences. Over the three-year program, which launched in the summer of 2015, students will build a comprehensive database and a content-rich digital map showcasing their research into the history and culture of the city and its inhabitants.
One of the project’s primary goals is to encourage students to think across disciplines about ecology, geography, the lived environment, history, literature, and culture. Students will use skills central to information technology and information literacy to draw linkages between these topics, which will expand their critical thinking abilities and encourage them to see technology as a tool for exploring and visualizing broader questions. The project plans to train students in photography as they learn about East St. Louis architecture, learn about video production as they conduct oral history interviews with East St. Louis residents, and develop skills in research and metadata as they develop their own research interests for the project. This presentation will highlight the projects’ progress and discuss how to develop successful collaborations between the fields of STEM and the digital humanities in informal K-12 learning environments.