Text Mining Interest

From this week's reading, I am most intrigued by the second link titled “Where to Start with Text Mining.” The foundation of this interest is, obviously, my personal connection. I am an English major with an emphasis in Literature and Creative Writing. Clearly, the idea of bringing hundreds, even thousands of texts together seems like a wonderful, highly useful dream-come-true.

I am familiar with JSTOR. I have used JSTOR only scarcely and usually only for research purposes. I see that the blogger is noticing a conflict in JSTOR with the errors involving text match up. I remember getting a lot of unrelated articles and information to my topic of research (back in the day, of course). The one main deterrent of anything is frustration. Nowadays if something isn’t fast, efficient, and easy to use… people will not spend their time trying to figure it out. I think this can be said for any database for literary works or works of any kind. If the database is not easily accessible, accurate, and efficient it will not be effective because many people will not take the time to learn to use it and be patient.

Because I have used such things in my own education experience, I can see the potential of this to become an even more valuable part of education in the future. In English classes we are always discussing translations, common themes, ties to other literary works… we continuously are drawing conclusions from several sources about historical events, scientific break through, and anything else that could have effected the style, rhetoric, plot, etc. of literary works. By continuing to build up resources like this, the gaps in education could be filled. Students would be able to see not only how certain literary works have changed over time and translation but  also how other parts of life such as history, and scientific findings during the times of these writings effected the work as a whole.

GIS Reading

I have never considered myself a map lover. Perhaps the silly name is still a bit of an exaggeration, but however after the past few reading I see room for influence. As I dive deeper into these topics I find myself more and more intrigued. How amazing is it that when different areas or aspects of studies that seem entirely unrelated can work together on something so simple as a map to portray a larger, more fascinating display of science, history, influence, change, and so much more. 

Even as the "How Maps Lie" article stated, maps are inconsistent. Even through inconsistency over time, it can be determined that something viewed as flawless and absolutely correct such as a map can be influenced by human nature of being prideful. What I mean to say is even through maps' flaws; lessons about history and human nature can be learned. 

However, I would like to bring a point up from my last post concerning the use of these techniques and theories in education. I was reminded of this point as I read from the first link, " US History Tours." The site didn't have much actual reading, yes, but it did have one very important definition so-to-speak. 

" New format traces historical developments across time, touching down on locations vital to our nations heritage and development."

If this isn't the best support of my claim; I don't know what is. The quote speaks for itself, does it not? This kind of tracing technique is "vital" to understanding, learning, and exploring our nation's complete history.  

Post for 09-10

Spatial History

For this week’s readings, we dove into explanations, theories, and proposals of spatial history. I could write this post and not tell you I was a bit confused. However, that would be a lie.

Caught off guard by the complexity that is spatial history and its role in digital history was hard for me to grasp. I contribute most of this confusion to its forward-like thinking- something so vastly different from everything that I have ever known. What I mean is, spatial history is a completely new way of thinking, and any introduction of “ new wave- type thinking” is difficult to grasp only in the fact that you have to break the confines of original thought.

After racking my brain, for what felt like forever, I finally found a foundation of understanding. One point that I found most interesting was in the articled titled “What is Spatial History?” which pointed out that historians focus their writings and study on explaining changes over time. However, this can often make history feel as if it took plan “on the head of a pin.”

Personally, I find this to, at large, be true in my history classes especially. I have had history as part of my education ever since it began, but it is always harder to fully grasp because the history stories end up being just spoken and written words. In class, there are always showings of charts. However, there was never a real connection between space, place, and history.

After briefly studying and learning about spatial history, I feel that historical learning has been hindered without it. Because, I am now beginning to see, that history cannot fully be comprehended without all of these connections. As the article later pointed out, history covers political, social, class, cultural and so many more changes; but rarely covers the spatial changes that serves as the critical connecting point between the two.

This makes me want to take this new-age historical concept into schools, because I truly believe it would enable students to better understand and comprehend connections between history.