![]() ![]() Wells - if the conversation dries up, they can always escape to the Folkestone Free Library to learn more about Dickens’s time in the town. This is a new kind of virtual space, where a user can join Elizabeth von Arnim on a visit to H. In the process it quite deliberately breaks down the boundaries between Kent’s historic and fictional characters, to gain the widest possible sense of how place has been explored, reimagined, fought over and fought for in the course of many centuries by the people who live here. But it also makes space for the obscure and out of print, the overtly populist and the downright odd. Yes it features canonical authors, quite a few of them in fact. Kent Maps Online was born of a fascination with untold stories and forgotten things. The constantly evolving field of Digital Humanities gives us new ways to try and capture something of that experience in ways that the traditional monograph was never designed to do. From student nurses in Victorian terraced houses to ice cream vendors outside Norman castles, we all become part of the palimpsest. And we in turn move through this landscape, leaving material traces behind us. For every blue plaque reminding us where the famous – sometimes the infamous - have been before us, there is a museum curator carefully preserving flint tools or pottery fragments and inviting us to imagine the unknown people who used them. Hartley), it is also a country we pass through every day. Acknowledge your lasting debt to other critics and hope like mad you don’t meet them at a conference only to forget which book they wrote (or what it was about).īut if the past is a foreign country (thank you L. Write in an appropriate scholarly register (this will help no end with impact later on). Read widely (without losing focus) and establish appropriate parameters (any vaguely related source from the century either side of your own). Devise a difficult question to which you alone already know the answer. Come up with an abstruse topic, the importance of which is clearly apparent. ![]() The standard model for a Humanities research project looks something like this: ![]() Having explored, now she gets to share her adventures with us. As you read, don’t let her self-deprecating wit fool you: she’s an intrepid explorer of both the county Kent and digital landscapes. I’ll leave it to Carolyn to introduce the project in more depth. This process is ongoing: the site linked to below is very much a work in progress, representing the resources and connections the team at Canterbury Christ Church University have compiled to date, with more collection and more organization still to come. On this project, the iterative, exploratory process that is the nature of academic research has been mirrored by our own collective effort to find ways to present and organize this material for others. Working with Carolyn has given us an opportunity to work, not with a set of already-collected materials, but with researchers currently gathering the physical and digital primary sources, and to help them use Linked Open Data, maps and other tools to organize them. We’ve learned something new with each project, iterating slowly towards our goal of creating something both useful and replicable. Most recently, we’ve been continuing this work with the Plant Humanities Initiative (I can’t WAIT to show you what we’re cooking up for that project). This project touches upon a theme that JSTOR Labs keeps returning to: how can we better connect and present diverse but related content? In projects starting with the Zambezi project and including Cultural History Baseball Cards and the Interview Archive, we’ve explored different ways both to make the connections and to present them to the end user. Loving her enthusiasm and willingness to dive into uncharted waters, we agreed to work together. Carolyn was interested in creating a new interdisciplinary site helping people researching the county of Kent in the southeast of England, one that would allow users, for example, to trace the footsteps of both Dickens and his characters in the region. Carolyn Oulton approached the JSTOR Labs team a few years ago, drawn to us when she saw how project Livingstone’s Zambezi Project showed a variety of primary sources visualized using both geography and time. ![]()
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