Who is the Digital Historian?

Who is the Digital Historian?

BL Labs Roadshow, LJMU, March 2017slideshare.net/drjwbaker

James BakerLecturer in Digital History/Archives

@[email protected]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Exceptions: quotations, embeds from external sources, logos, and marked images.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

@j_w_baker -- [email protected]

You don’t need to be adigital historian


Lincoln Mullen, ComputationalHistorical Thinking: WithApplications in R (2017): http://dh-r.lincolnmullen.com


Rudy,Kathryn. ‘DirtyBooks:QuantifyingPatterns ofUse inMedievalManuscriptsUsing aDensitometer’. Journal ofHistorians ofNetherlandishArt 2, no. 1–2(June 2010).doi:10.5092/jhna.2010.2.1.1


Wall, John. ‘Virtual Pauls Cross Project: A Digital Re-Creation ofJohn Donnes’ Gunpower Day Sermon’, 2013.https://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/.


Finley, Will. Makingan Impression: BookIllustration and theirTechnologies, 1780-1850. Phd Thesis,University ofSheffield.Forthcoming 2017.


Hitchcock, Tim,and William J.Turkel. ‘The OldBaileyProceedings,1674–1913: TextMining forEvidence of CourtBehavior’. Lawand HistoryReview, August2016, 1–27.doi:10.1017/S0738248016000304.

Distribution of trial lengths in words for “killing” displayedas red circles; all other trials are displayed as gray dots.“Killing” includes all trials tagged for the offenses of“infanticide,” “murder,” “petty treason,” “manslaughter,”and “killing: other,” by the Old Bailey online.


You don’t need to be a digitalhistorian

But you do need to be alittle critical digital


Year 1 DigitalHistory at Sussex


Autumn1. What is History / What is Art History2. Reading History / Reading Art History3. Library4. Archives5. History on the Web I: Search and Retrieval7. History on the Web II: History in Public8. Referencing 9. Zotero10. Counting History I (theory)11. Counting History II (practice)12. Being a Historian in the Digital AgeSpring1. Doing Digital History2. Foundations: data types and data fields3. Making historical data I (theory)4. Making historical data II (practice: getting data)5. Making historical data III (practice: cleaning data)6. Visualising historical data I (theory)7. Visualising historical data II (practice: graphs)8. Visualising historical data III (practice: maps)10. Storing and preserving historical data11. Sharing historical data

Year 1 DigitalHistory at SussexBaker, James. ‘Fostering Digital

History: Integrating DigitalResearch Skills into anUndergraduate History

Curriculum’, 1 October 2016.http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/66712


You don’t need to be a digitalhistorian

But if you aren’t thenresearching the 1990s

will be tricky


Until relatively recently records were tangible –often boxes of papers, photographs and maps.This is no longer the case. Now we have digitalrecords, which not only comprise written orintelligible content but also intangible bits, dataand code.National Archives. ‘Digital Strategy’, January 2017.http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/the-national-archives-digital-strategy-2017-19.pdf


Archival practice hinges on the tangibility of thephysical record and a thoroughly establishedrecord keeping tradition. Digital records arevery different. Records are not just documents.National Archives. ‘Digital Strategy’, January 2017.http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/the-national-archives-digital-strategy-2017-19.pdf


xkcd. Old Files, 2015. https://xkcd.com/1360/.

Methods that werecreaking with digitiseddocuments...

Hitchcock, Tim. ‘Confronting the Digital: OrHow Academic History Writing Lost the Plot’.

Cultural and Social History 10, no. 1 (2013): 9–23. doi:10.2752/147800413X13515292098070.

...won’t work for born-digital documents



Laura Carroll,Erika Farr, PeterHornsby, andBen Ranker. ‘AComprehensiveApproach toBorn-DigitalArchives’.Archivaria 72 (2December 2011)


Mar 6 08:33:42 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520NetworkManager[852]: <info> Policy set 'Wired connection 1' (eth0) as default forIPv4 routing and DNS.

Mar 6 08:33:42 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520NetworkManager[852]: <info> Writing DNS information to /sbin/resolvconf

Mar 6 08:33:42 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520dnsmasq[3507]: setting upstream servers from DBus

Mar 6 08:33:42 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520dnsmasq[3507]: using nameserver 139.184.32.26#53

IP 139.184.32.26 is University of Sussex.So at 08:30 on 6 March 2017 I was at work.Wired means I was probably in my office.




Mar 6 12:24:52 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520NetworkManager[852]: <info> (wlan0): roamed from BSSID 00:0C:E6:5A:B2:3D(eduroam) to 00:0C:E6:5A:C1:09 (eduroam)

IP 139.184.32.27 is University of Sussex.So at 12:24 on 6 March 2017 I was still at work.Eduroam suggets somewhere else on campus.


Mar 14 10:22:15 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520NetworkManager[827]: <info> address 192.168.0.9

Mar 14 10:22:15 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520NetworkManager[827]: <info> prefix 24 (255.255.255.0)

Mar 14 10:22:15 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520NetworkManager[827]: <info> gateway 192.168.0.1

Mar 14 10:22:15 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520NetworkManager[827]: <info> nameserver '192.168.0.1'

Mar 14 10:22:15 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520NetworkManager[827]: <info> domain name 'Home'

IP 192.168.0.1 is a generic home router.So at 10:22 on 14 March I was likely at home.Though this would be harder to pin down.


Image from Milligan, Ian.‘Finding Community in theRuins of GeoCities:Distantly Reading a WebArchive’. Bulletin of IEEETechnical Committee onDigital Libraries 11, no. 2(2015). http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/papers/milligan.pdf.

See also Brügger, Niels,and Ralph Schroeder,eds. The Web as History.London: UCL Press,2017.


Gaining access to someone else's computer is[..] like finding a master key to their house, withthe freedom to open the cabinets, cupboards,and desk drawers, to peek at family photoalbums, to see what's recently been playing onthe stereo or TV, even to sift through what'sbeen left behind in the trashKirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, 2016. 215.


[We] must be conversant in the antiquariancants of vanished operating systems, fileformats, and emulators, just as we expect anearly modernist doing book history to knowsomething of signatures and collation formulasKirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, 2016. 233.


Windows 95 (1995) https://archive.org/details/win3_W95DEMO

spsman69, Windows 95 PC (6 April 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge9UqHKlaNU


Windows 3.11 (1992) https://archive.org/details/win3_stock

Bingocat, Using Windows 3.11 for the First Time! (5 May 2016)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk4c12DcrBg


A GeoCities diary on your browser:http://wayback.archive.org/web/20000622112212/http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary.html

A GeoCities diary on old Internet Explorer:http://oldweb.today/ie4/20010314115631/http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary.html

A GeoCities diary on old Mac Netscape:http://oldweb.today/nsmac3/20010303110059/http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary.html


You don’t need to be adigital historianBut we do need:

Historians who are confident workingwith digital dataTo foster critical digitalTo inspire students and citizensTo start asking more questions thataren’t yoked to paper

Who is the Digital Historian?

BL Labs Roadshow, LJMU, March 2017slideshare.net/drjwbaker

James BakerLecturer in Digital History/Archives

@[email protected]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Exceptions: quotations, embeds from external sources, logos, and marked images.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


Education

Who is the Digital Historian?