Author: Andrew

I have experienced HTML only briefly in adding content to the Mason Family Account Book Digital project. I chose this module for my first optional week of work because when I encounter coding it confuses me and I hope to at least be able to understand enough of what I am looking at to know where to look to figure things out. XML and TEI are completely new to me.

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is an important consortium that creates guidelines for encoding text. As Cummings’s article suggests, I too think it is important to have a paper trail of the changes in how this group and digital humanities perceive the challenges associated with text coding. It seems that many of the proposed solutions to the TEI myths could be applied to most misunderstandings. Since the TEI Guidelines are such a large corpus of information, many people only engage with small portions of it. This calls for long term teaching approaches through smaller, more digestible modules. This encompasses the more or better teaching materials that Cummings calls for. Also, as in many committee settings, more open communication needs to be embraced.[1]

The only crowdsourcing projects I am aware of are the only facilitated by the National Archives, for example, their efforts to transcribe Revolutionary War pension applications. I have never engaged with them, because well, I have enough of my own transcription work to work on, but they always catch my eye. I guess I would consider this type of recruiting “lightweight peer production,” that Causer and Wallace describe in their article. Now knowing the distinction between lightweight and heavyweight production, I wonder who they have going through these records and annotating them, or even if they do have people in these roles.[2]

Just because of the massive scope of the ODNB, I too had never thought of being able to study it as a corpus and record itself. I have thought about studying source creation at a much smaller scale, which did not require wrestling with text encoding. The two voices of historiography just complicate things more for me in a world of trying to understand scholarly arguments and where I fit in with them. As we have learned, digital humanities projects inherently contain arguments, and it makes complete sense about the data structure of such a large project to have a framework.[3] Also, I find Warren’s definition of digital humanities interesting: Information history, digital history, sociology of knowledge, media archaeology, history of archives, distant reading, and data visualization.[4]

Reading Causer with XML, man I’m going crossed eyed now. It is interesting that I can still follow what is there and the information that XML provides. The body of the article is fairly similar, minus the information about italics and the like, but the extra tag information about the articles metadata is cool to see the thought process of creating the file.

For the technical activity of coding a document I chose to encode a letter from the Freedmen’s Bureau. Along with the transcription, applying the proper HTML tags for superscript, underlines, paragraphs, and right justified text for the header, I see the amount of work that goes into putting text on the web.

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[1] James Cummings, “A world of difference: Myths and misconceptions about the TEI,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqy071.

[2] Tim Causer and Valerie Wallace, “Building A Volunteer Community: Results and Findings from Transcribe Bentham, Digital Humanities Quarterly 6, no. 2 (2012). https://doi.org/10.63744/g2e6wuytv8hd.

[3] Christopher N. Warren, “Historiography’s Two Voices: Data Infrastructure and History at Scale in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB),” Journal of Cultural Analytics 3, no. 1 (2018), 4, 31. https://doi.org/10.22148/16.028

[4] Warren, “Historiography’s Two Voices,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 3, no. 1 (2018), 2. https://doi.org/10.22148/16.028

This class has been eye-opening to all the different approaches to presenting history. These big open-ended discussion questions are mindboggling and illuminating.  

This was my second introduction to Twine. I took HIST390 Intro to Digital History with Dr. Otis during undergrad and my group made a choose your own adventure game that was set during the Reformation in England. I appreciate the skills we learned, but like those that knew GIS was not for them, I know that creative historical storytelling is not for me. I could see myself creating a Twine experience that explores many branches of an event or time period, but I will leave the imagination to others. Maybe the time crunch of the 20 minutes we had to create our own got to me, when I learned it was supposed to be historical, I reluctantly scrapped the which snack do you wanna pick from the junk food cupboard Twine I was making as we got our demo. 

I think it would be interesting to use this methodology to present many different perspectives on a significant event. There are a few court cases we are planning to use on the Judicial Learning Center website with a lot of testimony that I think this approach would change things up for the 8^th graders engaging with our site. 

I knew that RRCHNM produced podcasts, but I had never listened to any. I chose to listen to Dr. Miles Kelly’s Appalachian Trial podcast episode about the sign on top of Mt. Katahdin. I don’t generally listen to podcasts, just because of being so busy, but I found these well done. They were much more engaging than the video listed in this week’s schedule. Both history delivery systems consist of a mountain of work, but personally I would rather just listen than watch too.  

It was interesting to hear the differences in the other podcasts. It was easy to tell that The Green Tunnel followed a strict script and was heavily edited, but it was also only 15 minutes, so it makes sense that the hour-long ones that my group members listened to were more conversational. 

One of the important concepts I took away from this week’s readings was that GIS can tell you where something is, but it cannot tell you why it is there.

I am glad that I have had an introduction (self-taught) to QGIS because this week’s material was dense. The articles put into words some of the struggles I have encountered already. Historical sources are often ambiguous, riddled with gaps, and inconsistencies, thus making WAY more work to think about the best ways to structure and input those sources into GIS.[1] The whole horizontal and vertical aspects of thinking like a geographer still boggles my mind, but as I read more scholarship focused on race and place, I can see the horizontal flow of community and culture. One of the points we brought up in class was the dehumanizing effect creating datasets can have on historical subjects. It seems that other scholars have thought this too with the push back HGIS received early on, however, I think ways to address this could include the historian’s “caveat” or “disclaimer” that accompanies the analysis or data visualizations. While data erases the human element, we as historians can put our subjects back by clearly articulating our methods and acknowledging the silences our data creates.

Even though the article about mapping Tokyo is 26 years old now, I appreciated the extensive methodological breakdown. Ultimately, I hope to include spatial analysis in my larger works and reading about other’s successes and struggles was beneficial.

It makes me happy to think that we have made it through the hardest module for the semester. The work we did in class was new for me. This was also a much nicer experience than my crash and burn trying to learn how to use QGIS on my own for a couple months. It had been about a year since I opened the software, and the refresher was great along with the formal training. It also makes me chuckle that I spent SO much time trying to georectify maps on MapWarper that I pulled from the David Rumsey collection that had already been done.

I am looking forward to testing the waters with mapping for my group’s final project. I think mapping is one of the best ways to grab an audience’s attention, especially if it is a public history project. There is an opportunity that our project will reinvigorate a relationship between Mason and a community partner which may foster future scholarship with their rich resources.

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[1] GIS and its role in historical research: an introduction, 17.

Understaffed and underfunded are apt descriptors for most libraries and archives. I prefer not to add the term pirate to that list, unless it is some odd office Halloween party. These two professions tend to focus first on providing their patrons with the sources they need to either further research or indulge an itch for education. It is in their job description to understand the sources available to them and how best to harness those sources. So, while big publishing companies are collecting exorbitant subscription fees, I see nothing wrong with sharing those paywalled sources between individuals. Unfortunately, our academic and popular literature system is built on this type of transaction. How many times have you been a third of the way through an online news article to just be cut off by the limits of a daily free trial? Saying that I think there are work arounds for these, but I do not think paywalls are going away. There is an associated prestige with publishing under certain presses that will always carry weight in their respective fields, but if you received funding from taxpayer dollars to conduct your research, I think the fruits of that labor should always be free and accessible.

I am glad that I have now been shown Omeka Classic. I have used Omeka-S and the logical path for learning this interface would have been Classic first, but oh well. I learned so helpful tips this week about the inner workings of Omeka, like the thumbnail path connection and file size parameters. Either way, for me, Omeka still proves to be a trial-and-error based system that is thankfully fairly forgiving. Thanks again to all those librarians that spend endless hours building out libguides!

Metadata and its associated headaches are no joke. In my experience, creating a standard for certain metadata fields FIRST, should be a rule. I have also experimented with using spreadsheets to promote consistency across multiple items. A combination of the two should be present in every project. When I built out the Judicial Learning Center website my Omeka and metadata skills were in their infancy. I would like to think I am in my stumbling around learning to walk phase after having to go back through the entire list of items that my colleague and I created to ensure consistent metadata. To give you an idea, it took about a week to make sure everything was in presentable condition, but I am sure there are a few things I missed here and there.

I found immense value in our short but lofty conversation about arguments in DH projects. By defining the implicit arguments in my work, I think my future scholarship will be stronger.

Organization is the catalyst to keeping myself headed in the right direction, so I found this week’s readings and video useful. For my research projects that are writing based I learned the importance of breaking things down into smaller chunks, so I am not sure why I had not thought of DH in the same way. In the future I plan to apply Tabak’s model for managing DH projects to my other work as well.

This was my first introduction to any type of project management software. I really like how Basecamp keeps everything together, especially when collaborating with a team. In previous projects I have used things like shared folders, google docs, or even emailing new versions back and forth to team members. I now see how inefficient that was at the time.

What a shame that the NEH is no more, at least for another two and a half years, fingers crossed! In my work at the courthouse, I conducted grant research for the Judicial Learning Center, and it was all so foreign to me. Most of that research was during a time when everything was being cut as well, so yeah, not great times. Other than that, I had only looked at the yearly grant applications for document conservation from the Library of Virginia. That was the final product, and I never had to think about putting the package together. The NOFO we looked at this week was so helpful to better understand the entire process. I also see the importance of building grant writing as a skill. The table from page thirteen with the breakdown of the language is one of those reference items that I have now added to citation help and Dublin Core metadata definitions that I am sure I will keep going back to.

My usual methodologies consist of Trouillot’s analysis of the four moments when history is created and Montalvo’s questioning the perspectives of people that created legal documents surrounding enslaved people, so I cannot believe I had not previously applied the questioning the silences methods to digital tools and methodologies. Griffin and Hayler’s article had an interesting concept of breaking through the us versus them perception that surrounds technology. I know I have been in the situation they mention in the article when technology acts up at a presentation or something and I have treated it like an obscure tool. As a public historian my goal is to bridge the gap between academia and the public so I figure why can’t I do the same with technology.

I feel like the Anonymous Cheetahs quickly gelled as a DH team. I am sure like most, I dreaded the final group project coming into this course, but now I feel confident knowing that I am among like-minded individuals. Our strengths even out any weaknesses and I think by the end of the semester we can help each other build the skills that we feel are shortfalls. It has been super exciting these past couple of days at work putting together maps and court cases to incorporate into our project.

Our class time working with AI for transcriptions reassured me that my skills of transcription, historical document editing, and being able to read cursive handwriting are still important. Before class I had zero interest in using AI to transcribe, but now I see how someone may find it useful if parsing through a large corpus of documents to determine how close to read them or as a better than nothing scenario as with the Papers of the War Department project. As I work to transcribe all the letters to and from Fairfax’s Freedmen’s Bureau to create an index and database for researchers, it comforts me to know that I should finish before AI gets good enough to do the same.

Ahh the topic of citations. Historians not citing articles because the standard for scholarship is the academic monograph makes sense to me, but I could not imagine changing a digital article’s citation format into the print version.[1] I just do not see the point in that. These databases have paywalls for a reason, unfortunately, and being able to justify keeping them alive means they need to show people are using and referencing them. As for URLs, I personally just put the database where I retrieved an article, but when it is a website, the URL is necessary. The reason I choose to cite books as if I use the physical version is because I consider them different than journal articles. It is hard to get over the thought that engaging with the hard copy of a book is more prestigious than the digital version. Even when I use a digital surrogate, I reference the index, read the introduction and conclusion, and analysis the chapter titles. If I have not found what I am looking for then I will do a keyword search.

Putnam’s article illuminated how digitized sources can be positive and negative. What stood out to me was the sense of place that gets lost with using only digitized sources. My biggest take away was the quote “distinguishing the window from the why will be crucial.”[2] Keyword searchability removes the sense of scope that is important. I need to be sure to keep in mind that if something only shows up five times in my newspaper search, it may not be as important as I think it was.

I had not considered how much more digitized newspapers are cited than those still on microfilm or not digitized at all. A light bulb went off that answered my question about the lack of visibility Fairfax County receives in academic literature, it is because the court archive requires an in person visit! At least that leaves a gap in the scholarship for me to address in my own work.

Overall, I found this week’s material and discussion useful. I am glad that most of the sources I encounter are out of copyright (sorry 20^th century folks). The overview and definitions Schoch provides for different data models will sure be important as we add to our digital toolbox throughout the semester.[3]

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[1] Jonathan Blaney and Judith Siefring, “A Culture of non-citation: Assessing the digital impact of British History Online and the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, 2017, 2.

[2] Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” The American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016), 392. JSTOR.

[3] Christof Schoch, “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities,” Journal of Digital Humanities 2, no. 3 (2013). Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities · Journal of Digital Humanities.

Hello world of Digital Humanities, or wait, is it Digital History?

The world of WP welcomed me with a fog of confusion and frustration, but I think the dust of the first night of class has settled. Minus a few technical difficulties, and scrolling through a million theme options, at least this blog page is up and ready to share thoughts and insights for our Clio Wired journey.

So who was I to think by doing “New Social History” that I was avoiding the digital world? I thought by keeping to myself, not doing fancy websites, nothing more than crunching numbers, spreadsheets, and well, maybe a little QGIS, I was safe. Adam Crymble’s Technology and the Historian blew my mind. Of course, I had heard of Frank Owsley’s thesis of a small poor/middling class in between the enslaved and elite, but I never attributed his methodology as a foundation for digital history. Regardless if his “computer” was just a really smart person that was good with numbers or a calculator, I guess I was blinded by his racist motivations. (18)

I think Crymble’s glossary is one of his most important contributions. As a historian in training, defining my methodology has been one of the biggest challenges that haunts me. Although I am still not completely certain of exactly what I am doing all the time, this week’s reading pushed me one step closer to that conclusion. Even the different types of transcription projects that I engage in have their own names.

Although almost any scholar can employ the differing regional experiences argument, Crymble’s point about these different paths toward the digital world as we currently know it is interesting to think about. I would consider us fortunate even if the focus that pushed the US was pedagogy instead of digitizing records. Often, I pause in amazement at the local Fairfax County historical work on our reference shelves that my predecessors pumped out, without the benefits of VirginiaChronicle.com. I prefer to focus on other aspects of the history world besides pedagogical approaches, but last week I did have the opportunity to facilitate three breakout sessions of the Fairfax County Public School Social Studies teacher in-service day. Even the resources available to these students dwarfs what I had back in Maine, so while Crymble focuses on a macro scale, I think we need to be aware of the differences within those big spaces.

Working in the Fairfax Circuit Court Archives for over the past year and a half has been a playground for “cliometrics.” Most of our collection is digitized, but not out there on the internet. Ancestry and FamilySearch have scooped up some of our will and deed books, but overall, we are an institution that requires patrons to come in the flesh. Trying to use these records in a new way, I have created data sets from Fairfax’s slave patrol and jailer records that have led to visualizations which have furthered my arguments. I also mapped the County’s slave patrols, rudimentarily, using QGIS. I did not think that by doing all of this I was, in fact, engaging in digital history.

In closing my first ever blog post, it was great to meet all of you fellow budding digital historians and I look forward to forging onward together this semester.