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Digital History Readings
Getting Started
Internet Basics
Your Web Presence
What is Digital History?
- Edward Ayers, “The Pasts and Futures of Digital History” (1999)
- William Thomas, “Computing and the Historical Imagination,” A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth (2004)
- Tom Scheinfeldt, “The Dividends of Difference” (2014)
- Dan Cohen & Roy Rosenzweig, “Introduction: Promises and Perils of Digital History,” Digital History (2006)
- “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” Journal of American History (September 2008)
- Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas, “What is Digital History?” Perspectives (May 2009)
- Mike O’Malley, “Evidence and Scarcity” & Sean Takats, “Evidence and Abundance” (2010)
- Mills Kelly, “Clio, Eight Years On,” edwired (December 6, 2013)
Additional Reading
- DevDH.org: Development for the Digital Humanities
- Miriam Posner, “How did they make that?” (2013)
- Tim Sherratt, “It’s all about the Stuff” (2011)
- William Turkel, Shezan Muhammedi and Mary Beth Start, “Grounding Digital History in the History of Computing,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (April-June 2014): 72-75
- David Armitage, and Jo Guildi, “The Return of the Longue Durée: An Anglo-American Perspective,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 69 (2014)
- David Staley, Computers, Visualization and History (2nd ed, 2013)
Digitization
- Dan Cohen & Roy Rosenzweig, “Chapter 3: Becoming Digital,” Digital History (2006)
- Simon Tanner, “Deciding whether Optical Character Recognition is feasible” (2004)
- Ian Milligan, “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010,” Canadian Historical Review 94, 4, December 2013, pp. 540-569 (focus on 558-569)
- Paul Conway, “Building Meaning in Digitized Photographs.” Journal of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science 1, 1 (2009)
Digital and Material
Additional Reading
- Nicole Maurantonio, “Archiving the Visual: The promises and pitfalls of digital newspapers,” Media History 20, 1 (2014): 88-102
- Andrew Torget and Jon Christensen, “Building New Windows into Digitized Newspapers,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, 3 (2012) & Robert Nelson, “Review of Mapping Texts”, Journal of Digital Humanities 1, 3 (2012) (read only section on Mapping Newspaper Quality)
- Laura Mandell, “Encoded Matter,” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 6 (2008)
Databases & Search
- Lev Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media,” AI & Society 14 (2000)
- Tim Hitchcock, “Digital Searching and the Re-formulation of Historical Knowledge,” The Virtual Representation of the Past, eds Mark Greenglass and Lorna Hughes (2008)
- Patrick Spedding, ““The New Machine”: Discovering the Limits of ECCO,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 44, 4 (Summer 2011): 437-453
- Caleb McDaniel, “The Digital Early Republic,” (2011)
- James Mussell, ‘Doing and Making: History as Digital Practice’, History in the Digital Age, edited by Toni Weller (London: Routledge, 2013), 79-94
- Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text‐Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” (preprint, 2014)
Additional Reading
- Stephen Ramsay, “Databases,”A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth (2004)
- Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, “Appendix: Databases,” Digital History (2006)
- Mark Merry, Designing Databases for Historical Research (Institute for Historical Research)
- Marlene Manoff, “Archive and Database: Theorizing the Historical Record,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 10, 4 (2010): 385-398
- Beyond Citation: Critical Thinking About Academic Databases
- Roger Schonfeld and Jennifer Rutner, Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians (Ithaka S+R, 20112)
Text Mining & Topic Modelling
- Ted Underwood , “Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago,” (Representations, forthcoming 2014)
- Ted Underwood, “Where to start with text mining” (2012)
- Frederick Gibbs and Daniel Cohen, “A Conversation with Data: Prospecting Victorian Words and Ideas,” Victorian Studies 54, 1 (Autumn 2011): 69-77
- Cameron Blevins, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” Journal of American History (2014) 101 (1): 122-147
- Robert Nelson, “Mining the Dispatch”
- Miki Kaufman, “”Everything on Paper Will Be Used Against Me”: Quantifying Kissinger” (2014)
Additional Reading
- Sharon Block, “Doing More with Digitization: An Introduction to Topic Modeling Early American Sources,” Common-place (Jan 2006)
- Cameron Blevins, Topic Modelling Martha Ballard’s Diary
- Dan Cohen et al, “Data Mining with Criminal Intent” (2011)
- David Allen and Matthew Connelly, “Diplomatic History After the Big Bang: Using Computational Methods to Explore the Infinite Archive” (forthcoming)
- Daniel Craig, “The Ghost Files,” Columbia (Winter 2013-14): 17-23
- Tim Hitchcock, “Big Data for Dead People” (2013)
- Lauren Klein, “TOME,” (2014)
- Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us,” New Literary History (forthcoming 2014)
- Jo Guldi, “The History of Walking and the Digital Turn,” Journal of Modern History 84, 1 (2012): 116-144
- Peter Leonard, “Mining large datasets for the humanities,” IFLA WLIC (2014)
- Eric Hoyt, “Lenses for Lantern: Data Mining, Visualization, and Excavating Film,” Film History 26, 2 (2014): 146-168
- Anne Helmreich, Tim Hitchcock, William Turkel, “Rethinking Inventories in the digital age: the case of the Old Bailey,” Journal of Art Historiography 11 (December 2014): 1-25
Visualization
- John Theibault, “Visualizations and Historical Arguments,” Writing History in the Digital Age (2012), eds Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki
- Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 5, 1 (2011)
- Lauren F Klein. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings,” American Literature 85, no. 4 (2013): 661-688
- Mapping the Republic of Letters: Case Studies
- Elena Friot, Go Go Gadget, Gephi! The (Mis)Adventures of a Newbie DHer (2013)
- Scott Weingart, When Networks are Inappropriate (2013)
Additional Reading
Mapping
- Tim Hitchcock, “Place and the Politics of the Past” (2012)
- Trevor Harris, John Corrigan and David Bodenhamer, “Challenges for the Spatial Humanities: Toward a Research Agenda,” The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (2010), 167-176
- Edward L. Ayers & Scott Nesbit, “Seeing Emancipation: Scale and Freedom in the American South,”Journal of the Civil War Era 1, 1 (March 2011): 3-24
- Elijah Meeks and Karl Grossner, “Modeling Networks and Scholarship with ORBIS,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, 3 (2012)
- Stephen Roberson, “Putting Harlem on the Map,” in Writing History for the Digital Age (2012), eds Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki
Additional Reading
Games
- Joshua Brown, “From the Illustrated Newspaper to Cyberspace: Visual Technologies and Interaction in the Nineteenth and Twenty-first Centuries,” Rethinking History 8, 2 (2010): 253-75
- Laura Zucconi, Ethan Watrall, Hannah Ueno, and Lisa Rosner, “Pox and the City: Challenges in Writing a Digital History Game,” Writing History in the Digital Age (2012), eds Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki
- Elizabeth Goins, “Pox and the City: Designing a Social history Game,” Gamasutra (2014)
- Adam Chapman, “Privileging Form Over Content: Analysing Historical Videogames,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, 2 (2012)
- Adam Chapman, “Is Sid Meier’s Civilization history?” Rethinking History 17, 3 (2013): 312-332
- Trevor Owens, “Games as Historical Scholarship,” playthepast (1/29/2014)
Additional Reading
Public History
- Carl Smith, “Can You Do Serious History on the Web?” Perspectives (February 1998)
- The Great Chicago Fire (1996)
- The Great Chicago Fire (2011)
- Mark Tebeau, “Listening to the City: Oral History and Place in the Digital Era,” The Oral History Review 40, 1 (2013): 25-35
- Bruce Wyman et al, “Digital Storytelling in Museums: Observations and Best Practices,” Curator 54, 4 (2011): 461-468
- Anne Lindsay, “#VirtualTourist: Embracing Our Audience through Public History Web Experience,” The Public Historian 35, 1 (2013): 67-86
- Melissa Terras, “Digitisation’s Most Wanted” (5/15/2014)
Additional Reading
- Michael Peter Edson, “Dark Matter” Medium (May 20, 2014)
- Daniel Cohen & Roy Rosenzweig, “Chapter 5: Building an Audience,” Digital History (2006)
- Alexander Gelfand, “If We Build It (and Promote It) They Will Come: History of Analog and Digital Exhibits in Archival Repositories,” Journal of Archival Organization 11 (2013): 49-82 (focus on 64ff)
- Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, “Digitising History From Below: The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1834,” History Compass 4, 2 (March 2006,): 193–202
- Tim Sherratt, “Life on the outside: collections, contexts, and the wild, wild web” (9/21/2014)
Crowdsourced History
Wikipedia
Crowdsourcing
Collecting
Social media
Additional Reading
- Steven Brier and Joshua Brown, “The September 11 Digital Archive,” Radical History Review 111 (Fall 2011)
- Trevor Owens, “Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage: The Objectives Are Upside Down”; “Human Computation and Wisdom of the Crowds in Cultural Heritage”; “Software as Scaffolding and Motivation and Meaning” (2012)
- Tim Causer and Valerie Wallace, “Building a Volunteer Community: Results and Findings from Transcribe Bentham,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 6, 2 (2012)
- Tim Causer and Melissa Terras, “Crowdsourcing Bentham: Beyond the Traditional Boundaries of Academic History,” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 8, 1 (2014): 46-64
- Mia Ridge (ed), Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage (forthcoming October 2014)
- Library of Congress Photos on Flickr (2008-)
Digital Scholarship
Blogging
- Alex Sayf Cummings and Jonathan Jarrett, “Only Typing? Informal Writing, Blogging and the Academy,” Writing History in the Digital Age(2012), ed Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki
- Joan Fragaszy Troyano, “Two Years of the Journal of Digital Humanities,” PressForward (2014)
- Melissa Terras, “The Impact of Social Media on the Dissemination of Research: Results of an Experiment,” Journal of Digital Humanities, 1, 3 (2012)
Digital articles
Evaluation
- Jack Dougherty, Kristen Nawrotzki, Charlotte Rochez, and Timothy Burke, “Conclusions: What We Learned from Writing History in the Digital Age,” Writing History in the Digital Age(2012), ed Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (Paragraphs 1-14 only)
- Alex Galarza, Jason Heppler and Douglas Seefeldt, “A Call to Redefine Historical Scholarship in the Digital Turn,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, 4 (2012)
Additional Reading
- Todd Presner, “How to Evaluate Digital Scholarship,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, 4 (2012)
- James Smithies, “Evaluating Scholarly Digital Outputs: The Six Layers Approach,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, 4 (2012)
- Sheila Brennan, “Let the Grant Do the Talking,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, 4 (2012)
- Trevor Owens, “A Draft Style guide for Digital Collection Hypertexts” (2014)
Open Access, Open Source, Copyright
Debating Dissertation Embargos (read the comments on the blog posts)
- American Historical Association Statement on Policies Regarding the Embargoing of Completed History PhD Dissertations (July 2013)
- Q&A on the AHA’s Statement on Embargoing of History Dissertations (July 24, 2013)
- William Cronon, “Why Put at Risk the Publishing Options of Our Most Vulnerable Colleagues?” (July 26, 2013)
- Trevor Owens, “Notes toward a Bizarro World AHA Dissertation Open Access Statement” (July 22, 2013)
- Adam Crymble, “Students should be empowered, not bullied into open access” (July 23, 2013)
- Rebecca Anne Goetz, “Do not fear open access. Embrace It” (August 22, 2013)
Additional Reading
Teaching History in the Digital Age
- Danah Boyd, “Chapter 7: literacy: Are today’s youth digital natives?” It’s Complicated: The social lives of networked teens(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 176-198
- Dan Cohen, “Pragmatic as Well as Prescient: Digital History Education at George Mason University,” Perspectives (May 2009)
- Mills Kelly, “Chapter 5: Making: DIY History?” Teaching History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013)
- Adam Rabinowitz, “Reading Herodotus spatially in the undergraduate classroom, part III,” Hestia (July 22, 2014)
- Allison Marsh, “Omeka in the Classroom,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 28, 2 (2013): 279-282
- Nicholas Trepanier, “The Assassin’s Perspective: Teaching History with Video Games,” Perspectives (May 2014)
Additional Reading
- Martha Saxton, “Wikipedia and Women’s History: A Classroom Experience,” Writing History in the Digital Age (2012), ed Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki
- Stephen Ramsey, “Programming with Humanists,” in Brett Hirsch, Digital Humanities Pedagogy(2012) 217-240
- Adam Rabinowitz, “Reading Herodotus spatially in the undergraduate classroom, Part 1,” Hestia (June 5, 2014)
- Kevin Kee (ed), Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology (University of Michigan Press, 2014)
- Debates in the Digital Humanities: Teaching the Digital Humanities
- Hacking the Academy: Lectures, Classrooms, and the Curriculum
