ST235A - Digital Projects in History

Author: Ben Steib

Project Proposal: Colby’s Buildings

April 8, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Topic: History of Colby’s buildings

Significance:

The significance of this project is that it can help add context to a lot of what we see on campus today. When using the current campus map, there is a small description and maybe when the building was built and a fairly updated photo. I would like to provide a similar, but much more in depth description of some of the more relevant buildings and in a visual, easy to understand way. I think this could add a lot to the knowledge on campus about where our campus has come from, and where it is headed.

Historical sources:

I will use a variety of sources to do the research needed for this project. Google searches, public records and resources that I can get from Special Collections like historical photographs, videos and documents that the school has saved from the time. Photos of the buildings during construction would be ideal, as well as photos from over time to see how they have or haven’t changed visually.

Technical requirements:

All I will need help with is getting a website. Once I have a place that I can put all of the information I plan to collect on, I can get started with the design and getting going.

Achievements:

  • I have been experimenting with different forms of presentation
  • Read parts of Mayflower Hill: A History of Colby College by Earl Smith
  • I have setup a time this week to speak with Erin Rhodes from Special Collections who has offered to show me the variety of collections that have been kept over the years.
  • https://juxtapose.knightlab.com/#examples
    • Now and then
    • Juxtapose

Challenges:

The challenge for my project will be displaying the information and resources I collect in an intuitive, user friendly way that will allow it to be seen by many people. I think the best way to do this would be by a campus map that I can have sub links to reveal more information.

Project Idea: History of Colby’s Buildings

March 18, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Colby as a place. Historical community of grads and current students and faculty.

Resources: special collections, Earl Smith, Marriner,

Sense of place.

For my research project, I want to produce an informative website or photo book of the history of the buildings and facilities at Colby. With the development of the new downtown dorm, athletic center and boutique hotel downtown, the scenes of campus and downtown Waterville are changing rapidly. I became initially interested in this idea after watching the videos taken on campus with Colby students and saw the same buildings that we see on the main quad today. After doing a little Google research, I found it hard to find information on the history of the buildings themselves and how Colby has grown as an institution over the years.

One interesting difference between the buildings that have been built in the past, and current projects is the source of much of the funding for those buildings. The new athletic center was funded by $100m of bonds, but all the buildings that have been here for decades, like Olin, Mudd, Keyes, Diamond, were funded by generous philanthropists and grants. I would like to explore why that is the case. The difference in sourcing of funds is an interesting, unexplored concentration that I could narrow down my project into. I want to be able to portray a larger scope of what has changed on our campus and in the town over time, while keeping my research content focused and not become overwhelmed as the scale of this project could be very large. I think a website could be a good digital medium that would allow people who are also interested in the topic to learn more, and could draw attention to this subtle change in how we fund expansions. It can also be a good way to chronologically tell a story by scrolling through from the start to the present.

I will need ITS support in creating a website that I can put all of my work on. Maybe a WordPress or a ArcGIS site would be good for this kind of project. I’m pretty familiar with HTML and have made websites before, so I think I can make this without much assistance. I will also need to meet with Special Collections to see what kind of resources and media that they have for this project. I know that they have lots of historical images, maps and other documents that could be digitized and published on my website to bring interesting material together. Also, articles in the Colby Echo could convey the voices of students from each time period. There are a variety of sources that I could explore to portray a more high level view of how things have changed over time.

I want to do this project because it is a topic that really interests me and I believe the information is not readily accessible and I intend to do so. I think the idea of a website would be useful and will last a long time. I can make the website editable so people taking ST235 in the future could go more in depth and continue what I begin.

Digital Darwin: A Conversation with John Van Wyhe

March 11, 2019 / / 0 Comments

John Van Wyhe is a British historian based in Singapore that was founder and director of the world renowned Digital Darwin project. We had the opportunity to talk to him over Skype at 7am Singapore time, 7pm Colby time about his project and some of the stories, advice and lessons he learned from digitizing a database of hundreds of thousands of documents and other media forms. Before our talk, I only knew the basics of what his project was and what he wanted to accomplish by doing it, but being able to ask him questions and pick his brain allowed me to gain a real comprehension of what it would’ve been like to compile a database as large as the Digital Darwin project. I thought the scope and scale of the task he set out to complete was the most impressive, and it sought out to change the ownership of this information by opening it up to the world.

One aspect of the project that I hadn’t really thought of before was the copyright and ownership issues. I found the difficulty that he had to get the rights to use much of the work he needed quite interesting. Every document may have different ownership rights, and that needs to be factored in to the scope of the project as it can become very time consuming to obtain the rights to all the documents you may need for a project. I also really liked the simple objective of the Digital Darwin project, to make as much information about Darwin digitally available online as possible. It is one of the websites that makes the internet a better place for learning and sharing, how it was originally intended to, instead of arguably what it has become today.

Overall, I really enjoyed talking with Professor Van Wyhe and I learned a lot about how one would go about compiling and managing a project of such a large magnitude. Some of his lessons and guidance can definitely be applied into our projects for our class.

They Shall Not Grow Old – Movie Reflection

March 5, 2019 / / 0 Comments

The film They Shall Not Grow Old was an incredible movie that portrayed the lives of the men fighting in the trenches during WW1. The footage used in the movie was from archives in the Imperial War Museum in London, but was colorized and given audio to bring it into the 21st century. Peter Jackson, the director, put the footage together to create a cohesive, emotional and moving story.

The movie began by showing the footage in its original form, of soldiers leaving home and heading off to war, but soon it transitions into the colorized, remastered version. I found the transition jarring as it shows how truly amazing what the producers of the film were able to do to that footage from more than 100 years ago. In order to make the footage more appealing and interesting to modern audiences, the production team had to add color and audio to every frame, which seems like a very laborious process but the final product was truly stunning. I almost couldn’t believe that the modernized scenes were even based off of original footage. The colorization really allowed the scenes to seem very real instead of blurry and faded like it looks originally. Throughout the film, the soldiers in the movie were intrigued and confused by the camera filming them. At the time, film was a very specialized field and most people hadn’t seen a camera before. In many of the scenes in the trenches, they were often staring at the camera in confusion and awe, which I found particularly interesting. The editing and colorization also allowed the faces to seem more vibrant and lifelike. I think it made the scenes more relatable and enables the viewer to get a better sense of what the soldiers looked like and being able to read the emotions on their faces.

The spoken narration that was played over the film were from BBC interviews with WW1 veterans in the 60s and 70s. They had hundreds of hours of recordings that they sifted through and cut together to accurately describe each scene that we were seeing. The narration added a dramatic effect as it was like what we were hearing was foreshadowing what were about to see. Since the movie has no dates, no character names and no significant plot line, the viewer is left with the recounts of the experiences that these soldiers had. It portrays well the full range of what being in the trenches at that time would’ve been like. From the initial excitement of enlisting in the army to serve their country, to the horrors they experienced on the front line, the combination of the narration and remastered footage accurately depicts the whole picture.

 

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