1890 Fourth of July

In 1890 not only did Boise celebrate the birth of the nation but also the birth of the 43rd state, Idaho. of the four articles about the fourth from the newspapers that came out on the 4th and 5th 2 are about the schedule of the fourth, of the remaining two the one from the fourth is both a call and a descriptor of people celebrating on the fourth, it describes both the young and old celebrating both the birthday of america but also the signing of Idaho into the 43rd state. The final article from the fifth is an account of the parade and events from the day before, the description of the parade focused primarily those present and on the ship of the state, which the article called the most unique float of the parade. the reading of the deceleration of independence that followed must have been quite pleasurable speech if the romanticizing that the author gave it is anything to go by. of particularly interest is the account of governor Shoup informing the lady dressed as the territory of Idaho that she would have to have here circlet remade to say state of Idaho instead of Idaho, the evening parade again mentions the state ship but not in as much detail.

of interesting note is that the star representing Idaho was nearly delayed a year due to the state nearly being signed into existence on the fourth instead of the third due to a federal law and a one man decision by the state delegate  source

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what i found

 

the word cloud shows that while war is mentioned 34 times it is not one of the more popular topics.

4th of July voyant

honestly the only, the only thing I remember about the voyant I did Sunday is the word firework. looking at it after class has been kind of messed up by class itself given i can’t unhear everyone opinions but, I still see fireworks, and mrs. is very prominent, and i notice a few typos from our ocr process that are also very common.

dirt directory review

rating scale 1-5

Georss.org

1. usability, 3- requires knowledge of html
2. new user friendliness, 3- assumes knowledge of html prior to using, otherwise it is copy paste style friendly
3. is it helpful, 4 i like the idea it represent of showing where the feed subject is taking place.
4. extra comments, i like the idea but its current reliance on html to manage is kind of a drawback for most

Voicecup.com

1. 4- all it requires is that you can spell the word
2. 3- requires that you spell the word correctly, and requires the most recent flash player
3. 1- does not have a large enough database of words or languages.
4. while the idea is nice the lack of a large database is rather annoying

go4convert.com

1. 3- the objective of the site can be done with out a specialized program
2. 5- very simply and easy to figure out.
3. 3- it does simplify the process and stops reformatting issues down the road
4. it is easy to use but seems kind of redundant even with the things it helps with being pointed out

dirtdirectory.org

1. 4- pretty easy to use and figure out.
2. 3- catagories are helpful but you still need to know what they mean and what you are looking for
3. 4- i likely wouldn’t find any of these sites on my own.

Now I understand why programmers are well paid.

now the title just about says it all for my experience with the advanced DH techniques, while I could follow the instructions and get the results I was suppose to, and I can likely use the programs at a beginner level going any farther than that isn’t really possible for me at the minute.

i’m pretty sure what we did with the programs (notepad++) is just the basics of what they are used for and really if you asked me to do anything more advanced than use notepad++ to play with a document or WGET to copy a website i wouldn’t be able to. while i knew that the more advanced programming material was well beyond what a normal computer user could manage, i wasn’t aware of how complex some of the basics could get.

P.S. WGET was not working for me.

 

well i’m late

first time i read the schedule thought it said there wasn’t one for Wednesday,of interesting note most of stack edit stuff isn’t working for copy paste and preview test.
or publish either i should have a trash can icon.

For the past week and a half roughly we have been going over text mining, or for my understanding of it, it would be simpler to say we were learning how to use computer programs to analyze and draw some conclusion about a written work. The first thing that we were introduced to was really a text mining program so much as word history app called ngram while the program doesn’t say anything about a document it does tell us about how the use of a word or popularity of the physical manifestation of the word has changed throughout time.

The first actuall text mining program that we look at was Antconc, antconc is a program with a bunch of specialized version that people may find handy for different digital history projects. Impartially I can says that the program is a good program that is quite well built once you know how to use it, but if you asked if I would suggest it to any one I would say that it would probably not be my first suggestion. The program is not something that most people could open up and start using right after downloading it, it will require most people to find a tutorial to do anything with it, unlike the third program we looked at.

The third program that we looked at was voyant, the program itself is much more, new user friendly but probably has less overall functionality than antconc. I think the biggest draw for voyant for me personally is the word cloud option, while not truly telling you what the word text that they call a corpus is about, it does give you decent idea and let you know what part to focus on, an example is the word cloud below.

The word could is from a paper I did about the band Deep Purple’s induction into the music hall of fame, now if I didn’t tell you that it isn’t too hard to make a guess in that direction, by noticing that both hall and fame are frequently used words, and band, song, rock would tell you that it was about music.

The word cloud also has one other important feature that while not used for text mining can be very useful for an individual, that is that the fact that you can see if you are using a lack luster filler word to often. Using the word could above as an example again we can see like, didn’t, and having in there while in this case they partially are showing up due to the length of the paper it, in a longer paper it would be something I would want to go in and see if I could change them for a better word chose. Even in the paper itself if had used the program before I turned it in I could have seen those words and gone back and seen if I could change the wording in that area to avoid using them and get a higher word count. While the word could is by far the least useful for a researcher or historian the programs ability to find phrases and show correlation between words is probably quite helpful for finding if a text corpus has info that they are looking for specifically.

My overall experience with text mining programs is that I probably won’t find myself using antconc, or ngrams very often, if ever, I can see potentially using voyant and its word cloud to check if I’m using filler words to often and as a way to lengthen my papers which I generally find an issue for me.

playing with Ngrams

first try my first try was something that I did just kind of randomly lets take 3 thunder gods and see what results I get. I was honestly surprised when Zeus showed up more than Thor for modern day, Raijin coming as nearly non existent didn’t surprise me to much. My second try used the same words but didn’t capitalize them, this time I got the results I expected for modern day at least for thor and zues, ngram no longer realized what raijin was which I found funny, and showed how picky it was about capitalization. what i didn’t expect was that instead of being pretty even through out history thor was used much more often a few hundred years ago than it was today. at first I thought it had something to do with decline in Norse culture so I tried thor, Norse and Thor, Norse and realized that something about that capitalization was really changing the number of hits the system found, and causing me to have no idea what was going on.

Library clock tower report +Gallery

Library clock tower

 

the original library was attached to the Administration building where it resided until 1955 when legislature passed a 2,000,000 bill for public buildings and 1.3 million was assigned for the university of Idaho building, 550,000 less than what had be requested in 1953 legislative session, resulting in a redesign of the building till February of 1956 with the construction beginning on May 15 and completed in late 1957. The next 33 years say a rapid expansion of both the university of Idaho and the university library the enrollment more than doubled and the library collection more than tripled, this rapid expansion lead to a new problem for the library that was originally built to seat 1100 people. The library was becoming overcrowded and fast both due to the increase in student that where actively using the library and due to the increasing problem of where to store the library collection that was quickly outgrowing what the library could store in the building.

Curtsy of university of Idaho special collections

The overcrowding of the library resulted in the remodel of the library in 1992 of which clock tower on the University of Idaho was part of. The 1992 remodel of the library was started in 1990 under president Elisabeth Zinser, the overall budget for the library remodel was 2.3 million dollars and took nearly 2 years from start to finish. Some interesting things of note about the remodel where that, president Zinser added an extra 400,000 dollars added to the budget to adjust the exterior architecture to be more in line with the Administration Building and Memorial Gym, the concrete poured for the basement the largest ever pouring to take place on the Palouse.

During the remodel, the library remained open and fully operational beyond a few inconveniences caused by the constant need to move books from one floor to another, and the constant noise of construction that was present during the construction. During the library reconstruction, the school put out multiple pamphlets on the reconstruction to keep the student up to date on what was going on in the remodel. The remodel also drastically changed the general floor plan of the library along with adding a basement it also removed a post office located in the library, split the lounge area into a smoking and non-smoking area that has since been recombined with the smoking ban on campus, and changed the main entrance of the library from the south side to the east side of the library.

 

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This blog is part of a larger “Campus Obscura” project. Related posts can be found through the interactive map Please explore and share.

[1] UIVF Buildings and Campus Box 5, Folder UIVF Build + Campus library remodel, George Ade Papers 1878-2007, the University of Idaho Archives and Special Collections Research Center, University of Idaho Libraries

Campus Obsura

the Library clock tower, i know very little about it so lets do something about that.

the amphitheater that i only know exist due a zombie/nerf game.

the Trident we have seen it and probably heard a little about it, but lets see what its story really says (also my safe pick if the other two don’t work).