Digital History Workshop: Reading List
The vast majority of readings for the module are online, and take the form of blogs and posts, twitter streams and project descriptions. Some articles and hard copy background reading is also listed below. The material is organised on a thematic basis, rather than per week. You should also get in to the habit of following links in your readings, and assessing the quality and making use of the material you come to. Inclusion of new material that goes beyond this reading list in your work is very welcome.
[Comments by Prof Tim Hitchcock]
Free resources for which you will want to create accounts:
It is a good idea to keep a separate and secure (off-line) record of your username and passwords for each account.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/
Google Advanced Search: http://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search
Make this your ‘home page’, and use it in preference to a normal Google Search.
Other Google services you will want to familiarise yourself with (all available from the header menu on the Google Advanced Search page):
Blogger: Google’s free blog site, available to use with a gmail account etc. Please sign up for a space to create a blog. Please feel free to use Wordpress instead: http://wordpress.org/
Googledocs: A file sharing site that allows you to collaborate on creating word processing documents, spread sheets, etc.
Google+: Google’s new answer to Facebook. I don’t use it much, but we may want to explore it as a social medium for class discussions.
Google Earth: We will be exploring the opportunities created by Google Earth in the session on mapping; and it would be worthwhile downloading it to your own machine. http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/earth/index.html
Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/
This is the best ‘citation management’ site on the web, and allows you to collect both citations to books and articles, but also websites, as you work online (creating bibliographies you can then export to an essay for example). It works best as a ‘plug-in’ in a browser such as Firefox, but can also be downloaded as a ‘standalone’ application for use with Internet Explorer.
Dropbox: http://www.dropbox.com/
A free file sharing site that allows you to exchange large documents, and back up your local hard disk.
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/
An image sharing facility – useful for locating the right illustration, and sharing large image files.
A note on browsers
Many recent developments in social software and historical sites have relied on what are called ‘client side’ services. These essentially create small sub-programmes that live on your computer, and work with your internet browser. Services such as Google Maps work in this fashion. Different browsers work with these sites in different ways, but the most reliable browser for use with them is FireFox (http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/). There are also a number of sites that rely on a system for image delivery called Flash, that does not work with Apple’s proprietary browser, Safari – so please be aware of this.
Reading Online
If you are uncomfortable reading material on line in a normal web format, why not install something like Readability (http://www.readability.com/) . It allows you to eliminate all the extraneous text, images and adverts, and concentrate on the main body of the page.
If you want a single volume to read, try Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History; or Martin Weller, Digital scholar: how technology is transforming scholarly practice (London, 2011) - available as an e-book via voyager
Some Fun Introductions
20 Things I learned about browsers and the web: http://www.20thingsilearned.com/en-GB
Learn How Google Works: in Gory Detail: http://www.ppcblog.com/how-google-works/
DIS 19, Fiat Lux: "Just Google It": What It Really Is and When It's Appropriate: http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/jrichardson/Courses/19S10.htm
Evolution of the Web: http://evolutionofweb.appspot.com/
Books and Journals (e- and otherwise)
Greengrass, Mark, Hughes, Lorna, Virtual representation of the past
Moretti, Franco, Graphs, maps, trees : abstract models for literary history.
Stephen Ramsay, Reading machines : toward an algorithmic criticism.
Martin Weller, Digital scholar: how technology is transforming scholarly practice (London, 2011) - available as an e-book via voyager
Daniel J. Cohen & Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
This book is available online only, at: http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/
Writing History in the Digital Age: http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/
Digital History Project: https://uhvpn.herts.ac.uk/,DanaInfo=digitalhistory.unl.edu+
D-Lib Magazine: http://www.dlib.org/
Journal of Digital Humanities: http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/
Aggregator Sites and Discussion Boards (essentially themed news sites – worth following)
Digital Humanities Questions & Answers: http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/
Digital Humanities Quarterly: http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/
Digital Humanities Now: http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/
Digital History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research: http://ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/
Digital Research for Humanities: http://www.scoop.it/t/digital-research-for-humanities
Jisc – Digital Collections: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/enrichingdigi/charter.aspx
Arts-Humanities.net: http://www.arts-humanities.net/
Dirt: Digital Research Tools Wiki: https://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/w/page/17801672/FrontPage
Blogs and Blogging
The History Blogging Project: http://www.historybloggingproject.org/
A site advocating historical blogging, and aggregating other relevant blogs.
Trevor Owens: http://www.trevorowens.org/
A nice general blog on all things Digital Humanist
Dan Cohen: http://www.dancohen.org/
One of the most important North American blogs, from the director of the Center for History and the New Media.
A Wine Dark Sea: Drifting in a sea of texts and data: http://winedarksea.org/?p=926
A nice blog focussed on text mining, and visualisations.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities: http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/
Lisa Shapiro’s blog, full of discussion about how to get started with Digital projects; and some of the issues involved.
Digital History Hacks (2005-2008): http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/
A fantastic blog by William Turkel - Still the best example of digital history in action. But, also see Turkel's Going Digital blog: http://williamjturkel.net/2011/03/15/going-digital/
Stefan Sinclair: Scribblings and Musings of an Incorrigible Digital Humanist: http://stefansinclair.name/intro-rezoviz/
Great blog dealing primarily with how to work with data drawn from linguistics, but relevant for lots else - particularly history.
Brian Croxall’s Introduction to Digital Humanities: http://www.briancroxall.net/2011/08/29/introduction-to-digital-humanities/
The course description for a unit in literature by a significant practitioner in digital humanities.
Inkdroid: http://inkdroid.org/journal/
A nice, if slightly technical blog out of the library of Congress.
Active History: http://activehistory.ca/
A nice Canadian blog and resource site that is focussed on public history and digital delivery.
Sapping Attention: http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/
A great blog by Ben Schmidt from Princeton, reflecting his exploration of text mining techniques for the analysis of ‘big data’ (such as Google books).
History Experiments: http://devonelliott.blogspot.com/2007/10/wikiarchives.html
A nice blog about dealing with historical data on line, written by Devon Elliott.
The Visible Archive: http://visiblearchive.blogspot.com/
A blog recording experiments in interface design for archives and historical web resources. A fantastic instance of how design changes search.
Philosophi.ca: http://www.philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/DigitalHumanities2009
Geoffrey Rockwell’s blog on digital humanities policies and debates. Full of up to date and prescient discussion.
Going Digital: http://williamjturkel.net/2011/03/15/going-digital/
William Turkel’s challenging guide to moving from analogue to digital historical research.
Discontents: http://discontents.com.au/
Tim Sheratt’s blog about his development of new tools for the search and display of archival materials.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Simon Tanner, Trevor Munz and Pich Hemy Ross, ‘Measuring Mass Text Digitization Quality and Usefulness’, D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2009, Volume 15 Number 7/8.
The best single assessment of the impact of OCR on historical materials.
Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html
A short article from the New York Times on the use of Captcha technology to improve OCR.
Rose Holley, ‘How Good Can It Get? Analysing and Improving OCR Accuracy in Large Scale Historic Newspaper Digitisation Programs’, D-Lib Magazine, March/April 2009, vol.15, numb. 2/4.
A reasonable, if technical assessment drawn from the experience of the Trove project.
Clemens Neudecker and Asaf Tzadok, ‘User Collaboration for Improving Access to
Historical Texts’, Liber Quarterly, September 2010.
One more outcome of the Trove project.
Trove: http://trove.nla.gov.au/
Nineteenth-century Australian newspapers – the most successful attempt to use crowdsourcing to correct OCR text.
Mapping
New York Public Library Labs: Map Warper: http://maps.nypl.org/warper/
An innovative group based in the New York Public Library - see their Map Warper in particular.
I Would Rather My Streets Opened With All the Stories They Contained: http://iwouldrathermystreets.com/
An innovative attempt to map the culture of space.
Past Mapper: http://www.pastmapper.com/map/1853/
A nice example of the use of Google Maps with historical data.
The Grub Street Project: http://grubstreetproject.net/
An interesting attempt to map literature on London – using graphics, rather than a GIS enabled interface with Google Maps etc.
Paleides: http://pleiades.stoa.org/
A community-built gazetteer and graph of ancient places; particularly interesting for its approach to uncertain locations.
Addressing History: http://addressinghistory.edina.ac.uk/search.jsp
A brilliant use of Google Maps, to allow the crowd sourcing of historical data.
See the related: Visualising Urban Geographies: http://geo.nls.uk/urbhist/
Batchgeo: http://www.batchgeo.com/
A great free service to map lists of addresses (modern and historical).
Geocommons: http://geocommons.com/
A strong wiki-like site that allows you to map your own data on to publicly available maps.
Locating London’s Past: http://www.locatinglondon.org
Hertfordshire’s own stab at using Google Maps with historical data.
HistoryPin: http://www.historypin.com/
A project to crowdsource photographs and make them accessible via a google maps container.
Adding Layers in Google Earth: http://digitalpublichistory.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/adding-layers-in-google-earth/
A nice tutorial for working with Google Earth.
Google Maps Walking Tour: http://digitalpublichistory.wordpress.com/google-maps-walking-tour/
A good tutorial for making a historical walking tour in Google Earth.
New York Public Library Labs: Map Warper: http://maps.nypl.org/warper/
An innovative group based in the New York Public Library - see their Map Warper in particular.
Paleides: http://pleiades.stoa.org/
A community-built gazetteer and graph of ancient places; particularly interesting for its approach to uncertain locations.
Addressing History: http://addressinghistory.edina.ac.uk/search.jsp
A brilliant use of Google Maps, to allow the crowd sourcing of historical data.
See the related: Visualising Urban Geographies: http://geo.nls.uk/urbhist/
StreetMuseum: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Resources/app/you-are-here-app/index.html
A mobile App for viewing photographs in association with their location, created by the Museum of London.
Digital Public History
The Oral Historians' Digital Toolbox: http://storytelling.concordia.ca/oralhistorianstoolbox/
A nice collection of tools and articles about using the digital with oral history - applcable for other kinds of history as well.
Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Context, 1803-1920: http://www.foundersandsurvivors.org/
A good example of a site focussed on public engagement.
Invisible Australians: http://invisibleaustralians.org/blog/2011/12/posts-and-reposts/
Tim Sheratt’s discussion of his project to make the ‘White Australia’ policy discoverable.
What was Where: http://www.whatwasthere.com/browse.aspx#!/ll/51.810892,-0.03109599999993/zoom/12/
A site similar to History Pin – that allows you to upload old images into a Google Maps container.
Institute of Historical Research: http://www.history.ac.uk/
The focus of much development in Britain, with lots of sources, and some innovation.
Active History: http://activehistory.ca/
A nice Canadian blog and resource site that is focussed on public history and digital delivery.
History Experiments: http://devonelliott.blogspot.com/2007/10/wikiarchives.html
A nice blog about dealing with historical data on line, written by Devon Elliott.
The Visible Archive: http://visiblearchive.blogspot.com/
A blog recording experiments in interface design for archives and historical web resources. A fantastic instance of how design changes search.
HistoryPin: http://www.historypin.com/
A project to crowdsource photographs and make them accessible via a google maps container.
Text and Datamining
Voyant Tools: http://voyant-tools.org/
The place to start – and probably to finish - for visualising text.
Digital Research Tools (DiRT): https://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/w/page/17801672/FrontPage
A wiki of readily available tools for analysis of data and text in the Humanities.
Mining the Dispatch: http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/pages/intro
A nice use and explanation of ‘topic modelling’ to interrogate a 19th century Newspaper (the Richmond Daily Dispatch.
Historical Thesaurus of English: http://libra.englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/WebThesHTML/homepage.html
A recent web resource that allows you to think about language meaning in new ways.
A Wine Dark Sea: Drifting in a sea of texts and data: http://winedarksea.org/?p=926
A nice blog focussed on text mining, and visualisations.
Comédie-Française Register Project: http://web.mit.edu/hyperstudio/cfr/index.html
An interesting implementation of ‘faceted’ browsing.
Patricia Cohen, ‘As the Gavels Fell: 240 Years at Old Bailey’, New York Times, 17 Aug. 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/books/old-bailey-trials-are-tabulated-for-scholars-online.html
A report of recent work on text mining the Old Bailey
Search: Federated and Google style
Connected Histories: http://www.connectedhistories.org/Default.aspx
Access to 10 billion words of material relating to British History.
Nines: http://www.nines.org/
A 'Federated Search' facility concentrating on 19th century resources
SmartHistory: http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/
Lots of stuff, in an innovative package.
What historians don't know about database design…:
http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-historians-dont-know-about.html
A great blog post from ‘Sapping Attention’, on the issue of search.
Sapping Attention: http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/
A great blog by Ben Schmidt from Princeton, reflecting his exploration of text mining techniques for the analysis of ‘big data’ (such as Google books).
Google Ngram Viewer: http://books.google.com/ngrams
Great fun – and we will play with a lot ngrams over the course of the semester. Read Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieverman Aiden, et al, Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books’, Science, Dec. 16, 2010.
Images, Networks, Crowdsourcing and Social Software
University of Washington - Digital Collections: http://content.lib.washington.edu/
A nice, clear interface for images.
The Wellcome Collection: http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/
A strong collection that has a strong digitisation agenda.
Epidoc: http://epidoc.sourceforge.net/
An example of an attempt to promote open standards for humanities data.
Demystifying Networks: http://www.scottbot.net/HIAL/?p=6279
A somewhat technical, but accessible, discussion of some of the problems of using ‘network analysis’ in the humanities.
Transcribe Bentham: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/
UCL’s attempt to create a crowd sourced historical transcription project.
Visualisations
Voyant Tools: http://voyant-tools.org/
The place to start – and probably to finish - for visualising text.
ManyEyes: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/
The site of IBM’s visualisation labs.
Querypics: http://discontents.com.au/shed/hacks/querypic
Tim Sheratt’s blog post on his upgraded take on an NGram Viewer
Evolution of the Web: http://evolutionofweb.appspot.com/
A fun visualisation of the development of different web tools, shown against a detailed timeline.
Visualising Data: http://www.visualisingdata.com/
An aggregator site for recent developments in visualisation.
Visualising History: http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2011/09/02/visualizing-history/
A fun blog post about Elizabeth Peabody’s 1859 attempt to create new ways of representing historical change. A good counterpoint to modern developments.
Hyperstudio: Digital Humanities at MIT: http://hyperstudio.mit.edu/
Home to a few innovative projects, including the Comedie-Francaise Registers Project.
The Best Tools for Visualizaton: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_best_tools_for_visualization.php
A reasonable overview of recent developments in visualisation.
Information Aesthetics: http://infosthetics.com/
A gallery of recent visualisations with commentary.
On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces: http://benfry.com/traces/
A beautifully realised visualisation of the different editions of Darwin’s Origin.
A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods: http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html
A fun and weird collection of graphs etc.
Flare Data Visualization for the Web: http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/dependency_graph
A good site to illustrate some high level visual strategies.
Taglines: http://www.research.yahoo.com/taglines/
A fun visualisation of Yahoo posts.
WikiStream: http://inkdroid.org:3000/
And you thought Wikipedia sat quietly in the background not doing much.
Smashing Magazine: Data Visualization: Modern Approaches: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/
A good overview.
Read Write Web: The Best Tools for Visualisation: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_best_tools_for_visualization.php
Another good overview, with a focus on visualising networks.
Gapminder: for a fact-based world view: http://www.gapminder.org/upload-data/
Now available through Google, gapminder forms perhaps the most important single new visualisation strategy for complex data available.
Data sites – exemplars and disasters
Comédie-Française Register Project: http://web.mit.edu/hyperstudio/cfr/index.html
An interesting implementation of ‘faceted’ browsing.
Cambridge Digital Library: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton
The Newton Papers (very impressed with itself).
The Clergy of the Church of England Database: http://www.theclergydatabase.org.uk/index.html
An interesting database approach to organising information.
The Real Face of White Australia: http://invisibleaustralians.org/faces/
A beautifully realised browser for images and text.
Transcribe Bentham: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/
UCL’s attempt to create a crowd sourced historical transcription project.
The Old Bailey Online, 1674-1913: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org
A competent stab at large scale digitisation.
London Lives, 1690-1800: http://www.londonlives.org
An unusual attempt to digitise large numbers of manuscripts, with some crowdsourcing of biographies.
Connected Histories: http://www.connectedhistories.org/Default.aspx
Access to 10 billion words of material relating to British History.
Electronic Enlightenment: http://www.e-enlightenment.com/
Digitised letters – see the innovative visualisation at Mapping the Republic of Letters: https://republicofletters.stanford.edu/
Nines: http://www.nines.org/
A 'Federated Search' facility concentrating on 19th century resources.
Google Ngram Viewer: http://books.google.com/ngrams
Great fun – and we will play with a lot ngrams over the course of the semester. Read Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieverman Aiden, et al, Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books’, Science, Dec. 16, 2010.
Trove: http://trove.nla.gov.au/
Nineteenth-century Australian newspapers – the most successful attempt to use crowdsourcing to correct OCR text.
SmartHistory: http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/
Lots of stuff, in an innovative package.
Papers of the War Department: http://wardepartmentpapers.org/index.php
A reasonable enough American site posting a fair amount of data – includes a crowd sourcing element.
The Walt Whitman Archive: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/
A nice and regularly updated archive site.
The Wellcome Collection: http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/
A strong collection that has a strong digitisation agenda.
Convict Transportation Registers Database: http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/info/fh/convicts
A database site, reflecting a structured approach to large scale data.
Henry III Fine Rolls Project: http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/info/fh/convicts
A large British site, representing a strong intellectual agenda and commitment to access.
Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/
Probably the first attempt to put large numbers of transcriptions on line. It also reflects an early attempt at ‘crowd sourcing’.
Google Books (specialised interface): http://googlebooks.byu.edu/
Where you can see what Google Books is becoming.
Europeana: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/
Perhaps the largest scale digital repository of digital material short of Google, brought to you courtesy of the EU.
On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces: http://benfry.com/traces/
A beautifully realised visualisation of the different editions of Darwin’s Origin.
Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Context, 1803-1920: http://www.foundersandsurvivors.org/
A good example of a site focussed on public engagement.
The Casebook Project: http://www.magicandmedicine.hps.cam.ac.uk/
A very recent ‘digital edition of Simon Forman’s & Richard Napier’s medical records 1596–1634’.
Moving Beyond this Course
The Programming Historian: http://niche-canada.org/programming-historian
This free e-book will allow you to develop basic programming skills directed at manipulating textual and historical data.
Digital Historian Series: Using Tools for Digital Research: http://uiuc.libguides.com/techives
A nice guide to the basics for taking and organising photographs in archives.
Prof. Hacker: Working with APIs (part 1): http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/working-with-apis-part-1/22674
A nice introduction to API architecture, and the possibilities it creates for data harvesting.
Steve Ramsay's Guide to Regular Expressions: http://solaris-8.tripod.com/regexp.pdf
A useful introduction to a standard element of text manipulation.
Cite Datasets and Link to Publications: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/cite-datasets
A nice guide to academic citations on line.
Get Ngrams: http://www.culturomics.org/Resources/get-ngrams
A tutorial for implementing ngrams locally