Slides from an invited talk I gave at Philosophisch-Historische Fakultät, University of Bern, 28 April 2014 Notes at https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/11291918

1. Digital History
A (personal) introduction
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker

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Text attribution Greg Wilson, Two Solitudes, SPLASH 2013 (29 October 2013)
http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/splash-2013
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unless stated otherwise.

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“The emergence of the new digital
humanities isn't an isolate
academic phenomenon. The
institutional and disciplinary
changes are part of a larger
cultural shift, a rapid
cycle of emergence and
convergence in
technology and culture”
Steven E Jones, Emergence of the
Digital Humanities (2014), 31.

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discipline
camp and
camps sentence

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„Digital history is an approach to examining and representing the past that
takes advantage of new communication technologies such
as computers and the Web. It draws on essential features of the
digital realm, such as databases, hypertextualization, and networks, to
create and share historical knowledge.
Digital history complements other forms of history – indeed
it draws its strength and methodological rigor from this age-old form of
human understanding while using the latest technology.‟
„What is Digital History?‟ Center for History and New Media, George Mason
University http://chnm.gmu.edu/ (accessed 25 March 2014)

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Research
…in Digital History

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„Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their
analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human
capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less
make sense of, millions of newspaper pages. With
the aid of computational linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we
are working toward a large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts
were valued and transmitted during this period‟
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, „Infectious
Texts: Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers‟ (2013)

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„Early users of medieval books of
hours and prayer books left signs of
their reading in the form of fingerprints
in the margins. The darkness of
their fingerprints correlates
to the intensity of their use
and handling. A densitometer -- a
machine that measures the darkness
of a reflecting surface -- can reveal
which texts a reader favored.‟
Kathryn M. Rudy, „Dirty Books:
Quantifying Patterns of Use in
Medieval Manuscripts Using a
Densitometer‟, Journal of Historians
of Nederlandish Art (2010)

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„The Digital Harlem website presents
information, drawn from legal
records, newspapers and other
archival and published sources, about
everyday life in New York City's
Harlem neighborhood in the years
1915-1930 […] Unlike most studies of
Harlem in the early twentieth
century, this project focuses not on
black artists and the black middle
class, but on the lives of ordinary
African New Yorkers‟
Digital Harlem: Everyday Life
1915-1930

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„[T]he very phrase ‘digital history’
suggests separateness from, or
the existence of, „non-digital‟ historical
practice. This seems highly
problematic though. Both the idea
that „digital history‟ constitutes a specific
sub-discipline, existing next to other
historical sub-disciplines such as
cultural, social, political or gender
history, as well as the idea that it should
essentially be seen as an auxiliary
science of history, feed into the myth
that historical practice in
general can be uncoupled from
technological, and thus
methodological, developments and that
going digital is a choice, which, I cannot
emphasise strongly enough, it is not.‟
Gerben Zaagsma, „On Digital
History‟, BMGN - Low Countries
Historical Review 128:4 (2013)

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Approaches
…in Digital History

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Newspaper Man photograph courtesy of
Flickr user Ed Stevenson / Creative
Commons Licensed

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Topic Model (10 topics, using stemming and term frequency–inverse document frequency) using
publication dates over time for entries listed under „Articles‟ in my Zotero Library generated using Paper
Machines, 17 September 2013.

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Magnus Huber, 'The Old Bailey Corpus:
spoken English in the 18th and 19th
Centuries', Institute of Historical
Research (21 February 2012)
The Old Bailey Corpus Online

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Asymmetrical Encounters
E-Humanity Approaches
to Reference Cultures in
Europe, 1815–1992
How did the large and cultural
powerful countries
Britain, France, and Germany
influence public debates in
smaller countries like the
Netherlands, Belgium and
Luxembourg?

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“If each paragraph in the infinite archive, all
the trillions of words, is simply a
collection of data, it immediately becomes
something that can be tied to a series of
other things – to any other bit of data. A
name, a date, a selection of words, or a phrase
[…] defined as a polygon on the surface of the
earth. In other words, the texts that form the
basis for western history can now be geo-
referenced and tied directly to a historical /
geographical understanding of spatial
distribution, which can in turn be cross analysed
with any other series of measures of text –
textmining makes text available for
embedding within a geographical
frame.”
Tim Hitchcock, „Place and the Politics of the Past‟
(2012)

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“In this instance we used the Spatial
Humanities: Place-name Proximity
Search tool (SHPPS) in combination with the
Edinburgh Geoparser and the Corpus Query
Processor to scan through all forty volumes
[of the Reports of the General Register Office
for England and Wales between 1840 and 1880]
and identify every instance in which a
place name in the corpus appeared
alongside (or, in other words, collocated with)
the words ‘Cholera’, ‘Diarrhoea’ or
‘Dysentery’ (hereafter, ChDiDy).* This
enabled us to create a geo-referenced
database, which we then used to study the
spatial patterns underlying the GRO‟s reporting
of these diseases.
Spatial Humanities, „Mapping Disease and
Mortality in Victorian England & Wales‟ (2013)

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Virtual St Paul‟s
Cross Project
Notes from talk at Institute of
Historical Research, 18 February
2014.

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Theory
…in Digital History

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Bob Nicholson, „Counting Culture; or, How to
Read Victorian Newspapers from a
Distance‟, Journal of Victorian Culture 17:2
(2012)
“Faced with this mountain of print, we have two choices: to
continue subjecting tiny fragments of Victorian culture to close
reading, or to supplement this approach by exploring a much
larger proportion of the archive through „distant reading‟.”

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„[...] en histoire, comme ailleurs, ce qui
compte, ce n‟est pas la machine, mais le
problème. La machine n‟a d‟intérêt que dans
la mesure où elle permet d‟aborder des
questions neuves, originales par les
méthodes, les contenus et surtout l‟ampleur‟
Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie, „L‟historien et
l‟ordinateur‟, Le territoire de
l‟historien (Paris 1973)
„In history, as elsewhere, what counts is
not the machine, but the problem. The
machine is only interesting insofar as it
allows to tackle new questions that are
original because of their
methods, content and especially scale‟

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Prototype Project Task
–Groups of 5 or 6.
–Use the cards to come up with a potential
project idea:
• Combination of tool cards and collection card.
– note: you all have different card combinations.
• Draws on what has been talked about this morning
• Uses the best of the skills and backgrounds your group
can offer
–Feedback
• Keep it short!

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It should not be assumed that, because DH emphasizes practice and
making use of computers, it's therefore naively instrumental or positivist in its
assumptions, or that its hands-on doing necessarily precludes
theory. Only an impoverished view of theory as pure verbal and written
discourse, separate from practice, would produce such an assumption.
Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014), 179.

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Statistics may serve to reveal or clarify a particular tendency; but
how we interpret that tendency - the significance we attach to it and
the causes we adduce for it - is a matter for seasoned historical
judgement, in which the historian trained exclusively in quantitative methods
would be woefully deficient.
John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (2nd editon, 1991), 197.

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Thank you!
@j_w_baker
james.baker@bl.uk
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/2014-0425-bernslides
Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/11291918