Digital Humanities project (INFO 5960)

I was fortunate enough to have the chance to enroll in what was, at the time, an experimental seminar course: Introduction to Digital Humanities (INFO 5960). The purpose of the class is to essentially provide a toolkit and hands-on experience in concepts and tools that may be commonly used in the digital humanities discipline. Students learn about ethics, publishing platforms, data visualization, mapping, and text analysis and mining. A large part of the course is dedicated to creating a humanities project using either Omeka or Scalar, based on a dataset of the student’s choice. For my project, I used Scalar and based on the work of Dr. William J. Maxwell and Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL), created a project detailing the lives of seven notable Black authors and activists that had been surveilled by the F.B.I. under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover. I’ve compiled pages from the digitized files, images, video, and audio to tell a story of how this relationship, for lack of a better term, began. It was an interesting and slightly taxing experience, but I’m proud of the result.