diPH is an extensible and easy-to-use platform for the creation of digital humanities projects. Built on the open-source WordPress content management system (CMS), diPH offers a user-friendly web interface over a MySQL database. As such, data can be migrated in and out of the system with relative ease. While WordPress began as a blog platform (one which is used for nearly 16% of all websites today), it has since become a robust content management system for handling a range of data. The strength of WordPress is its flexibility. Plugin extensions allow users to modify the core to add functionality to the system. With close to 21,000 plugins to date, nearly anything is possible in WordPress. Creating and modifying plugins is far easier and more cost-effective than having to rewrite the code for custom-built software, thereby producing a more flexible and responsive system for digital humanities projects.
Though humanists don’t often think of their work as data-driven, their source material is data. Archival records, photographs, maps, interviews and oral histories, field notes, newspapers and books, poetry, musical scores, sculptures, and so forth — all of this is information used to make connections, tell stories, create arguments, teach and learn. As this material becomes more readily available due to digitization and the growth of digital-born content, we will need tools to help manage and process the ever-expanding corpus of humanities-based data. diPH is one such easy-to-use tool to assist scholars and students, community members and cultural heritage organizations in handling and sharing their data.
While the physical objects that comprise humanities data cannot themselves be loaded into diPH, digital representations of the objects, coupled with descriptive information (metadata), can be used in diPH to facilitate exploration and analysis.
Though diPH is not a parsing tool for data harvesting or text mining, large amounts of data can be “dumped” into diPH’s underlying MySQL database with minor modification. Data output from text mining tools can be formatted to work in diPH. Content that you add can be exported to other diPH projects, or to other databases. In this way, diPH supports the creation and expansion of public data sets for the humanities.
Think of diPH as a visualization tool for your data. The core of diPH is a geo-spatial plugin that allows users to layer historical maps over contemporary satellite images and move seamlessly between those layers. Humanities data can then be layered (or “pinned”) to the map to help visualize spatial connections. Patterns in the pins – similar and disparate clusters of content – might suggest geographic patterns based on the data. For instance, diPH can be used to visualize segregated spaces (see our Charlotte 1911 project, which layers city directory data over historic maps).
The map layers convey change over time, forming a vertical timeline. Map animations will allow a more traditional horizontal timeline display over those layers. diPH’s geospatial capabilities enable the combination of disparate data sets to see connections that would otherwise be very difficult to make. As such, diPH is a powerful tool for visualizing everyday life through layered content.
diPH supports many different types of content, including maps, photographs, PDFs, video, and audio. It allows users to contribute their own content.
Yes! Though not all data contain a geographic aspect (that is, not all data can be linked to corresponding latitude and longitude), most data can be represented spatially — whether in the form of a bar chart, scatter plot, heat map, tree map, or some other visual display. And not all geographic data need be represented spatially, as Charles Joseph Minard’s famous chart (known as a Sankey diagram) of Napolean’s losses during his 1812 Russian Campaign demonstrate.
The point of data visualizations is to find the most effective and clearest way to represent data. Spatialization, then, is a metaphor or graphical representation (an abstraction) of data. Whether geographic in structure or not, visualizations help you make sense of and tell stories about data. As a tool for the visualization of humanities data, diPH offers a non-technical way for representing, presenting, and communicating your data.
Thus, diPH can be used for projects that are not geo-spatial in nature. We are working on expanding its data visualization capabilities to include tabular data, temporal (timelines), network graphs, and hierarchical tree structures (for example, a family tree). It is also easy to embed visualizations produced by other open-source tools, such as Viewshare, or any service that provides HTML embedding code. In short, diPH can be used for a wide range of approaches to displaying and communicating humanities data.
Moreover, diPH has powerful search and browse capabilities. Since it sits over a MySQL database, it can harness the query potential of a standard database. But because diPH can handle non-textual data (images, audio, video), it also functions as a non-textual database.
Because diPH is so user-friendly, projects built in the platform can be shared with a wide range of audiences, from K-12 children and college students, to scholars and community members. diPH projects have been used as tools of exploration and discovery in the classroom. Students have reported that these types of projects help them connect with the past by making it feel more tangible. We are currently exploring how diPH could be used as a learning tool in K-12 classrooms, where students would be able to contribute and share their own research and analyses with one another.
Communities can use diPH to create virtual walking tours or ghost tours of lost spaces. Likewise, diPH can be used for online exhibits or as a repository for a community of researchers to share thoughts. Because diPH supports user-generated content, the toolkit can also be used for crowd-sourcing. For instance, the tool can be used to create additional descriptive tags (geo-tags, for example) for humanities content to add meaning to the data.
diPH does not require technical knowledge or experience writing HTML. Administrative interfaces allow you to add and customize content easily and, hopefully, intuitively.
We expect to have a workable beta version of diPH ready by January 2013. We are looking for projects to help us test the tool with students and faculty. If you’d like to help us test our tool, contact Pam Lach.
Stay tuned for details about diPH 1.0 and follow our progress on our diPH blog.