diPH demonstration project comes online

We have just completed our first full demonstration project in our diPH prototype – “Recovering Hayti.”

 

Background

Recovering Hayti is an ongoing collaborative project being undertaken with Preservation Durham, a local historical preservation society whose mission “is to protect Durham’s historic assets through Action, Advocacy, and Education.” This demonstration project is an emulation of the “Repopulating Hayti” project (created in “Main Street, Carolina” or MSC), begun as a graduate student project in our Digital Humanities course (fall 2011) with contributions from students in our undergraduate “Main Street, Carolina” class. The project maps the lost community of Hayti, which was largely destroyed during the Urban Renewal efforts of the 1960s.

The Hayti neighborhood of Durham was a vibrant African-American community that flourished from the 1880s to the 1940s—one which W.E.B. DuBois held up as a shining example of black success. With its own thriving businesses and culture, Hayti was home to / or associated with many important institutions, including North Carolina Central University (NCCU), White Rock Baptist Church, and Lincoln Hospital. By 1960, the community was targeted for destruction during the process of Urban Renewal. Many homes and businesses were thus torn down to make way for the Durham Freeway (Highway 147). Very little remains of Hayti’s built environment today, though its legacy still persists.

This projects currently maps over 200 homes and businesses using the photos and parcel appraisals from the Durham Urban Renewal Records. These documents are part of the North Carolina Collection at the Durham County Library, and were digitized by the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. The map, drawn in 1961, was created by City Planning and Architectural Associates of Chapel Hill. The Durham City-County Planning Department provided the digital version of the map.

 

Features

“Recovering Hayti” demonstrates many of the core features that will be included in diPH beta, including the following features that were part of the original MSC project:

  • An interactive historical map layered over contemporary satellite imagery
  • The ability to toggle between the historic and contemporary landscape by changing the level of transparency of the historical map layer
  • Categorized and tagged historical content associated with (pinned to) the map layers. The categories dictate the color of the map pins, and the tags allow for refined searching.
  • Hosting of multi-media content, including photographs, videos, and PDFs

We then added several enhancements to the project:

You can search on exact values of many custom fields pulled from the original parcel appraisal forms

A searchable database of custom fields pulled from the original parcel appraisal forms. Users can search approximately 22 fields, such as Property Owner, Land Value, Number of Stories, Number of Rooms, Number of Inside Baths, and whether properties had heating and electricity. This database adds significant power to the project, by allowing users to see similarities and differences in the neighborhood based on a set of features. The database searches on exact matches for values.

We manually entered the field values, but plan to explore ways that the data could be automatically extracted from the historical document and put into a database.

Enhanced map control buttons that allow searching on a range of values for different data fields, such as land value and building age. These values are useful for visualizing and understanding the extent of the “blight” that affected the area targeted for Urban Renewal.

Enhanced map controls allow for searching on range values.

Embedded contemporary Google Street View for easier comparison of the historic and contemporary landscape.

User-generated content (comments) providing an in-depth look at three buildings. These comments trace the history of the properties and their occupants by using Durham city directories, census data and other statistical/demographic data available from ancestry.com.

Embedded oral history audio about one of the properties (select the “oral history” tag from the Building Use drop-down menu on the right).

We focused a lot of our energy on enhancing the search and browse capabilities of the project for several reasons. For one, we wanted to create multiple entry points into the collection – through the map, through the database search function, and through the various map controls. Equally important to us, we wanted to harness the raw data in the historical collection for the purposes of sense-making. The traditional narrative of Hayti is that it became a “blighted” area by the 1950s, thus necessitating the need for urban renewal. Being able to actually search through the collection through a database interface allows us to get a better, more nuanced, understanding of the nature of “blight,” which may help us better understand the process of urban renewal in Durham more generally.

 

Stay tuned…

An example of range-value searching (on land value).

We are still working on a few features for this project, most notably a help mode that will demo the project’s various features. Users will be able to select the help mode when they first click on the project (a welcome message pops up in a lightbox when you first arrive), but they will be able to view the demo at any point by clicking on the diPH Instructions box.

One final note: you may notice a second project in our diPH prototype, an emulation of our Charlotte 1911 Project. Though the two projects are contained in the same installation of diPH, the data for each project, including the unique map controls, are isolated to each project. This means that you can create multiple disparate projects in one diPH interface!

 

Tell us what you think!

We encourage you to explore the project, play around with its features, and let us know what you think. You can comment directly on the site, or you can email us at digitalinnovation@unc.edu.

Welcome to the diPH Project Blog

Welcome to the diPH project blog. These updates will chronicle our progress creating the beta version of diPH (pronounced “diff”), and eventually, our work towards the release of diPH 1.0.

About diPH

Built on the WordPress platform and its plugin-based architecture, diPH is a flexible, repurposable, fully extensible digital public humanities toolkit designed for non-technical users. diPH can be used to build web-based community projects that facilitate interactive exploration and discovery and story-telling.

diPH is intended as a versatile tool for managing and visualizing humanities data — archival records, historic photographs, maps, interviews and oral histories, field notes, newspapers and books, poetry, and so forth. The core of diPH will be 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).

diPH is ideal for making sense of large, comprehensive data sets such as city directories or census data. Though diPH is not a parsing tool for data harvesting, large amounts of data can be “dumped” into diPH’s underlying MySQL database with minor modification. Once the data are in diPH, a range of visualizations will be possible, including non-spatial visualizations such as network graphs, timelines, and hierarchical tree structures. Thus, diPH is a tool for visualizing everyday life. As we take on test projects, we’ll be able to push the boundaries of what is possible with diPH, thereby expanding its uses and utility for others.

The diPH Prototype

We first started working with Joe Hope of RENCI on a diPH prototype in the late fall of 2011. In fairly short order, we were able to mimic the major features of Main Street, Carolina (a digital history toolkit for cultural heritage organizations which was the inspiration for our toolkit), including:

  • Layering historic maps from the Carolina Digital Library and Archives over contemporary satellite imagery, coupled with the ability to toggle between the two and change the transparency of the historical overlays
  • Pinning markers to the map with city directory data (see our P3 project for more on our efforts to automatically harvest data from directories)
  • The ability to filter data by different categories and tags

Once we were convinced WordPress was a viable option for the diPH platform, we began working on a fully-elaborated demonstration project in earnest.

Demonstration Project

We selected the Hayti Urban Renewal Project as our first full-fledged demonstration project using our diPH prototype. We had first begun work on this project in a graduate seminar in the Fall 2011 semester, using the already-digitized urban renewal records from the Durham Public Library’s North Carolina Collection. Developed in collaboration with Preservation Durham, this project models how other communities can document and recover neighborhoods lost to urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s.

In addition to diPH’s base functionality, this project features:

  • Multi-media content, including photographs, PDFs, and videos
  • User-generated content featuring student research on several of the properties
  • Enhanced search and filter capabilities to allow for a more enriching exploration of the project

Other Projects

We have also begun a pilot project with the Southern Oral History Program to map the “Long Women’s Movement” in the South. Unlike previous digitization efforts, we are working on a project that not only delivers digital content (audio and transcripts) but also spatializes the people, places, and ideas of the movement. Doing this will enable users to search across oral histories in a way not possible with traditional oral history delivery systems, all the while experiencing a more streamlined interaction with the oral history collection. Read more about this project.

diPH Beta

Joe Hope of RENCI is leading our diPH development team, which includes Bryan Gaston and Chien-Yi Hou of the Digital Innovation Lab. Pam Lach is the project manager.

We have already begun coding the core plugin of diPH beta, with a target completion date of December 31, 2012. In addition to a range of critical features and functionalities, the beta version will also include user-friendly administrative interfaces for easy content creation and management.

We are hoping to start testing the beta software in the Spring 2013 semester.

Stay tuned for our progress on diPH beta!