The digital world provides historians with an array of tools and ways to make our time in the archive and our research process more fulfilling, thorough, and generally productive. But the changes we make need to happen from the bottom up–from conception to execution. For example, Trevor Owens, assessing the Ithaka report on historian’s research practices released […]
This is the second in my series of posts on the Old Bailey Online (OBO) corpus. I’ve downloaded all of the trial transcripts from 1674 to 1834 (find out how on the Programming Historian 2), which is about 100,000 trials and 51 million words of text. In the last post I looked at the impact of editors […]
Ukiyo-e Search provides an incredible resource: The ability to both search for Japanese woodblock prints by simply taking a picture of an existing print AND the ability to see similar prints across multiple collections of prints. Ukiyo-e Search was created by John Resig, a computer programmer and avid enthusiast of Japanese woodblock prints. In his personal research he […]
Back in August, Miriam Posner’s post “What are some challenges to doing DH in the library?” initiated a wide-ranging conversation in the blogosphere examining the relationship between DH and libraries. As the dh+lib blog gets a’rolling, it seems useful both to revisit Miriam’s post, but also remind ourselves of the potential DH holds to enable […]
I’m excited to be off to the Digital Methods Winter School in Amsterdam tomorrow! The first day is a mini conference (and look at all the interesting stuff in the reader!) and then there’s a three day workshop where we actually do data sprints and hands on work with data capture and “abbreviated analysis”. Richard Rogers and Sabine […]
Deeds, or charters, dealing with property rights, provide a continuous documentation which can be used by historians to study the evolution of social, economic and political changes. This study is concerned with charters (written in Latin) dating from the tenth through early fourteenth centuries in England. Of these, at least one million were left undated, […]
A few weeks ago I was discussing early modern vocabulary with Tim Hitchcock(as one does on a Wednesday evening). If I recall correctly, he felt that new words likely appeared at roughly the same rate as old words disappeared from the language. In essence, we’re not getting a bigger vocabulary, we’re just using an ever-shifting one. […]
I’ve been conversing with several different music scholars lately about methodology in corpus studies. Some of this has taken place on this blog, some on Twitter, and some over email. I’ve been talking about the same thing with a bunch of different people in a bunch of different places, when this is a conversation that […]
A podcast, video, and slides from Ian Gregory’s #dhist talk ‘Using GIS to explore Historical Texts’ is now available on HistorySpot. Podcast, Video, and Slides Available Here.
Over the past twelve months we have been developing some new approaches to the challenge of providing rich, revealing interfaces to cultural collections. The key idea here is the notion of generous interfaces – an argument that we can (and should) show more of these collections than the search box normally allows; and that there’s […]
