I’ll be growing an experimental space in the next two weeks and beyond as a way to learn digital humanities techniques, tools, perspectives, and principles. My subject focus will be the work of Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842-1904), a painter, stained glass artist, socialite, and designer of book covers for Houghton Mifflin in Boston in the 1880s and 1890s. The last two roles offer an especially tantalizing range of options for investigating Whitman’s means of production. Her designs are well represented in several freely-available digital image collections (notably the Boston Public Library’s Flickr collection), and a few of her own texts about art have been digitized, including The Making of Pictures, 1886. I would like to explore the reflexive nature of social and business connections as well as Whitman’s public voice through an analysis of her social networks, word choices, topics, “patrons,” etc.

Source: Venturing