Project Title: Improving Accessibility, Visibility, and Organization of Historical Sources and Data
BASIS Advisor: Dr. Ryan Grove
Internship Location: Library of Congress
Onsite Mentor: Andrew Forsberg
Our understanding of the flow of history is something we take for granted, but is really a miracle of human achievement. We can take objects out of the ground, and by scientific analysis analyze what time period it came from, what its original state is, and learn more about the surrounding conditions. However, the quality of those artifacts fall victim to the relentless process of aging, and after they are gone the information they contain will disappear. My Senior Project is dedicated to preserving the information these artifacts store, by digitally preserving qualities and information about the object, as well as even creating a working visualization modeling both what it looks like and compiling all the above information into an easily comprehensible format.
My Posts
Week 11: Finishing up
May 26, 2020
Hello Again! My last week at the Library of Congress was the busiest week, as along with the Madison notes, I had to complete an intern report detailing what I did during my internship, and I also had to give a presentation with similar goals. Aside from presenting what I’ve done, I also finished the […]
Week 10: Flute decision tree
May 18, 2020
Hello Again! This week, though I did set up some framework for the Madison notes, the bulk of making and transferring annotations will happen next week. Rather, this week I worked on adding one more piece to the glass flutes, which is the decision tree analysis. It is a guide, in flowchart form, on how […]
Week 9: Finishing flutes(Again)
May 11, 2020
Hello Again! This week, similar to last week, my time was spent on refining the manifests and adding additional information where necessary, though on the glass flutes and not the watercolors. I had finished the first flute, DCM0717, several weeks ago, but two new flutes, DCM1235 and DCM1311, were added to the Glass At Risk […]
Week 8: More work on the Rivera Watercolors
May 04, 2020
Hello Again! This week, all of my time was spent on taking the annotation data and transferring it to the Rivera Watercolors. Before I started working with the actual annotations, I had to change some annotation locations, since when I did the preparatory work some time ago, they were not as precise as they needed […]
Week 7: First steps to Victory
Apr 26, 2020
Hello Again! This week was much of the same from the previous week. Though last week was dedicated to learning NVD3, this week I instead worked on learning Victory, which is a simpler graphing library that would be better as an introduction for using similar libraries in the future. I learned how to incorporate it […]
Week 6: Independent Research
Apr 19, 2020
Hello Again! This week, my focus was on learning several new languages/libraries with the goal of eventually being able to compile charts to be able to make annotations independently. For this, I will primarily be using JavaScript, and more specifically I will be using React, which is a library dedicated to making better UIs, and […]
Week 5: Watercolors and Technical Problems
Apr 10, 2020
Hello Again! This week my project focus shifted from making visualizations of glass flutes to working with Diego Rivera’s Watercolors. Though I am doing the same thing in nature, for the watercolors it is much more complicated, as instead of adding annotations and making a visualization for one image, it is now for 3 of […]
Week 4: Significant Progress
Apr 05, 2020
Hello Again! This week I finally moved to actually working on creating part of my final deliverable, the manifest and annotations for the flute. On the manifest, I began cleaning out the information and fields that still referred to the previous manifest, and either replacing them with relevant information from the Library of Congress’s page […]
Week 3: Annotation Lists
Mar 30, 2020
Hello Everyone! The transition to working from home is getting more and more natural, and I am beginning to make some headway towards my actual deliverable. For the past week, I continued to work with the annotation JSON file and understand that, which took up most of the week. The file is somewhat inconsistent in […]
Week 2: Working from Home
Mar 23, 2020
Hello Again! This week was a little hectic, as there had to be a lot of quick adaptations to be able to work on my project from home. The past week, I did what I could from home, which primarily consisted of parsing through the JSON files mentioned last week, and understanding and visualizing any […]
Week 1: Getting Acquainted
Mar 13, 2020
Hello Again! This was my first week actually going onsite and meeting the people I would be working with, and it was exciting to see where I would be working. Monday was mostly focused on getting acquainted with the workplace and the people, as well as receiving security clearance. I had to get an ID, […]
Introduction: Data Visualizations
Mar 02, 2020
Hello Everyone! My name is Andy, and the focus of my Senior Project will be on improving the accessibility and durability of historical information. This will happen at the Library of Congress, where I will be working with their preservation department. More specifically, I will be creating visualizations of certain artifacts, working to integrate all […]