cindyanguyen

Intro to the Henri Oger Project: ‘On Reading a Peripheral Text’

It’s been nearly a year since I’ve stumbled upon the fascinating text Technique du Peuple Annamite (Mechanics and Crafts of the Vietnamese People) (Published 1908-1910). I had hoped to come to more of a conclusive analysis of this text before posting about this project. However like most intellectual projects, more questions and directions for analyses have opened up rather than converged into a neat finality. (See poster of tentative DH research presented at 2015 Berkeley DH Faire)

Thus, I wanted to at least share my initial observations and inquiry into the text. Below is a brief introduction to the text itself and excerpts (Methods & History of the Book) from my essay “On Examining a Peripheral Text: Technique du Peuple Annamite”, which I hope to finish editing and publish here. Additionally, I created a timeline of the life of the text and author below:

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Instructional Technology: What’s Markers Got to Do With It?

This past November 2014 I delivered a brief 5 minute talk for my Graduate Student Instructor pedagogy course on instructional technology. It was the first time I was tasked with speaking concisely and convincingly about a topic that I am extremely passionate about (and can go days on end speaking and debating about technology in the classroom). After weeks of agonizing over how to win over all my peers with shiny digital things, eye opening new media theory, and youtube clips of cats, I decided to keep it simple and personal.

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A Community of Curious Cats: Berkeley DH Working Group

I have a confession. I’ve attended DH conferences, worked as the ‘Digital Humanities Assistant’ on campus, and advocated for the development of DH resources here at Berkeley, but…I’m still working through what Digital Humanities actually means for me and my research.

The good thing is, this is exactly the purpose of the Berkeley Digital Humanities Working Group BDHWG (or #BDHWG for those following our updates on twitter, sorry for the long acronym) is a Townsend Center for Humanities working group started four years ago. Over the course of those years, we’ve held big events like the DH project fair, talks with Dan Cohen and Rob Nelson from DH institutes across the nation, co-organized HackFSM, and collaborated with regional DH groups and THATcamps.

These big events are a product of the immense diversity and creativity of our working group—a small to mid sized community of students, faculty, and staff interested in learning more about the digital humanities. In the spirit of ‘working groups’ we believe in the values of curiosity, collaboration, and diversity.

What is DH? image credit @Elijah_Meeks

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Discovering Digital Humanities at UC Berkeley

This post was originally published at the UC Berkeley Digital Humanities blog on November 20, 2013.

Chris Church leads a workshop at D-Lab. Image Source: D-Lab

Campus resources can be both exciting and dizzying. As a new graduate student at UC Berkeley, I spent most of my first semester lost in a sea of academic resources, departments, research centers, and events. I realize now that many of my meaningful connections I made revolved around the burgeoning community of digital humanities here at UC Berkeley.

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Digital Project Planning: Vietnamese Printing Houses

Last summer I started thinking about translating historical texts into ‘data’ and wrote a short blog post about it when I worked on the Cultural Heritage Informatics project. At that point, I pondered about the limitations of my recently minted Master’s thesis, where I analyzed tourism advertisements and travel stories to understand how individuals ‘mapped’ places with cultural, colonial, and personal significances.As a heavily theoretical cultural history project, I enjoyed the textual, literary, and tentativeness of such an endeavor. However, I could not answer many structural questions about the nature of Vietnamese tourism and genre of travel stories more broadly because of the qualitative nature of my project.

I wonder if others have had this experience in their own historical research? I myself am drawn to digital tools and more quantitative ways of thinking as a way of offering a broader perspective to my often very textual-based questions. With a deep yearning for more ‘concrete,’ quantitative data, I hope to create a digital history project within this line of thinking: translating historical text to data.

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Historical Texts as Data?

(This post was originally published on the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool blog here)

Last summer I had the chance to travel to the colonial archives in Aix-en-provence, France (Archives nationales d’outre mer or ANOM) to get a taste of ‘primary document archival research.’ Armed with a digital camera, a macbook, and a French dictionary, I bumbled around the archives, attempting to mirror the sense of confidence and purposefulness that other scholars seemed to have. After a month of 9-5’s at the archives (and evenings of pastis and concerts in Aix), what did I have to show for my dedicated data-collecting? Over 3,000 poorly labeled digital photos, an incomprehensible excel sheet of ‘important!’ records, and the overwhelming sense of gloom that I would never get through the endless number of primary documents needed to do my research.