Publication and Presentation (Week 10) Projects will be finished and published BEFORE CLASS on Friday, March 9 One member of each group should write a blog post giving a brief introduction and providing a link to the final project. On the last day of class each group will give a
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Converting text from a PDF to a Spreadsheet
The Goal: Have you ever had a lot of data on a PDF but no way to take that text and put it on a spreadsheet for ease of use? Have you been manually slogging through the process with no hope of salvation? Slog no more! Because I’m going to
Continue readingAutomate Online Tasks Using Zapier
Do you ever find yourself doing repetitive things online? You might be copying and pasting several things from a google doc to a spreadsheet. Or you might be manually tweeting every time you finish a blog post. Do not fret! Zapier is the ultimate tool to automate different web apps.
Continue readingTutorial: Using Apple Automator to manipulate text and PDF files
One powerful tool you can use to build automated applications and workflows is the Automator application built into every Mac. In this tutorial, we’ll talk about how to use Automator to manipulate text and PDF files. Automator is good for doing repetitive tasks very quickly, and on its own. For
Continue readingVisualization Dos and Donts
This week we are going to explore some dos and don’ts of data visualization as you prepare for your final projects. Edward Tufte is widely considered one of the world’s leading data visualization gurus, and has been called everything from “Leonardo da Vinci of data” to the “Galileo of graphics.” Tufte
Continue readingCleaning Data
Extracting Text from PDF There are many ways to get OCR’d text out of a pdf, from APIs to python utilities to copy/paste. If you are on a mac, one of the easiest is to set up an automator script to generate output from any PDF you drop on top
Continue reading3D Modeling from Photographs with Photogrammetry
First things first Go to Agisoft.com/downloads/installer to download the PhotoScan Standard Edition. A demo mode is available for free that will let you try everything except exporting and saving your model. Download the sample photograph dataset that we will use in class today So far in our
Continue reading3D Simulations and Algorithmic Modeling
Manual 3D modeling techniques are very effective and have had a long history of producing impressive digital humanities projects. Lisa Snyder’s long-running project to recreate the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1863 in Chicago is a prime example of what these techniques can accomplish in skilled hands. Increasingly, however, computers
Continue readingArchives, Metadata, and SketchUp 201
Last week we begun to get stuck in to our class project on reconstructing 1876 Northfield and the context of the James-Younger raid. We began the process of digitizing building footprints and gathering the archival research that will let us build them in 3D. This week we are going to
Continue readingSpatial Humanities Applied: Class Project
This week, we’ve learned about the spatial humanities, explored some map-based DH projects, and gotten an introduction to web mapping tools. Today, we are going to put what we’ve learned into practice and do some more work on our class project creating an interactive experience around the Defeat of Jesse
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