Author: Will

By David, Tom and Will

The digital humanities project I chose to reverse engineer was the Illuminating Reno’s Divorce History

Background: From the early 1900’s to the 1970’s Reno was famous for having liberal divorce laws. Before the 1970’s, most states required you to prove fault of the spouse in order to get a divorce. Reno was the first city to introduce the notion of a no fault divorce. This, paired with the fact that you only needed to live in Nevada for 6 weeks to get residency made it the perfect place to go get a divorce. During this era, the phrase going to Reno was synonymous
with getting a divorce.

 

Source: All of the data from the backend of the project was collected from the University of Nevada Library and Special Collections Library. This was a very good source for a DH project, because its all available to the public for educational use, and much of the Nevada Library and Special Collections library have been digitized. It also, importantly has a wealth of information of the history of Reno divorce. The library includes a large variety of sources (pictured), ranging from legal documents to poetry.

 

 

 

Services: This digital humanities project includes many services. One service of the cite is a selection of time peace narratives, each using sources from the library intermixed with prose to illuminate a theme in the history of Reno divorces. Each theme included direct links to any sources used, as well as links to related readings to the readings in the sources. This really allows for user discovering and exploration.


This website seemed to me to be presented in three primary ways.

The first, is through a story driven narrative, styled in a manner similar to a newspaper article.

 

 

 

The DH aspect of the project, however, allows the users to go a layer deeper, and explore any relevant information included in the article on a much deeper level. This is presented to us in the form of an online library, where you can search for an ‘assets’ searching for keywords and applying a large selection of filters.

 

 

The third way is through an interactive timeline. This allowed users to see the
origin and progression of Reno divorce industry.

 

Hi friends!  Shown below is two 2D images of my house that I grew up in.  This is a somewhat simplified model of the house, but it certainly captures its essence.

The Tricky part for me was definitely the roof.  I struggled to make a line on a rectangle that I could pull up to make the roof.  When I figured that out, I spent a bit of time figuring out how to make intersecting figures.  When finalizing my house, I would rotate my camera to find many perspective errors.  Things that looked straight and parallel/perpendicular from camera angle would not from another.

TIP: When making complicated objects, build up from small objects.

I started with simple rectangles to make the base of my house.  I next moved on to construct the shapes needed for the roof.  Once I had the main structure of my house, I proceeded to draw in details, and give them some depth.  Once I had the details I wanted, I added in textures.  I was unable to find textures that looked exactly like my old house, so the coloring of it is a bit off. I also skimped on the amount of detail, as my real house is more complicated than my model.  Overall I am happy with how my house turned out, and I was surprised how easy it was to make something that looks so close to my actually house.

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Will “NightRaven” Richards is a Junior CS major with hopes of winning it all someday. He is from Salt Lake City, Utah, and enjoys both playing and databasing Hearthstone. He was once on a professional League of Legends team, and last year scored a hat trick in soccer on his birthday. His favorite food is Code Red Mountain Dew, and his favorite coding language is C++.