Digital Humanities & Data Visualisation Design & Development Portfolio

by David Kelly @davkell LinkedIn

Selected examples of Data Visualisation and Digital Humanitites work carried out by David Kelly, 2014 — 2017.

ELMSS

Earlier Latin Manuscripts

elmss.nuigalway.ie

Tools for studying the scripts of the oldest Latin manuscripts. This database provides a number of data visualisation tools along with curated collections of manuscripts. Open data access is enabled through a RESTful JSON API to allow the integration of the dataset with other applications, and .csv exports.

Responsible for

All design and development of the web application.

Technologies Used

Data storage MySQL database
RESTful Web application Laravel PHP
Front-end D3, Leaflet, highcharts.com, Underscore, Bootstrap
RECIRC Homepage

RECIRC

The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women's Writing, 1550 - 1700

recirc.nuigalway.ie . The project database is not currently public.

RECIRC is an ERC-funded project researching the impact made by women writers and their works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Made up of a team of 10 researchers based at the National University of Ireland, Galway, the project runs from 2014 to 2019.

Responsible for

Technical architecture, infrastructure setup, design, development, maintenance, and support of the project's database & associated web application; assistance with design requirements of the marketing website, and liasing with external contractors during its construction.

Technologies Used

Data storage MySQL database (on Amazon RDS), Dropbox & Amazon S3 (file storage)
RESTful Web application Laravel PHP Framework, includes an integration with Mailgun (to allow researchers to email manuscript images into the database)
Search & Data Viz Elasticsearch, Kibana, data exports to .csv, .gexf (for Gephi Networks)
Admin front-end Angular.js, D3.js (minimal)
Ossian Online

Ossian Online

ossianonline.org

A project to publish the various editions of the sequence of eighteenth-century works known collectively as the Ossian poems. The web application publishes TEI-encoded texts, and provides with a tool (currently in private beta) to enable social annotation of the text.

Responsible for

All design and development of the web application.

Technologies Used

Data storage Texts encoded in TEI, SQLite database
RESTful Web application Laravel PHP, with a social login feature (via Facebook) for annotation section, XSLT to transform TEI
Front-end Annotation uses Annotator.js, Bootstrap, jQuery
Personae Screenshot

Personæ

A Character-Visualisation Tool for Dramatic Texts

www.davidkelly.ie/projects/personae/

An interactive visualisation tool that uses the XML files from the New Variorum Shakespeare edition of The Comedy of Errors to create a resource for exploring patterns of speeches by and mentions of characters in Shakespeare's work.

Responsible for

Initial concept, visual design and development of the resource.

Data was extracted from the TEI encoded files using Python, and transformed into a set of JSON files. D3.js used these files to create the interactive visualisation.

Technologies Used

Data Python was used to extract data from the TEI files
Front-end D3.js
Irish Famine Archive

Irish Famine Archive

faminearchive.nuigalway.ie

A project to make accessible eyewitness accounts of the Irish famine migration to Canada in 1847-1848 that would otherwise be unknown.

The project received a considerable amount of traffic soon after its launch following its inclusion in two interactive series on the Irish Famine produced by the BBC.

Responsible for

Design and development of the archive.

Technologies Used

Web back-end Slim PHP
Classic Irish Plays

Classic Irish Plays

classicirishplays.com

Classic Irish Plays is an Irish Research Council-funded online database which gives theatre practitioners, researchers, teachers, students, and, indeed, all fans of great literature access to scripts by the great Irish playwrights whose work has entered – or partially entered – the public domain

Responsible for

Visual design and development of the archive.

Technologies Used

CMS Kirby - a CMS that uses flat files, written in Markdown, for data-storage.
Front-end Bootstrap
Galway Dashboard Homepage

Galway Dashboard

Visualising key data for Galway City and County

galwaydashboard.ie

This is part of a project commissioned by Galway City Council and Galway County Council to carry out an industrial baseline study. We identified key data points that are relevant to the development of an economic plan and using public data sources visualized and mapped them to allow users to compare areas, as well as providing aggregated data for both City and County.

The categories of data being visualised are: People, Social, Enterprise and Environment.

Responsible for

All design, development and data visualisation within the web application.

Technologies Used

Data Storage MySQL, static JSON and CSV files
Web application Laravel PHP
Front-end D3, Leaflet, highcharts.com, Underscore, Bootstrap

Robertson Network Data Visualisations

About the project: davidkelly.ie/2015/03/23/robertson-network-data-visualisations/

The visualisations are based on a small dataset that shows the path of postal surveys among a network of people, connected to William Robertson (1721–1793). The data is the result of research by Dr. Ida Federica Pugliese, at the Moore Institute in NUI Galway.

The objective was to create a set of visualisations suitable for use by Ida during a conference presentation: "Questionnaires and Scholarly Networks in the Enlightenment", given at the The Republic Of Letters Goes Digital Conference, NUI Galway, Ireland, 20 March, 2015.

Responsible for

Design & data visualisation of the dataset's relational and geographic networks.

Technologies Used

Network Graphs Gephi
Visual Design Adobe Illustrator was used to improve the visual design of the graphs produced by Gephi.
Network

Galway's Cultural Networks

Exploring Galway's cultural and artisic communities

Currently Unpublished

Based on interviews with cultural practitioners, data was gathered on a range of areas, including the types of professional relationships they have, and the geography of those relationships.

Responsible for

Contributing to the research design, initial data analysis and visualisation.

Technologies Used

Data processing A mix of Python & PHP were used for merging the questionnaire spreadsheets, data cleaning, and network construction. Open Refine was used for geo-coding the data.
Network Graphs Gephi
Visual Design Adobe Illustrator was used to improve the visual design of the graphs produced by Gephi.
Duanaire Interactive Prototype

Duanaire - Data Visualisation Prototype

Unpublished Interactive Prototype

The Duanaire project focuses on Irish economic history data, and in particular, Irish fiscal history data, which makes accessible online a range of datasets in flexible forms to diverse audiences. The project is constructing a unique infrastructure for the imaginative curation, exploration, and sharing of significant tranches of Irish economic history data.

The objective in creating this prototype, which was built using a subset of the project's data, was to allow users who are not subject-matter experts to explore one of the project's datasets. The output allows users to customise their view of a complex time-series dataset featuring multiple categories, by using easy-to-understand filters, interactive maps and charts.

Responsible for

UI design & development of the interactive prototype. A final visual design was not part of the scope of the project.

Technologies Used

RESTful API The Laravel PHP Framework was used to construct a RESTful API that provided access to the pre-existing database.
Front-end The map was built using Leaflet, the charts with D3, and the interactive filters, including the timeline, with jQuery.
Exploring Dáil Data

Exploring Dáil Data

Data visualisation using Dáil transcripts

gov.davidkelly.ie

Data is displayed as a graph, that shows what speakers talked about what people, organisations, or locations ("Named Entities"). The visualisation allows you to navigate using the "bubbles" or nodes – doing this will show you who else has spoken about a topic, or other topics a speaker has mentioned.

Responsible for

All design & development - this was a personal project that started as an experiment with Python's Natural Language Processing Toolkit and an open dataset.

Technologies Used

Data processing Python NLTK.
Web back-end Laravel PHP Framework used for the data-access API
Front-end D3 is used for the network visualisation
Creative Edge

Mapping the Creative Edge

mapping.creative-edge.eu

Interactive map-based visualisation of data related to Creative Industries and Creative Culture within 4 peripheral regions of Europe.

Responsible for

UI design & development of the interactive visualisations; back-end web application and database to support the visualisations; automated data collection infrastructure to supplement manual collection efforts.

Technologies Used

Web application The Laravel PHP Framework.
Data Storage MySQL Database
Front-end The mapping was built using Leaflet, and the interactive filters with jQuery. Additional (non-public) data visualisations used D3.
Creative Momentum

Creative Momentum

Automated collection of social-media data, data visualisation, data management infrastructure.

Not currently public

Automated data gathering from a variety of social media sources. Data for collection is selected based on geographic location and time.

A data management web application for structuring and storing project data was also developed to support the work of the project's research team.

Further information on the project is available from whitakerinstitute.ie/project/creative-momentum

Responsible for

Technical design & development.

Technologies Used

Data collection & processing Python
Web application Laravel PHP Framework
Data Storage A mix of MySQL, .csv and JSON data

Additional Projects

Below are a number of other DH projects I have worked on: