Novice in the Archive

"The combination of increased access with the development of powerful digital searching tools has the potential to transform the nature and the scale of students’ relationship to the material itself. For the first time perhaps it allows the novice learner to get into the archives and engage in the kinds of archival activities that only expert learners used to be able to do."

Randy Bass and Roy Rosenzweig, "Rewiring the Social Studies Classroom," (Dec. 1999).

https://flic.kr/p/8pMJiv

http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/

Scholar in the Archive

Research Practices of Historians

"In numerous cases, interviewees demonstrated their organization processes by showing the physical and digital “piles” of sources that made up a chapter. Many scholars had stacks of index cards, paper notes, and print-outs of sources organized by chapter. In one case, an interviewee showed the file boxes (representing chapters) with tabs (representing sections) containing individual index cards (representing notes or ideas) by which a book is being organized; another shared the bookshelf on which he kept his last book, with each chapter’s sources sorted neatly into piles and labeled."

Schonfeld and Rutner, ITHAKA S+R, 2012

https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/supporting-the-changing-research-practices-of-historians/

Notecards

Secondary Research

Primary Research

Heuristics of Historical Thinking

• Sourcing
• Contextualizing
• Close reading
• Reading for silences
• Using background knowledge
• Corroborating

Sam Wineburg, “Thinking Like a Historian,” http://www.loc.gov/teachers/tps/quarterly/historical_thinking/article.html

Interrogating Historical Complexity

• Contending with multiple perspectives
• Grappling with the implications of multiple causation
• Considering how actors and events are shaped by their contexts and prior events
• Examining change and continuity over time

Teaching Digital History

https://www.6floors.org/teaching/H251/s2019/

Structured Data

Types of Structured Data

• Metadata
• Received Data (always already quantitative)
• Meso-level Data (derived from reading sources)

National Historical GIS

https://www.nhgis.org/

1790 US Census, by County

Andrew McDonald, H251 s2019

https://rightsstatements.org/en/

CSV or TXT, Please!

Tim Sherratt

https://glam-workbench.github.io/

Unstructured Data

http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/pages/home

http://wardepartmentpapers.org

http://selfiecity.net/

Questions that are good to think with

Stakeholders

• Who are they and what kinds of inquiry questions do they bring? (aside from technical capacity)

• What are their commitments and values?

Questions that are good to think with

http://bit.ly/CAD_RE_Questions