Digital HistoryA (personal) introduction

Dr James BakerCurator, Digital Research

@j_w_baker

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Text attribution Greg Wilson, Two Solitudes, SPLASH 2013 (29 October 2013) http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/splash-2013

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License unless stated otherwise.

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“The emergence of the new digital humanities isn't an isolate academic phenomenon. The institutional and disciplinary

changes are part of a larger cultural shift, a rapid cycle of emergence and convergence in technology and culture”

Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014), 31.

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disciplinecamp and camps sentence

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‘Digital history is an approach to examining and representing the past that

takes advantage of new communication technologies such as computers and the Web. It draws on essential features of the digital realm, such as databases, hypertextualization, and networks, to create and share historical knowledge.

Digital history complements other forms of history – indeed it draws its strength and methodological rigor from this age-old form of human understanding while using the latest technology.’

‘What is Digital History?’ Center for History and New Media, George Mason University http://chnm.gmu.edu/ (accessed 25 March 2014)

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Research…in Digital History

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‘Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human

capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less make sense of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of computational linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are working toward a large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were valued and transmitted during this period’

David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, ‘Infectious Texts: Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers’ (2013)

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‘Early users of medieval books of hours and prayer books left signs of their reading in the form of fingerprints

in the margins. The darkness of their fingerprints correlates to the intensity of their use and handling. A densitometer -- a machine that measures the darkness of a reflecting surface -- can reveal which texts a reader favored.’

Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer’, Journal of Historians of Nederlandish Art (2010)

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‘The Digital Harlem website presents information, drawn from legal records, newspapers and other archival and published sources, about everyday life in New York City's Harlem neighborhood in the years 1915-1930 […] Unlike most studies of Harlem in the early twentieth century, this project focuses not on black artists and the black middle class, but on the lives of ordinary African New Yorkers’

Digital Harlem: Everyday Life 1915-1930

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‘[T]he very phrase ‘digital history’ suggests separateness from, or the existence of, ‘non-digital’ historical

practice. This seems highly problematic though. Both the idea that ‘digital history’ constitutes a specific sub-discipline, existing next to other historical sub-disciplines such as cultural, social, political or gender history, as well as the idea that it should essentially be seen as an auxiliary

science of history, feed into the myth that historical practice in general can be uncoupled from technological, and thus methodological, developments and that going digital is a choice, which, I cannot emphasise strongly enough, it is not.’

Gerben Zaagsma, ‘On Digital History’, BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review 128:4 (2013)

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Approaches…in Digital History

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Newspaper Man photograph courtesy of Flickr user Ed Stevenson / Creative Commons Licensed

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Topic Model (10 topics, using stemming and term frequency–inverse document frequency) using publication dates over time for entries listed under ‘Articles’ in my Zotero Library generated using

Paper Machines, 17 September 2013.

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Magnus Huber, 'The Old Bailey Corpus: spoken English in the 18th and 19th Centuries', Institute of Historical Research (21 February 2012)

The Old Bailey Corpus Online

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Asymmetrical Encounters

E-Humanity Approaches to Reference Cultures in Europe, 1815–1992

How did the large and cultural powerful countries Britain, France, and Germany influence public debates in smaller countries like the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg?

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“If each paragraph in the infinite archive, all

the trillions of words, is simply a collection of data, it immediately becomes

something that can be tied to a series of

other things – to any other bit of data. A name, a date, a selection of words, or a phrase […] defined as a polygon on the surface of the earth. In other words, the texts that form the

basis for western history can now be geo-referenced and tied directly to a historical / geographical understanding of spatial distribution, which can in turn be cross analysed with any other series of measures of text –

textmining makes text available for embedding within a geographical frame.”

Tim Hitchcock, ‘Place and the Politics of the Past’ (2012)

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“In this instance we used the Spatial

Humanities: Place-name Proximity Search tool (SHPPS) in combination with the Edinburgh Geoparser and the Corpus

Query Processor to scan through all forty volumes [of the Reports of the General Register Office for England and Wales between 1840

and 1880] and identify every instance in which a place name in the corpus appeared alongside (or, in other words,

collocated with) the words ‘Cholera’, ‘Diarrhoea’ or ‘Dysentery’ (hereafter, ChDiDy).* This enabled us to create a geo-referenced database, which we then used to study the spatial patterns underlying the GRO’s reporting of these diseases.

Spatial Humanities, ‘Mapping Disease and Mortality in Victorian England & Wales’ (2013)

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Virtual St Paul’s Cross Project

Notes from talk at Institute of Historical Research, 18 February 2014.

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Theory…in Digital History

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Bob Nicholson, ‘Counting Culture; or, How to Read Victorian Newspapers from a Distance’, Journal of Victorian Culture 17:2 (2012)

“Faced with this mountain of print, we have two choices: to continue subjecting tiny fragments of Victorian culture to close reading, or to supplement this approach by exploring a much larger proportion of the archive through ‘distant reading’.”

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‘[...] en histoire, comme ailleurs, ce qui compte, ce n’est pas la machine, mais le problème. La machine n’a d’intérêt que dans la mesure où elle permet d’aborder des questions neuves, originales par les méthodes, les contenus et surtout l’ampleur’

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ‘L’historien et l’ordinateur’, Le territoire de l’historien (Paris 1973)

‘In history, as elsewhere, what counts is not the machine, but the problem. The machine is only interesting insofar as it allows to tackle new questions that are original because of their methods, content and especially scale’

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Prototype Project Task

–Groups of 5 or 6.–Use the cards to come up with a potential

project idea:• Combination of tool cards and collection card.

– note: you all have different card combinations.

• Draws on what has been talked about this morning• Uses the best of the skills and backgrounds your group

can offer

–Feedback• Keep it short!

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Digital History…in History

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It should not be assumed that, because DH emphasizes practice and making use of computers, it's therefore naively instrumental or positivist in its

assumptions, or that its hands-on doing necessarily precludes theory. Only an impoverished view of theory as pure verbal and written discourse, separate from practice, would produce such an assumption.

Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014), 179.

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Statistics may serve to reveal or clarify a particular tendency; but

how we interpret that tendency - the significance we attach to it and

the causes we adduce for it - is a matter for seasoned historical judgement, in which the historian trained exclusively in quantitative methods would be woefully deficient.

John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (2nd editon, 1991), 197.

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Digital History…in History?

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Thank you!@j_w_bakerjames.baker@bl.ukhttp://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

Slides: ???Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/11291918