This is a talk that I gave at the Harvard Purdue Data Management Symposium on June 17, 2015, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The audience was mostly librarians and other data-management professionals. I was the only humanities person on the program, so I wanted to talk about the ways that humanists think about data differently from people…

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From the post: In my copious spare time I have hacked together a thing I’m calling the HathiTrust Research Center Workset Browser, a (fledgling) tool for doing “distant reading” against corpora from the HathiTrust. [1] The idea is to: 1) create, refine, or identify a HathiTrust Research Center workset of interest — your corpus, 2)…

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Many if not most contemporary historians would probably agree with the statement that “the typical mode of explanation used by historians [is] narrative.” (Roberts 2001) Storytelling, then, is not the difference between history and fiction. Instead, we could say, the scope of the story is what differentiates historical and fictional writing. For the past four months,…

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