Open ryanpickering opened 9 years ago
shawngraham
commented
9 years ago Nope, this is the right place.
The 'tediousness' of digital history... I suppose. For some, 'close reading' or annotating might be equally tedious. Which of the projects showcased struck you as something you'd like to know more about, or were particularly inspiring?
ryanpickering
commented
9 years ago That's exactly what I mean though: just as this presentation showed the decisions made in digital history and regular history are very similar, so too are the long processes that one has to go through to finish a project. Which isn't a bad thing in my book, it's just another interesting similarity between the two that some profess to be very very different. Also I think it's ironic in the sense that some of the aspects of digital history have historians drawing on tools like wget, which allow them to download and access hundreds or thousands of documents with a few terms, but with that comes extensive vetting and cleaning up that isn't needed in traditional history. It's just a cool thought to me, I guess.
Hmm...I think I'd be interested in understanding Kindred Britain more, just because of the complexity of what they had to do in order to organize everything the way it appears.
shawngraham
commented
9 years ago I think we're on the same page! Kindred Britain is v. cool. Elijah Meeks, as it happens, has just published a book on how to do data visualizations in d3.js which you should check out. http://www.manning.com/meeks/
Hello all,
This may be the wrong place to put this quick bit of information, so please point me in the right direction if I am lost. That said, I just finished Miriam Posner's video on deconstructing digital humanities pieces, and it was very interesting. I found it to be a very simply explanation of methodologies going into digital history projects - simple in the way that Posner says that the methodologies of digital history are the exact same as regular history. One can see this more clearly when they break down the project into three steps - sources, processes, presentation. I think, however, that this framework in which to view DH projects only works extremely well when related to projects that don't make an essentially new scholarly interpretation through traditional scholarship techniques, but instead rearrange already available information to show off a new trend - incidentally, that is a trend in digital history. This point may be way off, but I'm writing it down so that I may be corrected and pointed in the right direction if that is the case. In thinking that, I thought of the reading we had a bit ago about the perpetual sunrise of methodology. In thinking of doing some of these projects, though, I was interested by the second last one on philosophical references to each other and how that shows off something new. It could easily be redone in any subject area to show off the trends in, for example, German or Russian history at different times, or any subject really. In discussing Swag Histories, the creator of that piece talked about the need to standardize all of her information in order to use different mapping and analysis programs. That highlights the tediousness that is a necessary evil in a lot of digital history, and is ironic in my opinion. It connects immediately in my mind to the tediousness involved in XML labelling a primary document or a transcription. All in all, this piece definitely reinforced within me the similarities between good digital history and more 'traditional' history, in the sense that both can be exciting, both can be very informative, but they both require decisions and a lot of hands-on work and tediousness as a necessary evil to achieve a complete and effective project.
Cheers, Ryan