Doing Digital History - A Beginners Guide to Working With Text As Data

This book is a practical introduction to digital history. It offers advice on the scoping of a project, evaluation of existing digital history resources, a detailed introduction to how to work with large text resources, how to manage digital data and how to approach data visualisation.

Doing digital history covers the entire 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. 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.

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. -- .

Product details

• Authors: Jonathan Blaney, Jonathan Winters Blaney, Blaney Jonathan, Sarah Milligan, Martin Steer, Steer Martin, Jane Winters, Winters Jane
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.05.2021
• EAN: 9781526132680
• ISBN: 978-1-5261-3268-0
• No. of pages: 192
• Series: IHR Research Guides
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > General, dictionaries; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > IT, data processing > General, dictionaries; Social sciences, law, business > Media, communication > Communication science; History: theory & methods, HISTORY / General, HISTORY / Historiography, Data analysis: general, Data science and analysis: general, Research methods: general, History: theory and methods, Data science and analysis