Editors' Choice: Post-Custodial Archives and Minority Collections

By: Lorena Gauthereau

Last week (July 31, 2018), I had the honor of speaking at CLIR’s (Council on Library and Information Resources) summer seminar for new Postdoctoral Fellows. I was very excited to get the opportunity to meet a new cohort of fellows just as they are beginning their new positions at various institutions. (For more information on…

Editors' Choice: Archivists as Peers in Digital Public History

By: Trevor Owens and Jesse Johnston

In the last 25 years we have seen the web enable new digital means for historians to reach broader publics and audiences. Over that same period of time, archives and archivists have been exploring and engaging with related strands of digital transformation. In one strand, similar focus on community work through digital means has emerged…

Editors' Choice: Do topic models warp time?

By: Ted Underwood

Recently, historians have been trying to understand cultural change by measuring the “distances” that separate texts, songs, or other cultural artifacts. Where distances are large, they infer that change has been rapid. There are many ways to define distance, but one common strategy begins by topic modeling the evidence. Each novel (or song, or political…

Editor's Choice: Mapping search data from Google Trends in R

By: Peer Christensen

This is a quick introduction on how to get and visualize Google search data with both time and geographical components using the R packages gtrendsR, maps and ggplot2. In this example, we will look at search interest for named hurricanes that hit the U.S. mainland and then plot how often different states search for “guns.”…