Category: Published

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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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Lab 1: Basic WordPress Development

WordPress is a common content management system that allows users to create websites without knowing how to code. You will create a WordPress website in this class and use it to post your blog posts.

Lab:

Today we will set up your WordPress websites and share them with the rest of the class (by adding a comment to this post with a link to your site).

  1. Log on to https://sites.usask.ca/.
  2. Find your way into the WordPress Dashboard
  3. Choose a new Theme for your website and play with the personalized options.
    1. Choose a title for your website and a subtitle
    2. add a banner image if your theme requires one
    3. create a menu
  4. create an about page
  5. decide how public you want the website to be. If you want to keep it somewhat private, you can click the box that discourages search engines from indexing the site. In practice, it is pretty hard to get attention for a blog, but this will reduce the chance that it comes up when someone searches your name. If you are concerned about privacy, there are other options to make your content password protected.
  6. Post a short blog post. Try embedding a photo, YouTube video and other content. The USask Sites limits what we can embed, but lots of content should work.

If you finish the basics before the end of the class or have worked with WordPress before, you might want to use the time to go deeper and learn more about how this content management system works and how you can tweak it to

USask provides free access to Linked In Learning (formally called Lynda.com) content and given we are online, I think this is a good resource to learn the basics of WordPress, as you can work at your own pace. I will also be able to join you via Zoom to help you through any issues.

You can access the lessons through this link: https://training.usask.ca/linkedin-learning/LIL.php

[USE YOUR NSID TO LOG IN. YOU DO NOT NEED TO LINK YOUR ACCOUNT TO A LINKED-IN ACCOUNT.]

Here is a very good WordPress essentials course. I will give you a list of the most important videos and which ones you might want to skip.

  • WordPress 5 Essential Training
    • WordPress: An introduction
      • skip forward
    • 1. Up and Running with WordPress
      • Skip Install and running WordPress as the IT people at USask have taken care of this for us.
      • The Admin Panel
      • Skip change the language unless you want to learn about launching a site in another language.
    • 2. Content Management

If you already know how to work with WordPress, there are a few more advanced lessons that you should consider: