ST235A - Digital Projects in History

Author: Scott Schibli

Final Proposal

April 8, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I have always had a fascination with family history, I am lucky enough to have a well documented timeline of my family on my mothers side.  In World War II my great grandfather Sydney Williams joined the 10th Mountain Division.  In 1939-40 was the first discussion of creating a military division meant for fighting in the mountains.  After training in the Colorado mountains in preparation they fought their way through the Italian alps during the war.  While Sydney was at war he sent letters home to his wife, his children later created a book with all these letters put together.  What I would like to do is create an interactive map that shows the route that he took through the alps during the war, while also digitalizing the letters.  With dates on all the letters, I would be able to show where the letters were written (generally) along the route.  

Bringing my Great Grandfathers letters to to a digital interface will allow more people to read and discover his story in a new and interactive way.  In addition, people will see and read a story about that war that is portrayed through letters to a soldiers wife, rather than the brutality of the war.  Letters being sent home could not give away any tactical moves that the division was planning, locations and more. It will interesting to see the change in tone of his letters sent in the days before a battle.  

Coupled with several more outside sources, such as “Climb to Conquer: The Untold Story of WWII’s 10th Mountain Division,” by Peter Shelton. Shelton does extensive research and interviews to write that follows the unique division from its conception on a Vermont ski hill, through its dramatic World War II coming-of-age, to the ultimate revolution it inspired in American outdoor life.  In addition “Chronology of The 10th Mountain Division in World War II: January 1940 — 30 November 1945,” compiled by John Imbrie, has an in detail time line of where and what the 10th Mountain Division did during the war.  

On the technical side I would need to plot the routes on the map and create an interactive interface for the user to navigate.  To digitize any text from the book containing my great grandfathers letters, I found apps such as Finescanner that allow you to take photos of text and convert that into a document.  There is also a program that is used by Colby that transcribes scans of documents into a word doc that I can manipulate as well.  

The technical support I will need is troubleshooting any problems and brainstorming ideas for the programming side of the project.  In addition, I am planning on using a Google maps API to implement the map.  Initially I wanted to be able to change the boarders of countries to that which represented conquered German land at the time of the 10th Mountain Divisions invasion into Italy, as well as Italy’s boarders through the war.  This is only possible if I manually plot the boarders from another reference, however, I am not sure how clean this will look.  Unless there is another solution, I am very happy to leave the boarders as they are in the current day and age, portraying where the 10th Mountain Division trekked through modern day Italy. 

Up to this point, I have reached out to my Grandfather who said he will look for a copy of the book this week when he returns to his house in Massachusetts, and overnight me a copy by the end of the week.  I have started research on maps, dates, and sources that will help determine where key battles took place.  I have also started to gather the proper resources to set up the Google Map API through research of Googles documentation around their map API.  

This project would create a tool that members of my family could use to interact with what my great grandfather experienced during WWII.  With only a finite number of copies of “Dear Mary: Letters Home from the 10th Mountain Division (1944–1945)” it would be an interesting digitalization of his experience that would allow easy access to his story.  

Final Project Idea

March 18, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I have always had a fascination with family history, I am lucky enough to have a well documented timeline of my family on my mothers side.  In World War II my great grandfather Sydney Williams joined the 10th Mountain Division.  In 1939-40 was the first discussion of creating a military division meant for fighting in the mountains.  After training in the Colorado mountains in preparation they fought their way through the Italian alps during the war.  While Sydney was at war he sent letters home to his wife, his children later created a book with all of these letters put together.  What I would like to do is create an interactive map that shows the route that he took through the alps during the war, while also digitalizing the letters.  With dates on all the letters, I would be able to show where the letters were written (generally) along the route.  

Because this is my family history, I find great interest in this.  I believe that it may be interesting to others as it would give an insight into a division in the war that is not well known for. This project could take different paths from here as well.  It could be more general and show all the different paths of the 10th mountain division, along with battle locations, critical events, and general information.  However, this would take a considerably longer time in research.  

On the technical side I would need to plot the routes on the map and create an interactive interface for the user to navigate.  To digitize any text from the book containing my great grandfathers letters, I found apps such as Finescanner that allow you to take photos of text and convert that into a document.  I believe the hardest part would be the programming to make the interface.  I will need to collect a copy of the book contains these letters from my grandfather, along with the maps he has (will just ask for photos of the maps).  

The technical support I will need is troubleshooting any problems and brainstorming ideas for the programming side of the project.  In addition, I would need to use a map API and utilize satellite as it shows a cool graphic of the alps and their vastness.

This project would create a tool that members of my family could use to interact with what my great grandfather experienced during WWII.  With only a finite number of copies of “Dear Mary: Letters Home from the 10th Mountain Division (1944–1945)” it would be an interesting digitalization of his experience that would allow easy access to his story.  That being said, this idea only just came to me and I would be happy to develop this idea into taking a different approach by digitalizing military routes of different divisions, or battalions, for a more general use by the public.  It could start off by following just one company through the war and portraying where they went and what they did through an interactive map.  Again, this might take more hands to complete as the research would have to be more extensive.  

They Shall Not Grow Old

March 5, 2019 / / 0 Comments

They Shall Not Grow Old is a film created with state of the art technology that enhanced and colorized black and white video footage from WW1.  Directed by Peter Jackson, a decorated director, with a team of video, audio and music specialists were able to create a film that allowed the viewers to see original, real imagery in a dynamic and more relatable movie aesthetic.  Documentaries of old war movies tend to be static, black and white footage that is running too quickly or too slow, with no noise except the historians that are speaking over the clip.  Between the techniques themselves and the decisions why Jackson chose those techniques create a fascinating digital project in history.  

Jackson and his team received over 100 hours of audio and over 60 hours of video that they had to watch and listen through to decide what they were going to use for their 99 minute film.  After watching dozens of hours of video Jackson decided that he was going to focus on the film provided by the English to base his film off of.  The English video alone was far too many hours, and his next step was figuring out what the film was going to be about.  Coupled with countless hours of audio, he wanted to create a film that expressed and showed what the actual soldiers were like.  He did not focus on the strategies that went into the battles, or the actual battles themselves, rather he portrayed the day to day lives of actual soldiers.  We have all seen war movies and how the soldiers interact, however that is only how we think they do.  I believe Jackson did an amazing job of personalizing how the soldiers interacted and what they thought of the war before, during and after the fact. 

The audio that was used in the film was only recorded tapes of real veterans from the war speaking about their experiences.  Starting with the the months leading up to the war we got to listen and see the excitement that men and women had for the war.  With men as young as 15 passing for the draft and heading off the war, everyone believed that one English man was worth 10 of anyone else.  They believed they were invincible.  The beginning of the film was all black and white while they were talking about the pre war times.  Once the filming starts to show the armies of the United Kingdom, Jackson switched the videos to color.  Through a machine learning model that uses object classifying to change the color of videos pixel by pixel, it allowed images and videos to come to life.  They also utilized the use of video editing that was capable of making images lighter that were too dark to see anything, or darken images that were too bright to see anything.  

Finally, Jackson’s ability to show what the soldiers were actually thinking, how they acted really struck home to see for the first time what day to day life in war was really like.  At one point a soldier said (along the lines of), that there were very bad times there is no way around that, however in general, on good days of weather, or the time we spent off the line, were quite fun spending time with the boys and telling stories.  Men always tried to keep a level head and would cope with the pressures with comedy and jokes, trying to keep themselves sane.  And more interesting, is how the soldiers were very excited for war before actually entering the front line.  By the end they were wondering why they were even there in the first place.  We got to see what the soldiers thought of the enemy.  Movies regularly portray enemies as evil and heartless.  The clips of audio and video that show the interactions between German and English soldiers showed that they did not hate each other.  Germans were captured and helping the wounded English, making jokes and smoking cigarettes with the enemy. Soldiers said the Germans were normal people just like them, that they loved their families, were bakers and butchers just like them.  Jackson’s decisions coupled with the technologies used made it possible to create a movie like nothing I have seen, and portray real soldiers, real landscapes, and real interactions.  

Digital Darwinism & Dr. Wyhe

March 5, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Digital Darwinism is an online database that has compiled all of Darwins writings together into one space.  Believed to be the largest online database of any single writer.  The project was started by Dr John van Wyhe, who is now a historian of science at the Department of Biological Sciences at Tembusu College, National University of Singapore.  Van Wyhe has an M.A. from University College London and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.  He then later moved on to Singapore where he found Darwin Online.  

The project itself was a large task right from the beginning.  Dr. Wyhe created a team that consisted of programmers and historians to combine all the works that Darwin created into one online platform.  At the time it was very new, and cutting edge technology to learn how to program and make products on your own.  Dealing with hundreds of works from Darwin’s life time they had to make digital copies of all these works.  That was either taking the actual texts and recreating a digital version of it, or uploading actual photos of the works.  Each of these were then stored in a Jsquel database using php, javascript and html.  

Dr. Wyhe believed that the most challenging part to the whole project was actually collecting Darwins writings.  At the time he said most of the institutions he was going reaching out to were relatively helpful with providing the work so he could make these digital copies. However, writings and articles that were kept in museums etc.. were much more difficult to receive the grace to make copies of Darwin pieces that didn’t exist anywhere else.  In most cases he was able to convince and make it happen.  He noted that if this project was to be carried out in the present day, he believed that it would not have been possible.  Institutions that have thousands of articles, notes and essays from historic figures would not be willing to give their original copies away. They would rather create their own database for their own creditability as an institutions.  

Having all of Darwins work categorized and located in one spot allows for his work to be seen and studied much easier.  Before internet and projects such as this only scholars had the ability to really study Darwin and his work.  Now any person with access to the internet, or even a library computer can research his work.  It has accelerated the study of Darwinism and arguable has made his immortality stronger than ever.  However, are we sure that Darwin wanted his work to be filtered through by key word searches to find quotes and snippets without having to actually read his work in its entirety.     

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