Apr 28
By Zara Kesterton (@ZaraKesterton)
15 March 2020: we were beginning to realise just how much of an impact the coronavirus pandemic would have on all our lives. One of my friends messaged a group chat, ‘Now that we aren’t allowed to touch anything ever again does it spell the end of material culture? Is the new textual turn approaching?’ Read more
By Zoë Jackson
On September 23, 2019, the British travel company Thomas Cook suddenly went out of business. The company had been dealing with financial issues for years. But its end was abrupt enough as to catch hundreds of thousands of travellers in the middle of trips or looking forward to trips planned with the company.[1] Read more
Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland)
On Thursday, voters across the UK will head to the polls in the third general election in less than five years. This contest suggests numerous historical parallels. It’s the first December election since 1923 – an election which incidentally brought in Britain’s first ever (minority) Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald. Brexit continues to upset traditional party allegiances, leaving both Labour and Tory heartlands vulnerable. And never before has the environmental crisis featured so prominently as an electoral issue.
We’re running a Twitter chat for this year’s World Digital Preservation Day on Thursday 29th November between 12 and 2pm (GMT). The chat will use the hashtag #WDPDhistory. Find us on Twitter @dhiptweets.
We’ll be talking about the importance of Digital Preservation for the study of the past. What does digital preservation look like to historians, archivists and other historical researchers? How does it fit with the digitisation agenda? What are your favourite digital sources, archives or resources? How are we preserving digital content today for the historians of the future?
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.
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 Hira Amin
9/11 is often cited as a watershed moment in contemporary history. The pervasive narrative was that these extremists hated Western freedom and democracy and Islam is an inherently violent and dangerous religion. In the wake of the brutal Charlie Hebdo attacks, one of the most striking features of the coverage was simply the lack of depth, historical analysis and contextualisation. Read more
By Emily Ward
Doing History in Public (DHP) has been a fully-functioning, up-and-running collaborative blog project for the best part of a year. Those of us who have been involved with it since the start wear the ‘blogger’ badge with pride and have found blogging to be an excellent medium with which to pursue thoughts on a variety of historical interests, from personal research to current affairs or digital humanities. Hence a recent social media training session for first year Arts and Humanities Research Council PhD students provided the perfect opportunity for members of the DHP team to try to enthuse new graduates about the use of social media in an academic context. It also ended up providing an occasion to reflect on an exciting year past and to plug a new re-launch for the blog! Read more
by Julia Bourke
On March 5 from 3-5pm, Cambridge DHP hosted a twitter chat to discuss why historians should do history in public. Read a preview below or find the full version on Storify.
