Week 3

  1. Are we all digital historians now?
  2. How is this a good thing?
  3. What are some of the problems and concerns?
  4. How can we do a better job as digital historians?
  5. How should we chance citation?

Academic Digital History – January 27

Readings:

  • Putnam, Lara. “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast.” The American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (April 1, 2016): 377–402. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.377.
  • Ian Milligan, “We Are All Digital Now: Digital Photography and the Reshaping of Historical Practice,” Canadian Historical Review 101, no. 4 (December 1, 2020): 602–21, https://doi.org/10.3138/chr-2020-0023.
  • Daniel J. Story et al., “History’s Future in the Age of the Internet,” The American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (October 21, 2020): 1337–46, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa477.

Lab: Digital tools for every historian

  • Smartphone cameras linked to cloud backup
    • How do you take a good photograph of a sheet of paper, a book or a large map
    • Which encoding should you use? heic? jpg? other?
    • Where should you back up your images?
    • How do you keep track of what you’ve got?
  • Google Scholar
  • Other scholarly databases
  • Primary source databases
    • How many history databases have you used?
  • Internet Archive
    • Use the advance search to find a document about Coffee in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from the 1860s
  • Zotero
    • Download and install Zotero if you’ve not used it already.
  • My Maps or Google Earth
    • Give My Maps a try. It is a very basic GIS tool that is free to use and you can access it from any browser.
  • Spreadsheets
  • Transcribing tools
    • https://transkribus.eu/
      • A potentially powerful tool using artificial intelligence to transcribe handwriting. How well does it work?
    • https://tropy.org/
  • Oral history software:
  • Primary source search and storage
    • Evernote
  • Digital publishing: WordPress, Medium, The Conversation, etc
  • Networking: Twitter

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