I think the idea of removing the isolation found within writing for academic purposes very motivating. Quite often, people are afraid of sharing work that is unfinished or 'imperfect' . Digital history allows people to create a community, which facilitates collaboration and a greater ability to learn from and accept mistakes. In acknowledging the benefits of making writing public, Moravec shows the ways in which digital history can change the academic landscape.

This is a perspective i did not see at first. I always valued the outcome of works more than the research but realistically the research has a equal if not higher value then the outcome of a project itself. I say this because the research itself provides more evidence, more insight and paints the picture of how the project came to be.

This is closely related to Ian Milligan's point about historians rejecting open research because of the idea of "my research" is a commodity to them. Yet Moravec makes a good point. Seeing so many finished products, sparkling and flawless straight from the publisher, lessens the work that is put into academic writing. This might lead a historian to felling that they are inadequate because they have failures without seeing those of their peers.

I just took the mandatory Historical Theory class, and I found it absolutely fascinating. I think it's important for not just writers of history but also readers of history to know that history is constructed by historians, and our current idea of "good history" is just another development in a long line of historical standards. This kind of work might help, for example, high school teachers explain to their students that history is actually written by human beings with their own ideas, goals, and shortcomings.

I appreciate this acknowledgement of the philosophical roots of open-access academic work. As discussed briefly by the authors of The Historian's Macroscope, DH as a field needs to promote diversity and be aware of its current shortcomings on that front. By framing her online work in the context of the feminist movement, Moravec makes an important statement: DH is not incompatible with diversity - it is the result of it.

Umm. A much better reading is this from Ryan Cordell: http://ryancordell.org/research/qijtb-the-raven/

I think that having this sort of source transparency through online access could really change the way any scholar within the humanities operates. I opens up so many possibilities for gaining a greater understanding of research and methods used to reach a certain conclusion. I think it's really fascinating that digital humanities open up so many new possibilities to expand our definition of humanities.

I can imagine the weight that would be lifted from a historians shoulder if this was a readily available feature. Especially for primary sources, from previous attempts at finding primary sources for my ancient greek classes, this would've been very helpful with the outcome and the time it took to do so.

Ladies and gentlemen, the future of history

This is very important, as there is an endless amount of information available online which makes it seem impossible to determine the data which is relevant.

It's so true that when presenting data/information, the reader MUST be considered. If it's too much content, or not understandable, it wont be retained.

This really highlights the importance of collaboration between the different fields.

For sure an important and useful step, for instance how we saw the impact of visualizing data helped Baker in the previous two texts in the readings for this week.

I think this is true of all varied sorts of scholars- the world is changing rapidly around us and if those who wish to study the world don't change with it, they may find themselves left behind as opposed to a part of the changes

It already has. By having so many things online, we are able to access information and learn and be inspired from others. A question to ask is, how much more will it change and effect our studies further.

It's interesting to compare how people felt back in the 1500s to the 1800s to present day. With the explosion of art and knowledge, there was a sense of excitement. Than once we enter later on, and start expanding our knowledge in science. For example, if we were to also look at the age of Enlightenment, you had people having an eerie feeling, a sublime feeling if you will. This overwhelming feeling still exists but it seems a lot more of the norm now. No one is going to freak out if we discover an other new planet, just like no one is going to be confused how they made an iPhone smaller, it's almost as if its expected now. Just a random note, how people's opinions have changed over the course of the last 500 years in terms of the idea of overwhelming data.

Will this change how we research and write history? I seem to see historians working as individual specialists with perhaps a small group of researchers for support. Will history be written by larger inter-disciplinary teams who can deal with these huge amounts of available information?

I appreciate how honest the author is about the "over-documented twentieth century" which I understand as addressing the explosion of texts and sources created by an expanding literate population and bureaucracies.

I think this discussion on the purpose of history is far from over and that many historian's today shy away from using history as activism. In Historical Theory we touched on these ideas but I think that historian's (and history students) still romanticize the idea that their research alone will inspire others, rather than making an effort to collaborate with other academics in emerging activism efforts.

I have definitely seen this way of viewing history in a teleological way in my economics courses. It is even worse when discussing the inevitability of market forces acting in the world's future economy; this lack of flexibility is what makes me thankful for learning about historian's skepticism.

This is really important for historians and something that I think Carleton could focus on more for first- and second-year history students! Instead of discussing "bias" it is skepticism that should be emphasized!

I disagree...I almost feel like we are in a "information toolItalic** overload" where there are so many ways to compile and access data that only those well-versed in technology can access updates to big data mining.

This is really smart; I've learned quite a bit about Canada's access to information laws while working for the federal government and have seen what information falls through the cracks.

I think this is a bit idealist...perhaps the history of our time can be categorized in this way but digitization of the past can only mine data from sources that were created at the time, and these are often created by powerful actors and institutions.

I definitely agree that this is the problem with Braudel's longue duree...how can data over such a long period of time be consolidated in theories, theses and relevant historical questions?

This is really fascinating to me and makes for hopeful for new, exciting ways we can revolutionize data organization moving forward. I wonder in particular how bibliographies will evolve in the future, as we are already experiencing the issue of deleted online sources as new webpages replace the older ones.

The amount of information that is now online makes using digital data complex whether you are looking for something specific or looking to find something to specify (in terms of research). I think this statement certainly will prove true more and more as the internet gets saturated with data for every topic.

Until I worked in a research library I didn't understand how important/useful censuses are! Beyond that, the digitization of them (at least from what I know of the Canadian ones) allows anyone with access to the internet to follow the movement and growth of families.

As an Anthropology student, this characterization of the macroscope made me think of the kind of work that socio-cultural anthropology attempts to do - take the chaos of the social world and unveil meaning from what, to the naked or untrained, eye might otherwise seem to lack any larger significance.

It's a very interesting concept to consider. I had never thought about how historical patterns might not be obvious when viewed as a giant. Also, with the concept of macro scoping, does this mean that outliers from the pattern eventually are forgotten?

Maybe I am interpreting this too literally, but I would add that the ability to conduct micro- and macro-level research is something that would benefit not only historians but also the majority of academics in the humanities and social sciences.

For my undergraduate thesis project in Criminology, I struggled with deciding which methodology worked best with my dataset. Given the nature of my research, which involved looking at mass media constructions of the HIV/AIDS crisis throughout history, I ended up conducting a critical discourse analysis.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed writing my thesis paper, I cannot help but wonder how much deeper my analysis could have been had I employed digital methods of research.

Finding different places and techniques to gather more knowledge is something that I think we stop doing after a time which can end up being more harmful than trying to explore new ways to learn

Here is one of the main reasons why learning the methods of a digital historian is more important and relevant than ever.

Important to remember this distinction.

Interesting point that speaks to the need to search exhaustively for evidence in order to make a strong case. Instead of a detective, a good lawyer might also be a strong metaphor, in that the evidence he presents must be relevant and complete if he/she is to make a strong case.

This is a good distinction from Fernard Braudel's distinction of timed period (longue, medium and short duree) for historical analysis that I studied last year.

this is very simple, but is a very good way to help define macroscopes.

I have experienced this in other classes I've taken in history. This is one of the reasons why the title of this course got my attention.

This here really shows her views on DH.

This goes to show how fresh the digital humanities really is. There are still so many obstacles and unknown areas of policy, and how to's out there. Progressive scholars are going to have to deal with these issues patiently.

I'm frustrated just reading this. It's interesting to me, as an undergraduate, to learn how much influence editors and established publishers have in the academic world. This kind of slow down, I imagine, must happen all the time.

Fascinating that she opened her study of public dialogues to a public dialogue (via WordPress comments). It goes to show that digital humanities methods are often revolutionary new ways of performing on a large scale and at a high speed the things that we've been doing for centuries (such as debating over stamps and history books).

With regards to future of digital humanities this will play an important roll in the progress DH will endure. (I believe that progress is going to happen as everything becomes mediated by technologies)

This is an exciting idea. It also reminds me of the discussions of how women's labour has been systematically denied over the centuries, and only recently have scholars and activists made it clear that "women's work" has always been unpaid labour. It's interesting that women have also been coded as more emotional than men, therefore more loving, therefore more willing to do unpaid work. Emotion, it seems, is often used to justify unpaid labour.

As someone who will be writing admissions essays in the fall: duly noted.

I think this is an important and difficult discussion that will have to be had soon. The validation of various expressions and experiences of emotion is a central part of the push for diversity and social justice. If academia continues to pretend it is a perfectly objective space, diverse voices will continue to be silenced by claims that they are "overreacting" or "irrational".

This may be why "productive fails" aren't encouraged in other classes. At least, not explicitly. It may also have to do with the fact that failed products are rarely handed in, and most classes (and academic journals) deal with the finished product, not the process. Thus a digital environment is a great place to start encouraging productive failure and critical humility.

I love "yes, and"! I did a lot of improv in high school, and this golden rule of improv is a memorable and appropriate way to describe how we should be approaching research. Whenever someone suggests something, you respond with "yes," and then you ADD something new to the scene. So an idea never gets completely shut down, it only gets continually improved over the course of the scene.

I never considered that self-criticism (within the field) was the root of this, but it makes sense. I've read some really whacky articles that made me question why I ever wanted to go to university. But I'm still here, continually upping the ante in my own papers, until I find myself writing about "conceptual bohemia as a female-coded body". There are other, clearer ways to express knowledge and data. Some scholars embrace them, yes, but sometimes the goal seems to be to get as complicated as possible. Perhaps digital history's new methodologies (such as visualizations and virtual reconstructions) may be one way to shift the focus of humanities scholars from critical complication to collaborative creation.

This very eloquent passage sums up how I feel about the humanities. I love her emphasis on engagement and "appropriate, thoughtful contribution." I joke that I study English and History because I just want to read books all day. What I don't say is that reading books all day is my way of preparing myself to meet current and future challenges. Ideally, I am also preparing myself to pass on the experience I gain to future generations of readers. I study humanities for my own sake, yes, but also to discover what and how much I can give back to the world.

I find this discussion incredibly important. I considered, for a while, going into the Public History Masters at Carleton, because I want to make sure that as many people as possible have access to knowledge about the past. Then I realized that I didn't want to do Public History so much as I wanted to make History public. Just because historians are academics doesn't mean that their work can be divorced from public interest and criticism. I'm glad that digital historians are engaging with the newfound opportunities offered by the internet to publish findings more widely, and in more accessible formats (eg in semi-formal blog posts rather than dense academic articles - though both serve a purpose).

She takes pride in her work and really understands there are benefits that come from sharing the information she has collected.

As milligan previously mentions, not all historians are willing to give their research out. So we are dealing with the information at hand; i can see this proving to bring difficulties and grey areas in research.

This perhaps reflects the French resistence to the war effort in the First World War, resulting in low enlistment and thus fewer deaths.

What an interesting hypothesis. This serves as a good reminder that data is often best used when contextualized with other information - such as a knowledge of the social climate in Canada from 1915-1916.

Good point to remember with all data. Not only has the data been collected for a specific purpose, it has been collected within specific parameters that may not be ideal for a given project. That being said, I think these kinds of barriers push scholars to play with data in really creative ways, all while keeping them cognizant of the limitations of data.

He is clearly open to what it has to offer historians

All mediums come with various affordances and disallowances - all new mediums challenge the old ones.

I think this has the potential to act as a review zone for researchers by fellow researchers. By seeing the direction of ones research another can suggest a different approach ect.

This approach would be appropriate for authors who do not wish to share their work while it is in progress for fear there might be others who would take their ideas and publish them first. Thus the circle of people who would be open to open notebook history widens.

Open notebook history also opens up the possibility for pet projects which publishers or universities hae rejected but the author still finds valuable and others may as well.

I can agree with this argument. I think that most academic writers have enough pressure on them to keep them honest. Universities, peer-reveiwers, publishers, academics who read the work, there are countless levels of scruitiny on academic authors.

Though a professional from what i read here, he is clearly open to new things, that may become norms.

This paragraph is an excellent summary of the benefits and obligations of sharing data: more interdisciplinary use (contribution to the body of knowledge), reduction of redundancy in the collection of data (re-use it, don't re-collect it), transparency (how were conclusions formed, repeat-ability of results, what work did funds pay for?)

This is a big part of my summer project on domestic servants at Rideau Hall - finding out what the conditions of servants were like in the average Ottawa home at the time. I'm still a bit lost on how to find data for that project, so hopefully these exercises will be useful to me!

markdown is straight forward to compose in, but I admit I am struggling with why it is an advantageous way to compose documents. It's easier for me to open a simple word processor and write, with the draft version of the document looking more pleasing to the eye than text with symbols. The .md format is nicely human readable and more future proof than Mictosoft's .docx format (or other proprietary formats), but a user could choose to save files in .md. A disadvantage of the format is the loss of meta-data that may be useful to future historians and present users and computers. A lot of information can be organized in tags and used adding richness to the document beyond the text.

I did this tutorial and tried to publish it into GitHub but unfortunately it wouldn't export.

This did not occur when I tried to merge a branch to my master of a clone of Bethany's repo. Did I do something wrong?

does every command line (such as the one on my own computer) do this?

is there a way to copy & paste instead of typing all of this into the cmd, or does cmd not accept pasted commands?

Computer science people: help my humanities brain understand how this is possible. Am I sending commands to a computer machine at Carleton, which is then doing all its computations and sending me back the results? Or is it actually entirely virtual, with no physical computer running all the time? What is DHBox???

An important piece of the course to know and understand!

I suggest to watch the report form URL. If it is https://via.hypothes.is/https://goo.gl/forms/V201a2LUgiADg7GD3. I think that the "https://via.hypothes.is/" part of the URL confuses ReCAPTCHA, because ReCAPTCHA would not work unless I removed this part of the URL and reloaded the page. If you came to this page directly you may not be affected by this.

I am excited to learn more about how it does this!

An interesting read -- It's important for people to see the value in failure. Mistakes are instrumental for learning and personal growth.

YESSSSSSSSSSSS. (This is convincing me to finally pick up A Midwife's Tale.)

It's important to remember that these topics are constructed by the historian. They are, like all historical narratives, just interpretation. Another historian may not have labelled that topic "DEATH." I would like to see the same text topic-modelled with the same parameters by two separate historians, and see how similar their interpretations are.

This is like a damn commercial for MALLET. It's important, of course, to remain cautious about directly attributing the rise in "emotional" words to certain events and using that as evidence that MALLET can solve all our text-mining problems... that being said, this (along with the "cold weather" experiment earlier) is convincing, and something I would like to try in a text for myself. Comparing digital data with non-digital observations seems like a good way to check scholarship.

Again: incredible how digital history can be used in tandem with, and in addition to, existing scholarship. This article really helped me imagine what exactly digital methods could accomplish within the established field. We can go beyond what we ever thought possible; everything can be explored in new ways.

Does MALLET count words that share a root together? I remember reading in the Macroscope's discussion of Father Busa that there are text-mining programs that do this, but does MALLET do it by default?

I like that he acknowledges this important limitation in his work. Accordingly, he uses his results more as "soft digital history" as described by Baker: to direct his thinking rather than as evidence in and of itself.

Anyone know of any good resources to learn more about this topic? I'm fascinated by the fact that computer code is a language akin to human languages. Both communicate information, but with different strengths and for different reasons.

A good reminder for any of us considering using primarily text-mining and other related methodologies for our final projects (or other projects).

Incredible that digital history is allowing us to improve upon pieces as seminal as A Midwife's Tale. It's fascinating that Ulrich uses "recovered" and "absorbed," two terms that describe almost perfectly what a machine is able to do with the diary that a single person cannot.

Unfortunately, academic journals, while they may be lagging severely behind other sectors in the digital revolution, are not the only products that should be more accessible due to digital technology. There's no reason an e-book should cost as much as a paperback, or a digital download of an album the same as a physical CD.

Damn, academia. This is a serious problem: academics (used to) have no choice but to support for-profit journals if they want to advance in their careers, regardless of how good the service is. And, even as a student, I know the service isn't great: journals as frustrating to access, highly restrictive, and I've found some of the databases and especially the search systems to be unreliable and unsatisfactory.

Fascinating. I would love to read more about this dilemma from a general philosophy (digital philosophy???) point of view. Of course, I've considered the ethics of history before, but the additional computational power of digital history (or, in the case of the census, the additional coercive power of the state) adds a new dimension to that question. Can we write good history with information the writers did not intend for us to know? Or is it the job of the historian to look beyond the text, and is computation just another tool to achieve that?

Moment of silence for all those animated .gifs.

It won't let me annotate on the sites?Not sure how to change this.

I'm very interested in this. I think this is one thing that humanities programs still don't prepare their students for. Whether or not we're using big data or computational methods, the fact is that more and more of our work as scholars is going to move online.

I like that Baker acknowledges how his own personal biases helped shape his data model, and that he does not attempt to apologize for it. That there was a high degree of subjectivity in Baker's research does not make his findings any less valuable.

The nature of qualitative research is such that it must necessarily be informed by the researcher's own mental frameworks.

This is a good point which makes me rethink my previous position on how including this data would have made Baker's argument more persuasive.

By choosing to only include information which would advance one of his arguments, Baker avoids bogging his reader down with superfluous details.

His blog acts as a dynamic and live extension to his book; it is where he can give elaborate explanations of his analysis without having to fear he has lost the reader.

I'm not sure if this is relevant/comparable, but it kind of reminds me of an episode of Revisionist History I listened to a while back http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/10-the-satire-paradox. I remember Gladwell talking about how the Colbert Report was interpreted differently by Republicans and Democrats and both groups liked and thought the satire presented supported their political beliefs. I wonder if any studies of historical satire have come across similar ambiguities and how possible it is to interpret the author's intended meaning?

I feel like even though we are decades ahead this is still something that authors/artists struggle with- their work has to be molded to fit what is currently in demand or they often find themselves unable to publish on a scale that will afford them recognition.

In the same vein as my previous comment from this authors other post- over time a skill that you need to develop is to pick and choose which information is truly needed to be in your work.

I am having trouble understanding what the author means by 'corpus level quantitative' work here. Can anyone explain?

I like how he points this out. It's vital to think about your audience and not always solely on your work alone.

I agree with the author, you can't add everything to your finish product. You need the most important data that tells the most and I personally was taught never to REPEAT data ever. If two analysis I did were similar, I'd ditch the one that explained less.

This is something I need to keep in mind when doing research and proves to be something to keep in mind when reading other works on the subject. The representativity and interpretation is very important to consider.

I'd be curious if anyone had definition for this as I'm not quite following what this analysis is..

Although I understand why Baker chose to omit these graphs from the published version of his book, I do not believe he made the right call.

Given how formative he says that these visual representations were in the realization of his central argument, it would seem logical for him to include them in his book.

I understand that the graphs merely represent his data in a visual form, but I would argue that this actually makes his analysis and interpretation more persuasive.

If the visual representations of Baker's data assist the reader in following his thought process, this can only be a good thing.

The way in which data can be made into visualizations which help to organize and make clear patterns is very interesting to me. The fact that the visualizations are sometimes only used as a way of making sense of big data rather than as part of the argument, greatly appeals to me as I am someone who learns visually.

Very interesting subject; taken a look at such things as well in another History class regarding War and Europe from 1897 to 1914. Perfect primary sources for seeing the mores of the time and the opinion of the "common people"

This is something I always have to pay attention to when writing- and it helps to know that "professionals" also have this same issue. Sometimes when researching, especially with history, I find I am able to gather a lot of information but am sometimes just regurgitating this information instead of making a point or adding to a point I was attempting to make

Going off the idea that @angelachiesa mentioned in her annotation above, I can relate significantly to this point and believe that the process of doing something can make you grow as an individual. For me, doing research for an assignment is like a never ending game of connect the dots and most of it never ends up getting used. However, it still plays an important part in the process.

This example gives me a good understanding of how one might use data digitally but I wonder in what other ways digital data can be used in addition to this.

I can also relate to Baker as well, because a good portion of my studies include researching a building or a site, and than making an abstract representation of this. Reading this article is making me look forward to some of the modules and doing these kind of graphs or something different.

I can relate to this a lot as the process of doing something can make you grow as an individual. Sometimes you don't end up using some of the data you have collected or the graphs you've made for a project, but you were able to gain some sort of skill that can be used in the future.

The author, Baker, used an interesting approach to represent the way in which different business categories congregated in different areas; as he points out later in the paragraph. By organizing each business category into coloured groups, the reader is able to differentiate where the majority of each business was located with respect to the Thames.

I agree with Baker suppressing these excellent maps from his book. History is about making an argument based on evidence. If the maps are not directly relevant to telling the history they do not really belong in the book, good editing would leave them out. The maps are important, and as @sarahmcole points out they are useful in a blog post like this, or a supplement to a book for those historians who want to delve into the methods the author used in research. Future researchers can also build on the author's work, repeat the experiments and perhaps get more conclusive outcomes. So, in fact it's important that work like this be published somewhere.

I still think that the author should have included some of these facts of "soft history" even though he does not think they contributed to his argument. His data on the changing meaning of the named job of "stationer," for example, is in my opinion important to present to the reader.

As I thought more about what digital and digitizing history is, it struck me how much of this medium relies on visual and sonification methods to communicate historical information. It's interesting this method changes perspectives on data communication, engaging with the past and forces history to keep up with technology.

I think this is very important, as acknowledging and removing any biases one has makes it infinitely easier to see the truth of something.

I really like that digital history, and digital humanities as a whole, is a discipline which is constantly evolving to reflect changing technologies and people's understandings of ways in which to approach the humanities.

Knowing that there's no exact recipe for 'doing' digital history is very comforting to me, as it means I am able to define and practice digital history according to my own interests to create something meaningful to me.

I like this interpretation; it really demonstrates the past and the present coming together, and how different disciplines can be combined to create a whole that is able to enhance the two parts.

This is something important to remember, that the fact that the data is digital does not make it any different or truer that other data.

I love this idea. So much of my time as a student has been spent seeking sources as justification for a particular (and established) historical argument- I hope learning about the field of digital history will help me explore the past in a way that allows me to question without having an answer already in mind.

This reminds me of our discussion of micro-histories in Historical Theory. We read "The Return of Martin Guerre," which I think is a particularly good example of how history can be viewed as narrative storytelling and that the author of the historical piece and their background can greatly influence history's presentation.

I find it very interesting that DH has evolved so quickly as technology evolves, and is continually evolving. It is neat to see a discipline which is always in motion in comparison to more static traditional humanities.

What biases does DH introduce to history? I don't have a good answer to this yet, other than to see DH as an important method of inquiry, but not to over-rely on it to draw a conclusion.

I admit that this is very much how I imagine computational history so I look forward to seeing how digital history goes beyond numerical data sets!

this is the most complicated thing I have ever done

I need to get into the habit of annotating.

This link appears to be broken.

Thanks for linking to Melissa's project. It's nice to get a feel for the kind of contents that other students have chosen to share in the past.

test

I pasted the code into the page, but it was just displayed as text. In Wordpress I clicked the Text tab of the page editor and then highlighted the stuff I added and tagged it as "code" with the code button. It was marked up with <code> so I believe it's correct now. Follow up: That worked. Follow up 2: I was getting the "code" format of fixed width courier type font text leaking from my list of annotations over to the menu on the right side. An ugly hack of adding a second close </code> code tag at the end "fixed" the formatting. See example (<code>[hypothesis user = 'jeffblackadar']</code></code>) I don't like it but I thought I'd mention it.

Cool!

My post can be found here: http://whythemwhythen.ca/uncategorized/my-digital-history/

Handy tool!

Annotation complete!

This will definitely come in handy, I can easily see myself using this for all my future courses!

annotation

First annotation

First test annotation

I had a similar program on my computer for the past school year but this one seems much more user friendly!

I think can go hand in hand with something that TIm Hitchcock wrote on his blog: Big Data for Dead People: Digital Readings and the Conundrums of Positivism. He said: "But, if you want something with a bit more flavour we need to move beyond what was deliberately coded to text – or photographs – and be more adventurous in what we are reading. "

Within all the readings we had this week, I am noticing the trend of collaboration and exactly how important it is to digital history.

This is very important, as history has been a playground for the privileged for so long. In fact, a lot of primary sources that were used for centuries were often from upper class members and/or high members of the military if we are talking about wars. Using primary sources such as satirical prints or writings of the "unprivileged" (please note the quotation marks as this could mean women in any class as well) gives us a better understanding of the people, their views on historical events and the mores of the time.

I feel that DH is facilitating diversity more than other more static non-digital disciplines, as the constant evolution of DH allows for greater collaboration and the ability to recognize faults within the discipline in order to change them. This is very refreshing, as the discipline is allowing itself to change for the better from the inside, rather than resisting the change.

I think this is really important, as removing any barriers makes it a lot easier for people to share ideas. I think this is especially important when it comes the barriers between academics in the digital humanities and non-digital humanities, as the disciplines could gain significant knowledge in working together.

I really like this idea and how it echos the way the internet is used - as a platform for people to be free in expressing their opinions and thoughts.

As someone new to Digital History, I am unfamiliar with this method. Could someone please explain this.

Computers can be expensive and that expense represents a barrier. I`m going to try to access DHBox from my low cost Raspberry Pi computer and see how that goes. Some cloud computing providers like Microsoft Azure and IBM Bluemix offer a free tier of service (with limits), Maybe others. Having access to something like DHBox lowers barriers too.

This is a problem in any new frontier of academic research, and becomes more clear if Melissa Terras' blog post (footnote 1) is read! Academics must make substantive effort to open up their fields to include women and people of colour, not only out of human decency but also to tackle biases and break research barriers.

The mere recognizing of the barriers to diversity in the field is an important thing in it of itself. I feel like the open climate of digital history means that historians themselves are able to be held accountable for issues in diversity. With paper publication the pressure is on the publisher to be aware and catch such inequalities. With open research and open publication and living documents these things can be corrected quickly and by the author themselves. This practice not only holds the author accountable but also teaches historians ways in which they are able to encourage diversity and discourage marginalization on a first-hand basis, with interactions from groups that need better inclusion in the field.

I briefly learned about Father Busa this past year, he worked on the earliest computers to analyse the work of Thomas Aquinas.

This makes me wonder what we could attain in terms of examining big data, without modern technology. What trends would we see, and which ones would we miss? It really has impacted how we can interpret history, and how we can use these insights to look forward and predict other trends -- as the renown quote goes, "history repeats itself."

This day in age, this is necessary in order for a historian to produce full & complex research.

I'm fascinated by the idea of quantifying historical facts and records into equally-weighted "data" that can be analysed. That is part of the reason I signed up for this course: to see how the analytical tools I have learned while studying history and economics can be turned on their head by computational methods. Does anyone have some examples of this translation from historical fact to numerical data?

This debate over the ethics of archiving potentially sensitive--and yet public--personal blogs is fascinating to me.

While I am sure that personal blogs have the potential to be instructive for future generations, it is likely that MySpace users did not have the same level of awareness regarding the permanence of the Internet as today's users of social media.

I am more sympathetic to the side that wants to protect such personal records from being archived and publicly accessible; however, there are likely compelling arguments in favour of archiving this data that I am simply unaware of.

As history becomes increasingly digitized, I wonder if this will pose challenges for data retrieval, say 500 years from now. I agree with this because even though we may be able to access such a vast pool of knowledge, it may not necessarily be easy to sift out what is relevant or needed.

Wow, this is a surprising statistic.

These tips are should be applied to any and every discipline, not just DH. They are easy steps to follow to ensure that DH becomes diverse and allows for a greater range of ideas within the discipline.

In excluding all but one perspective, the discipline is effectively limiting itself when it comes to collaboration and the ability to evolve.

I really like that she outright addresses the issue, calling out the lack of diversity within DH.

Interesting that there is a "DH identity" collectively held by scholars within the discipline.

It's very interesting that these topics were focused on the most, as they are all topics which are taught in the intro digital humanities courses I've taken.

This is an interesting break down of topics being discussed in DH, further showing the ways in which the discipline is lacking in certain areas of study.

Further showing the need for diversity within DH, as less voices being included means less opportunity for collaborations and the ability to develop new avenues of research.

I have read and I agree to abide by the Code of Conduct.

I have read and I agree to abide by the Code of Conduct.

What an incredibly useful research tool. Any legal research I have ever done has been on CanLii, QuickLaw and WestLaw. I never found any of these databases particularly user-friendly.

I can see how there would have been a huge demand for this kind of tool.

In a world that contains a myriad of data, it can be overwhelming and challenging to narrow it down by relevance. This is why I think open history and collaboration are so important, because scholars can work together and break down the task into more manageable parts. I believe that this will become more of a norm as technology and access to digital history content develops.

Excellent point, collaboration between both is essential.

I would love to use the some of this information in the final project if thats possible!

As someone who is particularly interested in immigration history, this seems like a wonderful project! I think that this type of data mining could be useful in other cities and could be used to show the general population the changing nationalities that have lived there.

Distant reading is something I find really interesting, the few times I've encountered it I've found that the literary application to texts allows for a new understanding of the work to be seen.

Like others have expressed in annotations above, I find this whole example very interesting. I wasn't aware of the concept of distant reading before hand but will keep an active eye open for it now!

As an English major this hurts me a bit to say, but words/texts are not always the best way to go about research. Examining art and images or even examining the way words are written as opposed to the words and their meaning can produce as many insightful opinions and theories as reading

One thing to consider when it comes to a these digital resources, is that could it also be hurting historical data? There are so many users online, so many people can be posting misinformation and different versions or photos of historical data. Having so many sources can alter the reality of history in a way. It is incredible how much access we have, but it has already interfered, with unreliable sources like Wikipedia.

It's a danger only if the computer is over relied on. We do the same thing when we consult paper archives - we research certain questions the archives can help with, but don't expect to find out the kinds of things in an archive that oral history can tell us.

I like how in this sentence the author clearly states that all the evidence above evolved from a single picture of a woman. It really emphasizes that digital history could have any starting point. This might be handy to remember for future research.

I think it is fascinating that this conclusion can be drawn from the data examined above. It puts into perspective the power of digital history.

That history is in fact textual criticism is a fact which I believe is lost on most high school and many university students in their early years. Though the inclusion of primary sources is getting better in high schools, I for one had a teacher who taught us well how to find good and relevant primary sources, often these sources are simply presented to students with no explaination as to how to find them. The analysis on these sources is also wrapped up in a neat package for students that is easy to digest. They are not challenged to find something new in the text, to explore their own ideas. The digital humanities has been working so hard on digitizing so mnay of these primary sources. I feel these big data programs would be of great use in enaging younger students in primary source data and analysis thereof. Textual analysis is a valuable skill that serves people in any avenue they may persue after their secondary education. Big data and digital history I think would be an incredible way for them to be introduced to this kind of analysis.

History is in a way static, but the ways that we interpret it are dynamic.

That's such a neat medium in which to experience history. I think that presenting it in this way would captivate so many people. Those who may not otherwise be inclined to sit down and read about it may be drawn in to learn about it by other sensory means.

This is a great example of looking at historical trends through a macroscope, while still being able to access microhistory. I think that one of the problems with using a macro approach is that in a way, it diminishes individual narratives which are relative to the individual and cannot always be generalized. I think it's great how this study takes both into consideration.

I think that reach using these types of tools will allow for more subjects to be explored by historians in greater detail but also this may prove to be the begging of some change in what is expected in research (with all this available content).

Similarly, radio has more power behind it then the television, the words alone carry more influence as the listeners are not distracted by the images. I think this carries over well into the idea that text is less powerful then speech.

This is what I would like to see with the use of big data. The ability to both show overall trends, yet also be able to follow micro history narratives and still value those narratives.

As an avid consumer of historical novels this would be a really interesting project for me. Showing themes in this way, without even having to read the text sounds so efficient but might make academics in literature cringe.

Test annotation in Klein and Gold's Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field

I love all the imagery this sentence produces

I really admire when authors and editors acknowledge this because it really is a position that needs to be stated as a something that holds a bias.

I`m wondering if the "technical" aspect of DH gets linked with the type of hostile exclusivity that happens to women in some university engineering departments (per anecdotes related to me.) Seeing my daughter study programming in high school has shown her education in that course to be male dominated, I am not sure why this problem persists. I have worked with a lot of programmers who are women over the last 20 years or so (and hired or promoted some of them), but I have not yet been on an IT team that had gender parity, which is where we should be.

https://github.com/alinapringle http://citizensofinhumanity.com/

https://github.com/rachel-johnson http://alongthedaisiedpath.ca/

https://github.com/liveash02 http://asharchitecture.ca/

http://ablastintothepast.ca/ https://github.com/ktamg/Kayleigh-Gagne

I'm not sure what make's a stupid algorithm if it works, I get the point that's made later but when another researcher tries to prove the point again it probably won't work in the same way and then they will have to reconsider accuracy.

The internet has a lot of potential for the academic world and it can make researching a lot easier as people continue to use it for this type of thing.

I was astonished and disgusted at the behaviour Melissa Terras was exposed to with this "Frontier journal." This article exposed a whole other side of online academic publishing that I did not know existed!

I feel like this "unintentional" sexism is so often what plauges female scholars. I have been blessed with some incredible female professors but have noticed some of this unplanned sexism in my own education. The core humanities classes are full year courses and are team taught by two professors for each year. This means there are eight professors. Currently, and for a considerable number of years to my understanding, only two out of these eight professors are women. This does not mean that the male professors are any less encouraging to female students or that they are sexist or marginalizing, but it is an issue. This sexism is I think increased by the fact that the academic field is so competitive. Diversity becomes less important than job security, and departments do not want to open positions to females only lest they be accused of denying other qualified male academics the security that comes with a permanent university appointment.

I love this author's honest critique of the DH academic community and the sexism present. I was surprised at the number of female attendees at DH2015 and admit that I would have assumed a much smaller proportion of females in the community.

I have never heard of this, interesting.

I think that this is an important goal, the internet is very prevalent in the lives of a lot of people so it is good to expand the academic potential it has.

I am interested in what types of Cultural Heritage this includes, heritage buildings?