Social science explores human interaction. So, now that we have data on virtually every type of human interaction, can we, once and for all, see exactly how human society works? Sort of. The potential of “big data” is enormous. But data by themselves are not enough. In this essay, I will argue that research still […]
I’m designing a digital humanities (DH) initiative here at the Purdue University Libraries, and “initiative” means our whole vision for DH, support for which is now enshrined as a specific point in our department strategic policy. To kick off a series of blog posts covering this infrastructure and community design work I’ve been up to, […]
Kellen Funk and I have just published an article titled “A Servile Copy: Text Reuse and Medium Data in American Civil Procedure” (PDF). The article is a brief invited contribution to a forum in Rechtsgeschichte [Legal History] on legal history and digital history. Kellen and I give an overview of our project to discover how nineteenth-century codes of […]
This notebook illustrates some of the behaviors of the singular value decomposition of time series data. I’ve written it in part as a response to a paper by Andrew J. Reagan, Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds recapitulating an argument first made by Matt Jockers: that certain kinds of eigendecompositions […]
Hundreds of thousands of artworks, objects, books, and records in the Getty’s collections have been photographed and posted online. But how do objects go from the physical world to your screen? People. Holly McGee is one of them. Here’s what a typical day in her life at work is like. Read full post here.
This fall quarter I am teaching my digital history course. You can find the draft of the syllabus here. While the title of the course hasn’t changed since the last time I taught it, I’ve made two substantial changes to the overall structure of the course. First, the course focuses more heavily on public history […]
In 1861, the census for the colony of New South Wales (as it was back then) recorded just one Chinese woman living in Balmain in Sydney. The historian Eric Rolls, writing in 1992, commented that this ‘lone woman is exceptional and inexplicable’. Inexplicable? My partner and collaborator Kate Bagnall is a historian of Chinese Australia and […]
In recent months we’ve been working on a couple of projects here in the Lab that are making use of the Extracted Features data set from HathiTrust. This is a fantastic resource, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to everyone at HTRC for putting it together and maintaining it. The extracted features are essentially […]
Digitized archival collections are going nowhere. Any historian conversant with archival debates will be aware of this. The pressure for “more product less process” and the backlogs in many repositories combined with the neo-liberal economy of higher education in which access for consumers often trumps all other concerns means that digitizing documents and putting them […]
There should be no need to mention in a blog about early American history that the digital turn is, perhaps, a fait accompli. However, over the past couple of years more and more articles have called into question the ways in which access to digital archives and digitized sources has changed both the questions historians […]
