Nov 10
As we all continue to navigate an increasingly virtual world during the coronavirus pandemic, I thought I would share a list of my favorite digital tools that I use to organize sources, annotate readings, manage citations, draft chapters, and conceptualize the ‘big picture’ of the PhD, in the hopes that they help make online research a little less daunting.
Read moreBy Joe Rachman
What sparked the craze for martial arts, particularly kung fu, in 1970s America? Why did some Serbs commit acts of genocide in the late twentieth century despite Serbs themselves having been victims of genocide during World War Two? What started the Opium Wars? Did Zarathustra, the supposed founder of Zoroastrianism, actually exist? Why are contemporary African states so poor when compared to the legendary wealth of some pre-colonial African empires? All these questions, and more, posed by curious members of the public have recently been answered for free by historians willing to dedicate a little bit of their time to help sate public curiosity about history. Welcome to /r/AskHistorians.
Doing History in Public has teamed up with Cambridge Digital Humanities to give two training sessions on blogging for researchers as part of this term’s Learning Programme.
The training sessions are open to PhD students and staff at the University of Cambridge.
Find out about how to use blogging in your research, the benefits and limitations of blogging for public engagement and how to use social media with your blog.
Know something about an eminent woman? Think it should be shared? Newnham College Cambridge are marking International Women’s Day 2017 by improving the gender balance of Wikipedia, and they’re looking for contributors. Read more
By Carys Brown, James Baker, Richard Deswarte, Adam Crymble
Originally posted on the Defining Effective Mentorship in Digital History site.
What factors are preventing academics from learning the digital skills that could enhance their research? A diverse group of twenty scholars consisting of postgraduate students and academic staff, assembled in Cambridge this past month to find out. Together, they critiqued a range of learning opportunities and they have identified the following challenges that must be overcome to encourage further growth in new skills acquisition amongst students and colleagues. The list is not exhaustive, but we hope it provides a useful starting point for those seeking to promote digital history and who are in a position to lower the barriers to access for learners.
by James Lloyd – @jtlloyd3
James is a PhD student at the University of Reading/Exeter in Classics. His thesis is entitled: ”Music and Ritual in Ancient Sparta: the lead votive figurines of the Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia”
In recent years, there has been a flurry of new technologies emerging at a price which makes them (just about) affordable, notably 3D scanners and printers, and such technologies have attracted attention in the news of late for their employment in the digital recreation of artefacts and archaeological sites destroyed by IS. Indeed, 3D printing is a wonderful tool for bringing the past to life: Museum3D, for example, uses its 3D prints to engage museum visitors with low-vision and Alzheimer’s. However, as this post will show, 3D scans are just as important to public history. Read more
January is passing with alarming speed, and as Cambridge hauls itself into the mania of full term there are flurries of emails about talks, seminars, and events. To save you the trouble of choosing, and to ensure that you don’t miss anything essential, here are a few top recommendations for this term. Those not at Cambridge are very welcome!
By Tom Smith and Alex Wakelam @A_Wakelam
Something strange happened last month for members of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA). On Wednesday the 28th October members of the 61-year-old historical society were informed that one of the major benefits of membership –subscription to the research tool EEBO (Early English Books Online) – had been cancelled. The service claims to possess “images of virtually every work printed” in English between 1473 and 1700, constituting several million scanned images of microfilm supplied by more than 200 libraries worldwide. It is thus an invaluable tool for the early modernist, available through most, if not all, university libraries. However, the service doesn’t offer any individual subscriptions and the high price puts it out of the realm of the casual public library. Membership at a very reasonable £85 a year of the RSA (the only professional society that subscribes to EEBO) provides the vital access to these documents in a digital, searchable format. It must therefore have proved a blow to their members that ProQuest, who own EEBO, decided to cancel the RSA’s subscription. This was not due to lack of use but to such “heavy use of the subscription” by members that it was “reducing ProQuest’s potential revenue from library-based subscriptions”. Within 24-hours the decision had been rescinded with ProQuest describing the situation as a “confusion”.
By Matt Tibble on behalf of Inciting Sparks @IncitingSparks
‘Public engagement’ and ‘research communities’ – these are the new buzzwords from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, one of the largest funding bodies for historical research in the UK. Their message is that the gulf between the ivory tower of academic research in higher education institutions and the enthusiastic, public communities interested in historical research must be reduced. It’s an idea that has been at the forefront of university scholarship within the humanities for some time now, and it’s unsurprising considering it’s the public who fund historical investigation. In providing the opportunity to conduct research, it would seem that the same public would like us to deliver it into their hands. This in itself is not an unreasonable request, though it is one that has lead us to the general assumption that the only good history is ‘usable history’.
By Emily Ward @1066unicorn and Carys Brown @HistoryCarys
If there was one thing that the Making Big Data Human conference made clear, it was that ‘Big Data’, and indeed digital methodologies in general, provide some very exciting opportunities to advance historical research. From the ambitious and wide-ranging National Archives’ Traces Through Time project, which looks to create a generic method to look at historical individuals across enormous datasets, through to the more specific but equally exciting Casebooks Project, the conference participants were treated to a feast of ideas about how historical methods are adapting to the changing nature of data in a digital age.
But what exactly is ‘big data’, and what did the Doing History in Public team have in mind when we decided to explore how we could make it ‘human’? The basic definition of ‘big data’ is ‘extremely large data sets that may be analysed computationally’.[1] For historians this might, as Jane Winters demonstrated in her keynote lecture, be a case of using the archived web as an historical source, or of exploring parliamentary proceedings from three different countries over a period of more than 200 years.
Niccolò Serri is a PhD student in Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge
A team based at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam has completed the digitisation of the Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels papers collection. Despite the almost indecipherable hand-writing of the father of modern socialism, this is great news for researchers and the general public alike.
The collection includes the sole remaining handwritten page of the original Communist Manifesto (1848) and Marx’s own copy of the first edition of Das Kapital (1967), as well as a wealth of letters displaying the lively exchange between socialist leaders and intellectuals of the late XIX century.
We are pleased to announce the final programme for the “Making ‘Big Data’ Human: Doing History in a Digital Age” conference, as set out below (updated 29/08/15). Registration for the conference is free but please sign up here if you would like to attend.
Graduate Student Travel Bursaries – A number of travel bursaries are available for graduate students who wish to attend this conference from outside Cambridge. If you would like to apply for a bursary towards the cost of your travel please email doinghistoryinpublic@gmail.com. All applications should include your name, stage of research (e.g. MA, PhD), amount requested and a short summary of why you would like to attend the conference (max. 200 words). Receipts for travel expenses will need to be brought with you on the day of the conference and bursaries will be refunded after this date. Read more
Matthew is an MPhil student in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge. He is currently researching religious counsel during the mid-Tudor period.
I have been studying history for the better part of four years, yet it was only recently that I managed to fulfil the archetypal ambition of making an original ‘discovery’. Like so much of modern historical research, it began by persistently trawling through online resources, flicking through digital facsimile images of countless early printed works, and noticing a small peculiarity. Laurence Saunders, a clergyman who died on 8th February 1555, had purportedly written a book that described in great detail the trial of two Protestant martyrs, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, who had later been burned at the stake by Mary I. The trial is known to have taken place in October, eight months after Laurence Saunders’ death, inherently undermining his contention that, ‘I was there presente at the doing of thys…and heard al for the most part with mine eares’.[1] Read more
Alison Richard Building, University of Cambridge, 9th September 2015
With Keynote Speaker Prof. Jane Winters, Professor of Digital History and Head of Publications, Institute of Historical Research
In a digital society, it is hard to escape discussions of ‘big data’, massive amounts of information that need database and software techniques for full processing. But beyond this initial definition what does ‘big data’ really mean? Do we already use it? Why do we need to? And how can we integrate this with historical research when using data sets simply too ‘big’ for traditional methods of analysis and presentation? Reflections on the impact and the usage of data, which have perhaps been more forthcoming in the spheres of business and science, are still only starting to permeate through the humanities. Read more
By Louise Moschetta, @LouiseMoschetta
Since the 1990s, in the early days of internet and the final demise of the floppy disk, new notions of knowledge have been hashed out on a global stage. With the dial-up sound (for those nostalgic for a slower, more complicated age, click here) came the possibility of an exchange of knowledge and interconnectivity which had never quite been achieved before. And with this possibility arose ideas of openness, of transnational sharing in virtual form which simply could not be attainable in a material shape. Read more
by Renata Duran, Londrina State University
According to the ICT in Education survey (CGI.br, 2013) conducted by the Internet Steering Committee in Brazil (CGI.br), through its Regional Centre of Studies for the Development of the Information Society (cetic.br), “almost all urban public schools have computers (99%) […]. Read more
The Cambridge University Digital History Seminar has decided to make available online all the material discussed in class. We start from the first lesson, an introduction to digital sources by Marta Musso. The seminar was held at the History Faculty on the 28th of October, 2014. The PDF with notes can be downloaded and used under CC restrictions. The author is available for any questions you might have: mm2015@cam.ac.uk
“The digital dark age? – Guidelines and perspectives of digital archives”
by Marta Musso
On the 3rd of December, the Institute for Historical Research hosted a conference on the challenges and opportunities that the digital world offers to researchers in the humanities. As we live in the middle of the digital revolution, we don’t have full perception of the massive changes that the switch to digital is bringing about. However, over the past 30 years, more and more human actions have been conducted through digital tools (from MS-DOS computers all the way to smartlets) and, especially in the past 15 years, the web has created an exponentially crowded place of action and interaction. As ephemeral as web content is (a tweet is published and lost in just a few seconds), the problem of preserving online data for future studies is now an integral part of research in the humanities.
by Janine Noack
Historians spend hours and hours in front of computer screens and paper sources from other centuries trying to create a cohesive narrative. Mostly we use Microsoft Word to write down our ideas and the internet to browse for information. But our computers can offer us way more than that. We may not always be aware of the great amount of software aiming to help us research more effectively. When contemporary historians analyse the world we live in now, an immense amount of available data needs to be contextualised. That’s where coding becomes essential – not only for programmers but also for historians. Here are some reasons why you should take your first steps in coding right now.
