DGHM 110: Introduction to Digital Humanities

Unfortunate Creatures: Pre-modern Natural Disaster Narratives

The peer-reviewed crowd-sourced site Unfortunate Creatures is devoted to making available primary sources reacting to natural disasters in the pre-modern period. Developers invite collaborators, including faculty and mentored undergraduate scholars to contribute. 

Ian F. MacInnes

https://unfortunatecreatures.org

To View: access to a web browser
To contribute: Knowledge of Tei and XML markup language.

There are no specific alternative projects to Unfortunate Creatures, but rather other research that could be sourced to broaden the project's informational scope. Some examples of potential sources include articles from Amsterdam University, University of Warwick, and the NIH. These organizations' studies could all be applied to Unfortunate Creatures to further the understanding of pre-modern natural disasters.

To start the DH project, you need knowledge about pre-modern natural disasters and their effects on our response to modern ones. Contributors must understand transcription encoding using TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) and XML, which help make texts searchable. This enables scholars to mark up texts for structure, meaning, and content.

Unfortunate Creatures needs more work to fully become more accessible. The introductory video has accurate subtitles, and the fonts used are clear, except for some contrasting colors. Some color pairings in the project may be difficult for people with visual impairment to read.

Kenna Childress - Albion College '22

Albion College