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Slides for University of Kent, School of History, HI878 Methods and Interpretations in Historical Research class, 15 October 2014.
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Digital Research at the British Library
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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“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) http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf
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disciplinecamp and camps sentence
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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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Michael Hancher: blog, exercise
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© Nicola Demonte
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© David Normal
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Who are these digital historians?
Dr James BakerCurator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker
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What is Digital History? (and how does it differ from DH)
Dr James BakerCurator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker
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Historians accustomed to accept only things proved by irrefutable documentation, quite justifiably find these uncertain methods disturbing. Statisticians share neither their misgivings nor their timidity.
Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800, (1967), 6-7.
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Newspaper Man photograph courtesy of Flickr user Ed Stevenson / Creative Commons Licensed
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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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Virtual St Paul’s Cross Project
Notes from talk at Institute of Historical Research, 18 February 2014.
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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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The emergence of the new digital humanities isn’t an isolated academic phenomenon. The institutional and disciplinary changes are part of a larger cultural shift, inside and outside the academy, a rapid cycle of emergence and convergence in technology and culture
Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014)
My review at Reviews in History
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Thank you!@[email protected]://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/
