History in the Digital Age

...Historians have only just begun to explore what history looks like in the digital medium. Increasingly, university departments are seeking scholars to translate history into this fast-paced, widely accessible environment and to work in digital history; however, they have found that without well-defined examples of digital scholarship, established best practices, and, especially, clear standards of review for tenure, few scholars have fully engaged with the digital medium.

-Douglas Seefeldt and WIlliam G. Thomas III (2009)

History in the Digital Age

"How is New Media Reshaping the Work of Historians?" AHA Perspectives

Robert Townsend | 2010

(not everyone is in the digital age yet)

History in the Digital Age

Accessibility and Searchability through Digitization

History in the Digital Age

Greater Communication with Colleagues

#twitterstorians

The Cost of Failing to Connect

“I nevertheless am a historian”: Digital Historical Practice and Malpractice around Black Confederate Soldiers in Writing History in the Digital Age by Leslie Madsen-Brooks

The rapid spread of black Confederate soldier narratives is a function not only of proponents’ apparent desire to openly admire the Confederacy without appearing to favor a white supremacist society and government, but also of the rise of inexpensive and easy-to-use digital tools.

The Cost of Failing to Connect

"technically, no"

misleading

questionable 

interpretations

blatant revisionism

blatant revisionism

Today, however, the digital footprint of people who maintain there were significant numbers of black Confederate soldiers appears far larger than that of historians and others who attempt to refute the myth. (Madsen-Brooks 2011)

The Cost of Failing to Connect

Alas, the twenty-first century footprint is no longer merely digital; a textbook distributed to Virginia students in September 2010 stated that “thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.”

“I nevertheless am a historian”: Digital Historical Practice and Malpractice around Black Confederate Soldiers in Writing History in the Digital Age by Leslie Madsen-Brooks

Digital History is Immersive

To do digital history...is to create a framework, an ontology, through the technology for people to experience, read, and follow an argument about a historical problem.

Digital history possesses a crucial set of common components—the capacity for play, manipulation, participation, and investigation by the reader. Dissemination in digital form makes the work of the scholar available for verification and examination; it also offers the reader the opportunity to experiment. He or she can test the interpretations of others, formulate new views, and mine the materials of the past for overlooked items and clues. The reader can immerse him/herself in the past, surrounded with the evidence, and make new associations. The goal of digital history might be to build environments that pull readers in less by the force of a linear argument than by the experience of total immersion and the curiosity to build connections.

-WIlliam G. Thomas III (2008)

Interchange: The Promise of Digital History - Journal of American History   

Digital History is Visual

The digital medium is a visual one and has already helped us see the past in ways that were difficult to do before. This has happened on several levels. There’s the ability to access images and video with new efficiency and therefore to make these forms a more central part of historical analysis. There are the possibilities for mapping: the plotting of data though gis maps to see the spatial dimensions of people’s lives or capturing movement through animated maps. Even databases have helped us to see social networks, such as families and communities, with new clarity.

-Amy Murrell Taylor (2008)

Interchange: The Promise of Digital History - Journal of American History   

Digital History is Public History

Digital history is a kind of public history: when we put materials online, we enter into a conversation with individuals from all walks of life, with various voices and degrees of professionalism...

Edward L. Ayers has argued that, while a “democratization of history” has taken place since the emergence of new historical fields in academia, a “democratization of audience” has yet to come.

-Shawn Graham, Guy Massie, and Nadine Feuerherm (2013)

"The HeritageCrowd Project: A Case Study in Crowdsourcing Public History" in Writing History in the Digital Age  

(in theory)

Digital History is Collaborative

-Scott Weingart "Submissions to Digital Humanities 2015 (pt 1)" [scottbot.net]

This second stage will require interdisciplinary collaboration, the likes of which most historians have yet to embrace; cooperative initiatives that involve historians, programmers, information architects, designers, and publishers. Libraries are already creating the infrastructure to collect, manage, explore, and manipulate these sources and to support and sustain the various forms of “new-model scholarship” that might come out of them; historians must join in this essential next step or, as Abby Smith warns us, face losing our scholarship to the “dustbin of history.”

-Seefeldt & Thomas "What is Digital History? (2009)

Digital History Enhances Traditional Methods

[D]igital capacities enhance research with all kinds of sources and scales. GIS and various forms of visualizations and other analytic representations or manipulations can be, and have been, as liberatingly innovative in dealing with bounded, proximate data as they are with unbounded and globally distributed datasets. New tools for engaging oral history sources in their primary media illustrate the point: some of the smaller-scale engagements unfolding new capacities for dealing seriously as historians with the orality, performance, and embodiment in these documents have been more productive, instructive, and exciting than the imperfect uses to which very large collections of digital audio and video interviews have been put.

-Michael Frisch (2008)

Interchange: The Promise of Digital History - Journal of American History   

Digital History Challenges Traditional Methods

Digital history and the abundance it tries to address make many historical arguments seem anecdotal rather than comprehensive. Hypotheses based on a limited number of examples, as many dissertations and books still are, seem flimsier when you can scan millions of books at Google to find counterexamples. I believe it will be possible to marry digital techniques with close reading and traditional methods, but very soon it will be perilous to ignore these new techniques.

-Dan Cohen (2008)

Interchange: The Promise of Digital History - Journal of American History   

Data Enough at Last

Moving from Scarcity to Abundance

[Historians] may need to figure out new ways to sort their way through the potentially overwhelming digital record of the past. Contemporary historians are already groaning under the weight of their sources. Robert Caro has spent twenty-six years working his way through just the documents on Lyndon B. Johnson’s pre-vice-presidential years—including 2,082 boxes of Senate papers. Surely, the injunction of traditional historians to look at "everything" cannot survive in a digital era in which "everything” has survived.

The historical narratives that future historians write may not actually look much different from those that are crafted today, but the methodologies they use may need to change radically. If we have, for example, a complete record of everything said in 2010, can we offer generalizations about the nature of discourse on a topic simply by "reading around"? Wouldn't we need to engage in some more methodical sampling in the manner of, say, sociology? Would this revive the social-scientific approaches with which historians flirted briefly in the 1970s? Wouldn't historians need to learn to write complex searches and algorithms that would allow them to sort through this overwhelming record in creative, but systematic, ways? 

-Roy Rosenzweig. "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era"
American Historical Review (June 2003)

Big Data: A Requirement?

As datasets expand into the realm of the big, computational analysis ceases to be a “nice to have” and becomes a simple requirement. While not all historians will have to become fluent with data (just as not all historians are oral historians, or use Geographic Information Systems, or work within communities), digital historians will become part of the disciplinal mosaic.

 

-Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, Scott Weingart The Historian's Macroscope: Big Digital History (accessed 02-18-2015)

Screenshot of Maranhão Inventories Slave Database

The Limits of Big Data

Digital history does not offer truths, but only a new way of interpreting and understanding traces of the past. More traces, yes, but still traces: brief shadows of things that were. Even with the most advanced computer, it is still up to the historian to put these traces together.

-Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, Scott Weingart The Historian's Macroscope: Big Digital History (accessed 02-18-2015)

Historical Social Networks

Kindred Britain is a network of nearly 30,000 individuals — many of them iconic figures in British culture — connected through family relationships of blood, marriage, or affiliation. It is a vision of the nation’s history as a giant family affair.

Kindred Britain | http://kindred.stanford.edu/

Large databases

Slave Biographies | slavebiographies.org

Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network is an open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. It includes the names, ethnicities, skills, occupations, and illnesses of individual slaves. Users can access data about slaves in colonial Louisiana and Maranhão, Brazil and download datasets, search for ancestors, and run statistical analysis.

Distant Reading of Archival Texts

Quantifying Kissinger | quantifyingkissinger.com

As larger and larger archives of human cultural output are accumulated, historians are beginning to employ other tools & methods...to overcome ‘information overload’ and facilitate new historical interpretations. This project is an application of ‘big data’ computational text analysis techniques to research...approximately 17500 meeting memoranda (‘memcons’) & teleconference transcripts (‘telcons’) detailing Kissinger’s correspondence during the period 1969-1977: it is a first effort at ‘Diplonomics’.

Topic Modeling of Archival Documents

Mining the Dispatch | dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch

This project, "Mining the Dispatch," seeks to explore—and encourage exploration of—the dramatic and often traumatic changes as well as the sometimes surprising continuities in the social and political life of Civil War Richmond. It uses as its evidence nearly the full run of the Richmond Daily Dispatch from the eve of Lincoln's election in November 1860 through...December 1865, an archive of over 112,000 pieces consisting of nearly 24 million words.

Reimagining Historical Sources

Queering Slavery Working Group | qswg.tumblr.com/

QSWG was formed to discuss issues related...histories of intimacy, sex, and sexuality during the period of Atlantic slavery. Guided by the question, “What would it mean to Queer Slavery?,” the group seeks out queer encounters in slavery’s archive...QSWG brings discussions happening in black queer studies, queer of color studies, and histories of enslaved and free people of African descent across the diaspora into lurid and profane contact..."You cannot find in the archive what you cannot imagine."

Historical Making

Kits for Culture | maker.uvic.ca/kch/

The primary aim of the project is to express the histories of media, technologies, and science through new media, especially physical computing and digital fabrication techniques...Physical kits “remake” old technologies and media that have been largely ignored, no longer exist, or are difficult to access. Rather than communicating humanities research solely in a written format, these open-source kits encourage hands-on, exploratory engagements that playfully resist instrumentalism as well as determinism.

Spatial History

http://www.making-business.org/2014/12/7-benefits-digital-mapping-business-owners/

"The Spatial Turn"

Beyond the academy, GIS opened questions of vertigo-inspiring scale. By scraping spatial data from archives of unprecedented vastness, researchers stood a better chance than ever before of addressing problems of tremendous size...

The spatial turn represents the impulse to position these new tools against old questions...We remember that every discipline in the humanities and social sciences has been stamped with the imprint of spatial questions about nations and their boundaries, states and surveillance, private property, and the perception of landscape, all of which fell into contestation during the nineteenth century.

 

-Jo Guldi, "What is the Spatial Turn?" http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/

Spatial History

Historians by definition focus on time. Chronology will always remain at the heart of a discipline that seeks to explain change over time, but this has left historians open to the charge from geographers that they write history as if it took place on the head of a pin. The charge is not true, but sometimes it is uncomfortably close to being true...Historians still routinely write about political change, social change, class relations, gender relations, cultural change as if the spatial dimensions of these issue matter little if at all.

-Richard White, What is Spatial History?

Networks & Human Movement

Conventional maps that represent this world as it appears from space signally fail to capture the severe environmental constraints that governed the flows of people, goods and information...ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.

Orbis | orbis.stanford.edu/

Urban Spatial History

The Digital Harlem website presents information drawn from legal records, newspapers & other archival & published sources, about everyday life in New York City's Harlem neighborhood in 1915-30.

Digital Harlem | digitalharlem.org

Representational Space

In my historical research, I use new media to quickly illustrate concepts that would be difficult to articulate in text alone. I am particularly interested in the ability of 3D reconstructions to show how historical architecture manipulated space & thus recover the experience and meaning of past environments.

Coltrain Portfolio | jamescoltrain.com/digital/schol.html

Archives-based History Projects

http://www.hastac.org/blogs/turnator/2013/10/15/digital-history-group-book-review-month-1-toni-wellers-history-digital-age

Archives as Supplements

Valley of the Shadow | valley.lib.virginia.edu

The Valley Project details life in two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Browns's Raid through the era of Reconstruction In the digital archive you may explore thousands of original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records, left by men and women...Giving voice to hundreds of individual people, the Valley Project tells forgotten stories of life during the era of the Civil War.

Interpretive Layers on Archives

Going to the Show | docsouth.unc.edu/gtts/

Going to the Show documents & illuminates the experience of movies & moviegoing in North Carolina...The project situates early moviegoing within the experience of urban life in the state's big cities & small towns. It highlights the ways that race conditioned the experience of moviegoing for all North Carolinians- white, African American, and American Indian...Supporting its documentation of more than 1300 movie venues across 200 communities is a searchable archive of thousands of contemporaneous artifacts: newspaper ads and articles, photographs, postcards, city directories, and 150 original architectural drawings.

Crowdsourced Archives

History Harvest | historyharvest.unl.edu

The History Harvest is an open, digital archive of historical artifacts gathered from communities across the United States. The [project] partners with institutions and individuals within highlighted communities to collect, preserve, and share their rich histories. We believe that our collective history is more diverse and multi-faceted than most people give credit for and that most of this history is not found in archives, historical societies, museums or libraries, but rather in the stories that ordinary people have to tell from their own experience and in the things - the objects and artifacts - that people keep and collect to tell the story of their lives.

What are archives?

Materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator, especially those materials maintained using the principles of provenance, original order, and collective control; permanent records. 

-Society of American Archivists Glossary

Principles of Archives

Authenticity

The quality of being genuine, not a counterfeit, and free from tampering, and is typically inferred from internal and external evidence, including its physical characteristics, structure, content, and context.

Authenticity is closely associated with the creator (or creators) of a record. First and foremost, an authentic record must have been created by the individual represented as the creator. 

Authenticity can be verified by testing physical and formal characteristics of a record. The ink used to write a document must be contemporaneous with the document's purported date. The style and language of the document must be consistent with other, related documents that are accepted as authentic.

-Society of American Archivists Glossary

Principles of Archives

Provenance

respect des fonds

This principle holds that that significance of archival materials is heavily dependent on the context of their creation, and that the arrangement and description of these materials should be directly related to their original purpose and function

Provenance: 1. The origin or source of something. - 2. Information regarding the origins, custody, and ownership of an item or collection. - Society of American Archivists Glossary 

-Hensen, Steven L., The First Shall Be First: APPM and Its Impacts on American Archival Description. Archivaria 35 (1993)

Photo: curatememe.tumblr.com

Digital collections do not need to be digital archives...

...but the principles are instructive

Thinking of a digital object as a surrogate for an object [or for knowledge represented by that object]

Demonstrate authenticity  

Demonstrate authenticity by preserving context

From: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kcarrothers/description.html

Parts of Well-Structured Metadata

Data fields are the named units of information, often also referred to as “elements” or “categories,” which are organized into a record by a data structure. In terms of our metaphor, data fields and structure standards are like bottles waiting to be filled.

From: Elings, Mary W.; Waibel, Günter. Metadata for all: Descriptive standards and metadata sharing across libraries, archives and museums. First Monday, 2007

Title, Subject, Description, Abstract, Creator, Publisher, Date, Format, Language

A Schema for Every Occasion....

Right: Description of core CDWA fields

Below: MODS record for a book

Data content and data values are the information proper stored in the data fields. More specifically, data content standards are the rules that guide you in filling a particular data field, while data value standards are the thesauri or name authorities providing preestablished terms to populate a data field. In terms of our metaphor, data content and data value standards establish what goes into a bottle.

From: Elings, Mary W.; Waibel, Günter. Metadata for all: Descriptive standards and metadata sharing across libraries, archives and museums. First Monday, 2007

LoC Subject Headings, Date Format, IANA Language Subtag Registry

Data format refers to the particular encoding of information contained within a file. In terms of our metaphor, a data format corresponds to the crate in which the bottles can be stored and shipped.

From: Elings, Mary W.; Waibel, Günter. Metadata for all: Descriptive standards and metadata sharing across libraries, archives and museums. First Monday, 2007

MARC, XML, JSON

Data exchange refers to the particular protocol used to share a collection of records. In terms of our metaphor, data exchange corresponds to a person delivering the crate of bottles.

From: Elings, Mary W.; Waibel, Günter. Metadata for all: Descriptive standards and metadata sharing across libraries, archives and museums. First Monday, 2007

OAI-PMH, APIs, Z39.50, Batch Processing

For Today's Work in Omeka...

Title, Subject, Description, Creator, Source, Publisher, Date, Contributor, Rights, Relation, Format, Language, Type, Identifier, Coverage

????

MySQL Database (via web form) [exportable in XML & JSON]

OAI, API, Z39.50