About Us

We are the Carleton Digital Humanities 110 President Project!

Our goal throughout this project is to highlight the Carleton College Presidents as figures of the college students often do not know much about. In order to go beyond simply biographical information, we use textual analysis and landmarks across campus to identify the ways that the presidents are and were seen in students daily lives on campus.

Sources:

The main sources we used for this project were Carletonians, Inaugural Addresses, and photographs of presidents housed in the Carleton College Archives, alongside information from the Carleton College Perlman Teaching Museum related to portraits on campus. We also used biographical information on each president from the official Carleton College website. With the help of Eric Hillemann, we scanned and accessed these primary sources to work with them in a digital format and include some within our website.

Processes:

Our first step within the multi-phase process was the collection of data from our outside sources. For the sentiment corpus analysis, Carletonian’s were taken from the last publishing date of each school year since 1877 and downloaded from the Carleton College Archives. These pdfs were then used within Voyant Tools and given subjective analysis beyond the positive/negative correlation tool to approximate the general sentiments students had at the time to their college president. For the geographical analysis of the portrait and building locations, a custom spreadsheet was created recording the latitude and longitude of the location of each portrait in the time it spent at that location alongside other relevant facts. Information provided by the Perlman Teaching Museum was only confident from 2010 to the current day in location data but there is speculative information going back even further. The spreadsheet was then loaded into ArcGIS and a web app was created allowing users to search for a specific president’s portrait and interact with the different spaces they are at.

Presentation:

Our project uses an array of formats to make information on the presidents more accessible and easily digestible through presentation. The primary presentation platform is a WordPress website that acts as the center for all of the project components discussed previously. We chose WordPress for flexibility in website design and its intuitive and familiar structure that was much easier to work with in deciding how to best showcase our information. The website opens with a welcome page that creates an entry discussion on the motivations behind our historical and present day analyses and the importance of the project as a whole. As users scroll on the main page, they will see pictures at the bottom of the Home page of former presidents providing a greater look into them not only as figures but as people. The top bar contains sections for “Presidents of Carleton College,” “Inauguration,” “Presidents Across Campus,” “Public Sentiment,” and “About Us” page. In the “Presidents of Carleton College” page, biographical information is given about each of the presidents and their accomplishments during their tenure at the college. The “Inauguration” and “Public Sentiment” pages provide textual analysis through Voyant Tools, with the analysis on general public sentiment including graphical displays as well showing the changes in positive and negative associations. The “Presidents Across Campus” page presents the movement of portraits across campus as time spatial data, allowing for easier presentation of the way in which movement has occurred across the past decade. Each location includes pop-up information including the name of the building it is located in, the biography of the president in the portrait, and the date in began staying in said location. We hope that these presentation choices come together to create a multimedia digital experience that showcases more about the humanistic historical element to Carleton Presidents and making information about them more accessible and engaging for contemporary audiences.

The Team