A History of the Poppy and Remembrance

This is a really nice reflection on the poppy and the history of rememberance practices. I agree that to wear, or not wear, a poppy is a personal choice, which people should not be bullied into. That being said, anyone who deliberately chooses not to wear the poppy should be prepared to explain their choice. Not because they necessarily need to justify themselves, but I think other people will be curious about the decision.

yourhistoryteacher

At 5am on 11^th November 1918 in the personal railway carriage of Ferdinand Foch the Généralissime of the Allied Armies an armistice agreement which ended the Great War was signed. For poetic licence it was agreed that this would come into place at 11am so that in years to come school children could recite that in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the most terrible of wars came to an end. (Interestingly it has been claimed repeatedly that 10am to 11am that day was the bloodiest of the war. Of the truth in this fact I am not sure.) So egregious was this capitulation perceived in Germany that in 1940 when the Nazis quickly defeated the French, they were forced to sign their own humiliating armistice in the exact same railway carriage with a gloating Hitler taking place of the smug Foch. However this…

View original post 725 more words

HI 9808: Multimedia Exhibit Design

It’s easy to see why virtual exhibits appeal to museums and other institutions. Virtual exhibits allow institutions to make their collections available to anyone with internet access, while not subjecting artifacts to the rigors of travel and display. However, as with physical exhibits, not all virtual exhibits are created equal. You can’t just slap together a photo gallery and expect the page views to come rolling in. Virtual exhibits require planning and deliberation if they are going to engage visitors.

With that in mind let’s assess Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible, produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington D.C.), the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, with assistance from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The virtual exhibit is really just one part of a multi-platform Manifold Greatness project, which also included a travelling exhibition and a book.

The core of the virtual exhibit is dived into three section: Before the King James Bible, Making the Book, and Later Influences. The content of these sections offer impressive depth and breadth of information. The Before section does an excellent job providing context for the creation of the KJB; it explains early bibles editions, English royal lineage, and 16th century religious tension. This is all explained through various media, including text, video, interactive timelines, and scans historical documents, paintings, and engravings. The virtual collection of primary sources is quite impressive, particularly the scans of early modern bibles which allow the viewer to see the craftsmanship that went into producing each copy.

The history of the King James Bible may not seem like a particularly kid-friendly topic, and the creators of the virtual exhibit could have easily kept their focus on older audiences, but instead they created a truly engaging portal for younger audiences to learn about the KJB. The Kids section, as with the whole exhibit, seeks to answer the questions: Where did it the KJB come from? How was it made? and why is it still important today? To answer these questions the Kids section uses pictures, video, short text explanations. There are also How-To videos showing visitors how to make ink, a ruff collar, a quarto (short book), and a quill pen. This is a great way to introduce new concepts and engage tactile learners. All of the online activities are thoughtful and connect to the core questions. I liked the Printer for a Day activity which allows users to typeset a line of text and “print” it with a 17th century printing press.

Manifold Greatness is a terrific virtual exhibit that explains the creation and lasting influence of the King James Bible. The site takes advantage of the web platform by presenting information using a variety of media, including video and dynamic timelines. The exhibit is thorough without being overwhelming, and the site design is clean and uncluttered. Manifold Greatness sets a high standard for virtual exhibits.

 

 

 

 

HI 9087: Manipulating PDFs in the Command Line

This week I am learning to work with PDFs in the command line using a variety of tools. The text I am using is “The Riel Rebellion, 1885” published by the Montreal Witness in 1900. The document comes from the Fisher rare books collection at the University of Toronto. I can see from the metadata that the document was run through the OCR program ABBYY finereader 9.0, which makes the document searchable.

To start I’ll use the Okular program to take a look at the document within History Crawler. I can see that the document has both text and images, often on the same page. Eventually I will be able to separate the images from the text so that I can analyse both.

Not feeling so j-ockular now, are ya Louis?

For now I can take a look at the text using the  pdftotext command and manipulate it using tool with which we are familiar. I can search through the text using the egrep command.

egrep -n --color Riel rielrebellion18800unse.txt

Next, I will create a folder for the image, extract them, and use ImageMagik to display them.


1| makdir images
2| pdfimages rielrebellion18800unse.pdf images/rielrebellion
3| ls images
4| display rielrebellion-001


The pdf images command returns 24 results, but by exploring the content I can see that some of the files only contain text and no images. I make a contact sheet to see how many actually have images, get seven results, and record the results.

I’m then able to burst the pdf into seven parts.

1| pdftk rierebellion18800unse.pdf burst
2| less doc_data.txt
3| mkdir docpages
4| mv pg*pdf docpages

The seven pdf files all seem fine. Now things start to unravel for me. From the folder that contains docpages I give the command

1| pdftotext docpages/pg_0007.pdf rielrebellion-p007.txt
2| less rielrebellion-p007.txt

This creates the .txt file but using less I only see a string of tilda ~~~~ I’ve tried this several times and retraced my earlier steps all of which seem inline with the lesson. This point is still where I get stuck.

Any suggestions? Let me know in the comments. Thanks