Digital Humanities Consultation
During the winter of 2023, I took a class on Digital Humanities (DH) through my graduate program at the University of Washington’s iSchool. The final project was to conduct a theoretical consultation report for an existing DH project. I chose to work on the Black Gotham Archive, a digital repository that houses supplementary sources for the book by Carla Peterson, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (note: as of 2024, the archive’s website does not have a secure connection. This was not the case at the time this project was done).
In this consultation, I gave recommendations on how the site could implement more interactive features and provided brief prototypes that could be further developed by the archive’s researchers. The first feature I recommended was using StoryMap JS by the Knight Lab to map images and stories curated by Peterson to a digital map of New York. A StoryMap prototype was created, but since the archive has restrictions on how its images can be used, access to it is only available upon request. The second feature I focused on was creating an interactive family tree prototype using Tableau. The idea behind this tree is that users can hover over family members and see whether that individual has corresponding records in the archive. Since the prototype does not contain images from the archive, it can be viewed on Tableau Public here.
Working on this project gave me a better understanding of what librarians can do to help DH practitioners and how to implement popular tools in the field.
