Week 10

10 November (asynchronous class)

This class looks at a dataset that was created by a previous NYUAD class, Professor Barakat's History of the Environment.

The book can be found here vol 1 and vol 2.

The dataset can be found here.

The dataset is a list of 2400+ automatically geocoded places mentioned in Lady Anne Blunt's Pilgrimage to Nejd per page.

What do you notice that is wrong with the digital map below? How would we think differently about the book if we were to reconstruct her itinerary?

You can access a short video recording that discusses some of the issues involved in the imperfect process of geocoding that went on in the dataset above here (13 mins).

In the block below, you see the geocoded list of places mentioned in her travels (interactive, color) and a map made that was included in vol 1 of the printed version of her travels found in the Internet Archive (scan black & white). Look at the very last page of vol 1.

The dataset that was used in the video is the following.

Homework:

Skim: Lady Anne Blunt's "travel narrative" and think about how would you map her travel from point A to B to C, etc.

12 November (asynchronous class)

This class will prepare you for our last expert chat.

Watch: Please watch this video (18 mins) in which I interview Nada Ammagui (Post-graduation Research Fellow, NYU Abu Dhabi) talking about her expertise working with digital mapping techniques and her PPTP experience studying itineraries in Lorimer's Gazetteer.

Write: Formulate two questions for Nada Ammagui in the DHS experts Chat. Complete this by 0600, 16 November.

Read: Nada Ammagui's blog post "Wādi Tāyīn: Then and Now"

"Five of the Best Online Mapping Apps" (Guardian)

"GPS Technology for Professional Sports"

14 November (asynchronous class, meets on a Tuesday schedule)

You can access a short video with instructions on building a dataset of an itinerary while close reading the text of the travel narrative, a text editor, a Google sheet and a simple regular expression. Video here (17 mins).

Download Sublime Text, if you do not already have an editor.

The dataset structure that you can copy is here.

Assignment 2 : Creating itineraries (due 0600, 25 November).

In this assignment, with your partner you will be skimming the book you chose, locating the "stops" of the itinerary for the pages that you have been assigned and making them into a structured dataset in Google sheets.

Make sure that you disambiguate and geolocate as many of the places as possible. You do not have to use each of the methods I presented: Geonames, Google and Wikipedia. Use which ever method gives you the best results.

You should begin on the page that you are assigned and end on the page you are assigned.

Publish this dataset on your blog as an embedded Sheet. You will accompany the dataset creation with a short paragraph (250 words max) about the challenges. This short paragraph can be written alone or collectively.

A detailed description of the five steps of the assignment can be found here.