Week 1: An intro to Digital History

1. Week 1 Discussion: where do we start?
2. Week 1 Lab: Early-stage exploratory analysis
3. Week 1 Data Mgmt: what will we do?
4. Get To Know You Survey
5. Digital History Writing Group Scheduling Poll

Week 1 Discussion: where do we start?

Our discussion today will largely focus on our lab activity and on getting us started this semester.

To that end, we’ll talk about how to create syllabi the digital-history way: with a spreadsheet. LINK REDACTED

Week 1 Lab: Early-stage exploratory analysis

We’ll be using Voyant, Google MyMaps, and Net.Create to create a dataset of our shared histories today.

Getting started

Upload your bios in .txt form here: LINK REDACTED

If you don’t have a text editor, you’ll need to paste your bio into WordPad, NotePad++ or TextEdit. Save the file as plain text with a “.txt” extension, and then upload here.

Data entry

About 80% of the work of a digital history project is transforming unstructured data into structured data. We’ll start with networks (the hardest technology to analyze but the easiest to do data-entry for our purposes this semester), then do maps, and text.

Networks: LINK REDACTED

Maps: LINK REDACTED

Text: LINK REDACTED

Week 1 Data Mgmt: what will we do?

In weeks 4-12, we’ll do some active hands-on student-led project-management and collaborative data-entry work directed at each of your projects.

• I’ll meet with you the week before to go over your data-entry and data-management needs and you’ll project-manage ½ of the class for this portion of our class session.
• The goal here is twofold:
• to get you past the 80/20 rule of digital history where 80% of what you need is data entry and cleaning. Each of you will benefit from this class-sourced help.
• More importantly, you’ll be exposed to 15 or 16 different projects in a variety of stages so that you have a sense of how the field works, where the barriers and opportunities are outside of your own project, and you’ll get a sense of how collaborative projects function.

Get To Know You Survey

I’d like to get a better handle on who’s in class and what kinds of skills you bring with you in a format that only I will see.

LINK REDACTED