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This book is a practical introduction to digital history with a focus on working with text. It will benefit anyone who is considering carrying out research in history that has a digital or data element and will also be of interest to researchers in related fields within digital humanities, such as literary studies or Classics. It offers advice on the scoping of a project, evaluation of existing digital history resources, a detailed introduction on how to work with large text resources, how to manage digital data and how to approach data visualisation.
After placing digital history in its historiographical context, and stressing the importance of understanding the history of digital history, this guide covers the life cycle of a digital project, from conception to digital outputs. It assumes no prior knowledge of digital techniques and shows you how much you can do without writing any code. It will give you the skills to use common formats such as XML with confidence. A key message of the book is that data preparation is a central part of most digital history projects, but that work becomes much easier and faster with a few essential tools.
The guide will be especially useful for postgraduates or other researchers about to embark upon a large piece of research.
List of contents
Introduction
1 The context of digital history
2 Formulating your research questions
3 How a digital project begins
4 Text 1: unstructured text
5 Text 2: structured text
6 Caring for your digital history project
7 Visualising your data
8 What next for digital history?
Answers to 'test yourself' questions
Appendix 1 Getting the data
Appendix 2 Some command line recipes
Appendix 3 Regular expressions
References
Index
About the author
Jonathan Blaney is Head of Digital Projects at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London
Sarah Milligan is an independent scholar based in Victoria, Canada
Marty Steer is Technical Lead, Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London
Jane Winters is Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London
Summary
A practical guide to digital history, which shows just how much can be done without writing any code. This book will give researchers in history or related fields the skills and confidence to approach existing digital resources and to create their own. Assuming no prior knowledge, the guide focuses on hands-on techniques for working with text. -- .
