Introduction and Project link
For this weeks blog post I chose to focus on The Viral Texts Project. The project began it’s planning stage in 2012 and has grown significantly since then. The project aims to decipher what made archived 19th century newspaper texts go “viral” through the use of several digital analysis tools.
Sources
This project uses a wide range of sources, as it collected texts from many different news sources. A few examples among many were Raftman’s Journal in Pennsylvania, Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia and Houma Ceres in Louisiana. They would collect the news texts digitally to complete research papers for the project.
Processes
This project uses computational text analysis tools to find collections of old texts from archives of newspapers that have been saved digitally. After that, they use the reprints of these texts to consider the historical and literary context of the original piece to determine what made them go “viral”. They also use other digital tools to learn as many details about the texts as possible. The Viral Texts team is also supported by the National Endowment for The Humanities Office of Digital Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Program, and the Northeastern University Research Project.
Presentation
The Viral Texts Analysis is presented through a website. Ryan Cordell is the manager of their website. The Viral Texts Project created their blog page and the Viral Texts Search by using a theme from a website called Beautiful Jekyll. The user can choose from three drop down menus, About, Publications, and Funded By. They can navigate to a Reprints Database, severals exhibits that utilize the information found in the news sources, a blog page, data visualizations and more. The website is simple and easy to use.
This is the main page of the project.
This is the data visualization part of the project.
This is the Viral Texts Search part of the project.
question
One question I have from doing my blog post why did they choose to display their findings from the project the way they did, instead of using a different format?
Answers to two in-class discussion questions
There are several academics fields that this project relates to, such as journalism, english, history, political science and economics. The target audience is likely students and educators including teachers and professors, but it also appeals to specialists such as journalists as well.
Thank you for providing a great overview of this project. Though I agree with the standpoint of your question — as the website, to me, looks to be without too much flavor — I believe each graph and image they provided may have been best suited to that format. Have you played at all with the Beautiful Jekyll process? They may have had to work around a certain format in order to include the ‘visual theme’ that they wanted. I also appreciate the images you chose for showing off the site; taking a look through their pages, I was very interested in the one data visualization map with the prevalence of different genres in different cities.