From ‘analogue’ to digital history

Doing small ‘hacky’ steps rather than a whole transformation

Dr Katrina NavickasUniversity of Hertfordshire

k.navickas@herts.ac.uk

Why do it?• Speed and volume – ‘automate

the boring stuff’• Be more systematic and

comprehensive• Do more with your databases• new ways of visualising research• Making research more

interactive – public engagement

• New methods, theories and approaches to analysis• Historians (and students) now

use digitised sources – imperative we understand and critically analyse how these sources are made and organised

It all starts with a database – once you’ve got a spreadsheet of data, you can ‘add value’

Using Google Fusion Tables – upload your database & you can manipulate the data immediately

Start with online tools – no experience necessary

http://sandbox.idre.ucla.edu/tools/geocoder/

http://mapwarper.net/

Building a historical gazetteer• Extracted place names run through

http://sandbox.idre.ucla.edu/tools/geocoder/ • Run again through Python code with

parameters of lat and long to check outliers • To remember: Add different variations of

addresses, including punctuation • ‘Missing’ places located by eye – locating

them on geo-referenced historic maps layered on QGIS or Google Earth – and lat/long entered manually

Try some mapping using QGIS

Learn some basic techniques using Programminghistorian.org

Text-mining – makes you more critically aware of the parameters & the flaws in digitised sources

http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/generating-an-ordered-data-set-from-an-OCR-text-file

politicalmeetingsmapper.co.uk on the Omeka platform

http://protesthistory.org.uk/