Reflecting on my First Forays into the Digital Humanities

Like Dana I’ve never been asked to formally reflect on a class before but I’ve found that ultimately it is an interesting and worthwhile exercise. This reflection has allowed me to go back and consider my initial expectations, what I’ve learned, how my approach to public history has changed, and what I hope to learn in the coming semester. 

Practically from the moment I first navigated to the history department’s website and viewed last year’s digital history wiki page this past June I’ve been excited for History 9808: Digital History. I didn’t know what half of the topics were, for example I had to ask my brother-in-law what spidering is, but that didn’t seem to matter.  I think on some level I viewed (and still view) the Digital History class as the epitome of what a public history class should be: current, informative, and hands-on. Moreover, in my opinion the class addresses a topic that is distinctly lacking in most humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts degrees. In my undergraduate education the extent to which we were taught to effectively use the digital sources available to us was minimal. It was limited to a library research seminar here or there and in St. Mary’s required historiography course a guest lecturer who very briefly discussed digital history as an emerging market (a lecture that while a worthwhile introduction proved to barely touch upon what is available to us as historians in a digital world). Moreover, I felt like I, to some extent, had a bit of an advantage. I’ve been actively using the internet to communicate, play online games, and research for almost 10 years now. I felt on some level that I had a deeper and more meaningful relationship with digital technologies than the average person. Little did I know that my meaningful relationship barely scratched the surface of what the internet and digital humanities had to offer.

Probably the most meaningful thing I’ve learned this semester is just how little I know, and more so, just how much there is out there to learn. I’ve learned about copyright, open source technology, folksonomy, information trapping, collective intelligence, markup, mashups, and augmented reality. I’ve tried my hand at blogging, twitter, html, css, some basic text mining, image manipulation with The GIMP, and website design using Google Sites. The class also had a look at one of the many interesting sources available to us free on the internet The Eaton’s Fall and Winter Catalogue from 1913-1914. Outside of class I was lucky enough to try google wave and got the class into it as well with Tim’s help. I joined a number of academic waves and I’m hoping in the new semester to use it more actively as two of our classes will revolve more directly around group projects. I have on more than one occasion been confronted with topics that were completely new, for example: folksonomy- though in that case, it was perhaps more an issue of not knowing the appropriate name for a concept it turned out I had encountered before. I have yet to completely wrap my head around CSS, when I finally did get my CSS assignment working I had no idea how what I had ultimately done was different from an earlier permutation that for whatever reason was broken and did not work. Moreover, although I understand that APIs are good and useful I have not yet quite wrapped my head around how I use them. Apparently there’s  a book for that, though here is a question: is it available online?

Digital History has also changed my approach to Public History, where before I had an almost snobbish disregard for digital sources, now I look to them first. I have a new set of skills that to a certain extent make digital sources more useful that print sources and I know where to find the information I need and I know how to extract the answers I need from it. Moreover, I’ve learned to use the internet to my advantage I can create a working website and will hopefully be well versed in online interactive exhibit design after next semester.

When I started my MA in Public History I imagined that after my 12 months at UWO I would  be prepared to find employment with a museum or local history group. Perhaps I would be researching and designing exhibits or collecting oral histories, or maybe I’d decide to stick to a more directly academic context and I would contribute to the study of social memory and continue to be a good Atlantic Canadian historian by continuing to explore why the history of Atlantic Canada remains largely underrepresented on a national scale. Digital History has opened my eyes to so many different possibilities from digitization and visualization to publishing online and exploiting new and different sources. Moreover, digital history has helped me to understand the importance of a web presence, and has made the idea of becoming an independent contractor far more palatable. I feel ready for the world of public history with my handy digital humanities toolbelt and theoretical hard hat.

Image Manipulation

Earlier today I added the finished products of  a Digital History assignment to my website. You can have a look here. The assignment involved editing an image using The GIMP. In a few days I'm going to post a guide to completing the edits we were asked to do. I found that when I was trying to figure it out no one place seemed to give me the quick and dirty answers so I'm going to fill the gap I noticed.

Concordances and Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott has been my favourite author since I first read Little Women when I was in third or fourth grade. She was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1832 and published her first novel in 1854. An Old Fashioned Girl was published in 1869, and it tells the story of a young country-girl who visits a wealthy friend in the city first when she is 14 then again 6 years later. Polly (the country girl) helps guide her friend’s family to the conclusion that their family life is all they need when they face bankruptcy. Throughout all this Polly is becomes very close to her friend’s elder brother Tom introducing a romantic aspect to the novel. 

I drew a fair amount of the above from the wikipedia entry and to be honest I caught myself thinking “really? the book is about family values?” I haven’t read it in at least 5 years, very possibly longer. My impression was that the novel was, at its heart, a romance. I had already decided to use the book for the Digital History class’ simple text mining assignment; the inconsistencies between my personal impression (recollection) of the book and the wikipedia description helped me decide what question to ask of the text. I decided to attempt to figure out using concordances if the book is a treatise on family values with a minor romantic sub-plot or a romantic novel as I was, before reading the wikipedia summary and thinking about it a bit further, inclined to believe.

I began by selecting a plain text edition of the novel available on Project Gutenberg and plugging it into the TAPoR Find Words -Concordance tool on the linked page. I decided to start by asking how love appears in the text. The word love appears in the text 88 times and is interspersed with reasonable regularity throughout. However, my initial TAPoR results just didn’t tell me much about the context the word appears in. I decided to expand my concordance to give me the sentences on either side of the word instead of just 5 words. First and foremost I need to mention that apparently Louisa May Alcott did not subscribe to the view that writing should be clear and concise- there is absolutely nothing concise about some of the sentences that the tool selected. More importantly though having the concordance tool give me the sentences gave me a much better picture of the context in which the word love appeared. It quickly became apparent that the majority of the mentions of love in the novel were not romantic in nature. They either referred to the love of, for example, an activity or person more generally, or they referred to familial love. More importantly, mentions of love that directly related to Polly were very rarely of a romantic nature. Making the assumption that love and romance in the 19th century especially among higher class city dwellers revolved around courtship with the eventual end goal of marriage I decided to see what the concordance tool had to say about the words marriage, matrimony, and union. There was only one mention of the word marriage in the entire novel, matrimony does not appear at all, and union appears once in an unromantic context towards the middle of the novel. Finally I asked the concordance tool to tell me about the words courtship, courting, and flirtation. Courtship does not appear in the novel at all, nor does courting. Flirtation, I suppose, is a word that has very few other meanings. It appears in the novel on four distinctly romantic occasions.

In my opinion, the results of my concordances tell me rather unequivocally that my childhood impression of An Old Fashioned Girl as a romantic novel was, at least, thematically wrong. This was at the very least an interesting way to use concordances to examine text.

Perhaps the most challenging thing about generating these concordances was choosing a question to try to answer, followed immediately by choosing words or phrases to plug into the concordance tool. I carefully employed my trusty thesaurus and used the tools linked on the TAPoR pages but I’m sure there was probably a better way to answer my question using the tool. We’ll stick it in the category “learning experience.”

Sources:

http://www.louisamayalcott.org/louisamaytext.html

Books, free, on the internet?

Last week for Digital History we were asked to have a look at the Eaton’s Fall and Winter Catalogue from 1913-1914 and choose 6-8 books from pages 282 onwards. The challenge was to see if we could find full online copies of these books.

For the exercise I chose:

Rose in Bloom- Lousia May Alcott

The Pathfinder- James Fenimore Cooper

A Ladder of Swords- Parker

The Trail of ’98- Robert Service

A Child’s Garden of Verses- Robert Louis Stevenson

Wood’s Illustrated Natural History

Originally I had chosen primarily from the catalogues selection of non-fiction books because I thought that those were likely to be the most difficult to find and might be the most fun to research, especially considering the catalogue often does not provide the authors first name. As you can probably tell from the selection of books I ended up with, a fair number of those books I rather quickly gave up on.

I knew before I even began that Project Gutenberg and Google Books would be invaluable, in part because Bill told us so, however,I hadn’t thought of Archive.org as a source for these books. I decided, however, to start with a google search and work from there.

I started with Rose In Bloom for two reasons, first, I thought that I should try to start out easy, and second, Louisa May Alcott remains to this day one of my favourite authors. I started as I mentioned above with a google search, and the book was just as easy to find as I expected it to be, a few links down the page, I got a full text scan from google books which you can go visit for yourself. Whats particular exciting about this scan is the table of contents has actually been hyperlinked. Maybe I just haven’t spent enough time looking at google books but thats the first time I remember seeing that. Just to see how it fared elsewhere I hoped over to Project Gutenberg. They have text transcriptions of the book available in a variety of formats here. Whats even better is they have other Alcott books I’ve never read. I have this strange feeling that I’ll be putting them on the ereader and reading a lot of Alcott over the Christmas Holidays.

It rather quickly became apparent that I didn’t have the requisite patience to find the non-fiction titles I had chosen for myself, so I moved on to The Pathfinder by James Fenimore Cooper. This one I found first at Project Gutenberg, you can download or view it here. Google books also has a full view scan of the 1877 and 1883 editions of this book.

I decided next to check out the “Recent High Class Fiction.” I started with one I’d never heard of, A Ladder of Swords by Sir Gilbert Parker. I sucessfully pulled up the 1904 edition on Google Books but its only a limited preview. A Ladder of Swords is not available at all on Project Gutenberg, it isn’t even on the works of Gilbert Parker that they list. This struck me as the perfect time to hop in the wayback machine to see if I could find the book there. Thank heavens for the internet archive, I  found the full text of the book on this page, the text version is here. What I find particularly interesting, especially as someone who worked in the book business for seven years is the catalogue’s definition of recent. A Ladder of Swords published in 1904 is listed as “recent” fiction in the 1913-1914 catalogue. Today, that book would be considered ancient by bookstore standards. In fact, if a book is more than two to five years old it can be difficult to find in stores, in part because it may not even be in print anymore.

Next I chose a book I knew well, The Trail of ’98 by Robert Service. I found it easily on Project Gutenberg. You can go read it too if you follow this link. The book was only available in a limited preview on google books. I think because the scan google has is a recent republication. I was also able to find the book 

I decided to look for Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses because I wanted to see if there was anything different about the way books with pictures appear on the internet, as we’ve discussed the fact that images can make the copyright situation a little hairy. The text of the book was pretty easy to find on Project Gutenberg, and they actually even had an audiobook. It turns out that A Child’s Garden of Verses is very much in the public domain, so I was very easily able to find a full scan at google books. However, the scanned edition was not illustrated, so it did not include the pictures I loved as a child. None of the full editions on google books seemed to have illustrations.

Finally, I decided to actually look for one of the non-fiction books I had originally chosen.,Wood’s Illustrated Natural History. I was able to find a full scan of an edition of the book at Google Books, but it was not a general Natural History like the Eaton’s add mentions, instead this was an edition about birds, so I still hadn’t found the book in the catalogue. However, an author search on Google Books quickly yielded this book. Go figure the one I chose would be a relatively easy one to find.

One of the books I could not find in full text: Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book, it is still being published to this day and so was only available as a limited preview, or in snippet view.   Another book I was unable to find: Dr. Gunn’s New Family Physician. I was able to find references to the book but could not find the book itself.

In general, this search was surprisingly easy but I think what surprised me the most about this search is actually the availability of public domain audiobooks. Although I suppose it is logical to assume that if a book is in the public domain and can be reproduced textually, interested parties like LibriVox can make them into audiobooks. More than anything this search was particularly revealing about what is and is not available on the internet and about the nature of copyright. 

New Website!

I have finally joined the rest of the Digital History class and put together a google sites website.

Go see it here.

Its still really just bare bones, but it'll do until I can settle on some images I'm willing to put on the web.

A Brief Introduction to Steampunk

I love Steampunk, so much so, that occasionally I forget how much I love it. In fact, it took me quite some time to latch onto this as the topic for this weeks blogging assignment. Luckily, about three weeks ago when this link made its way into my twitter feed, I subscribed to the associated RSS. When I was trying to come up with topics, I saw it and knew exactly what I was going to do.

Lets get this show on the road.

What, on earth, is Steampunk? Wikipedia, if you know how to read it, is probably the best place to find a quick introduction to any topic. Steampunk is no different, wikipedia provides one of the best introductions I’ve found to the genre. The article includes a fair amount of basic information, and most importantly, pictures. Pictures are central to an understanding of Steampunk.

So, we’ve established that Steampunk is an aesthetic, a genre, and a would-be culture. Next I’d suggest you read the history compiled by the Voyages Extraodinaire bloggers. They’ve provided a fairly etensive and well researched history of Steampunk here. Its ok if you gave up after two chapters, there is a lot of information on these pages from the earliest origins of Steampunk in Victorian novels and silent film, to Disney’s early science fiction, to the emergence of Steampunk in 1980s Science Fiction. If you read nothing else from Voyages Extraordinaire, I’d suggest reading Chapter 3. Then have a look at this video from the world’s first Steampunk exhibit on now at The Oxford Museum of the History of Science. The video shows various aspects of the exhibit and features interviews from the curator and several of the artists whose work is featured.

Now that we know the origins of Steampunk, its time to explore the Steampunk aesthetic, have a look at the process illustrated here. When you’ve finished with that I’d suggest heading to http://www.steampunklab.com. Take a look at some of the galleries and you’ll really get a feel for the style. When you’re done there have a look at the gallery Wired Magazine has put together. Steampunk is very much an art form and it has made its way into fashion, film, literature, and television. In the last few years it has also captured the attention of the media, this article published in the Boston Globe is fairly typical.

At this point, you’ve probably realized you’ve seen this aesthetic before. Steampunk has appeared in novels, film, and art since the 1980s. Have a look at http://www.steampunk.com  and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_steampunk_works and see if there are any authors, directors, films, or shows that you’ve seen. 

Finally, I’d suggest you visit  a few of the blogs listed below:

http://brassgoggles.co.uk/blog/

http://datamancer.net/

http://thesteampunkhome.blogspot.com/

http://steampunkworkshop.com/

Image Source:

http://steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml


*** Edit: November 2nd, 2009***


It's hilarious, everytime I write on a specific topic I start seeing it everywhere. Check it out, there is a steampunk reference in today's questionable content web comic.


http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1526

The Changing Face of History, or How the Internet is Revolutionizing our World.

As Roy Rosenzweig argued, historians are in the midst of a paradigm shift. Where primary sources particularly, and secondary sources to a lesser extent were once in short supply, digitization projects, not to mention born digital documents are making history more accessible than it has ever been in the past. The Internet is for all intents and purposes revolutionizing history. Historians have blogs, they use twitter, books are published concurrently online and on paper, and most university students and professors can now read court records from The Old Bailey online at 3 in the morning if they so desire.

This shift will change the way we do history, how can it not? That’s not to say that the public archives will be empty, or publishers are going to have to start closing offices and hosting their authors work online instead of printing it. We might, however, find a few more computers at the archives, and publishers certainly should consider publishing digitally as well.

In my opinion, the sheer accessibility of sources will change what we as historians do more than anything else. As I said earlier, most academics could, if they wanted to, read the records of The Old Bailey from home in their underpants. The days of traveling to ones sources may be numbered. Projects like Early English Books Online, and Early Canadiana Online have made it easier and easier to find and use primary sources from the comfort of our own homes. Where once, we might have had to buy a plane ticket, book a hotel, and perhaps actually experience England in order to write a thesis based on English primary sources, we can now open a browser, access one of these pages and start keyword searching for the information we need. This level of accessibility is, I believe, both a good thing and a bad thing.

I would argue that the documents I mention above should be publically accessible, and digitization is perhaps the best way to ensure that they are. It would be almost impossible to store physical copies of everything contained in the National Archives (the UK government’s official archive) in all of the commonwealth countries, let alone to ensure that these documents could be made widely available. Think about how much paper would be required, and how much space that would likely take. Digitization solves the problem of space. Documents that are digitized need only be housed in one place, and the digital copy can then be stored on a hard disk drive, cd-rom, dvd-rom, or solid state drive in a specialized facility. At this point it is a simple task to make the documents widely available.

Once the documents are widely available, we need a means of accessing them. Just like traditional archives have indexes and catalogues, online archives need a search engine. Search engines allow anyone to search the indexed documents for keywords, subjects, and phrases, some will even go so far as to let the historian limit the search dates. The downside however is that search engines are only as good as the system upon which they are based, be that a system of indices and categories, or an algorithm. To add a second factor to the efficacy of search engines, search engines are only as effective as the people using them. So, search engines are effectively limited by the questions we ask them. We as historians must learn how to use search engines effectively or no matter how accessible information is we will be unable to access it in its entirety if we do not know how to effectively search it.

Likewise, what we search can too easily be randomized to create a recombinant view of history, where concurrent events and movements are related randomly to create a picture of our historical past. Steve Anderson gives the example of the Recombinant History Project’s Terminal Time. Terminal Time is an AI based system that reconstructs history from a broader history of the past 1000 years based on audience choices. It illustrates quite clearly how different viewpoints can change the way history is understood if it is sampled randomly without, for example, an understanding of place. Terminal Time more specifically illustrates the involvement of our cultural biases in our research in a rather extreme fashion.

As I said above, the accessibility of information is both a good thing and a bad thing. Recombinant history is a good example of the bad. Another concern of mine is in actual fact the accessibility itself. As accessibility changes the way we do history I worry that we are perhaps losing the visceral experience of digging through the past. If we no longer have to leave home to search many primary sources, are we losing the sense of discovery we might have felt had we weeded our way through an archive? Likewise, if we for convenience sake limit ourselves to items that have been digitized, who then will tell the story of the items that have not been digitized? I worry that we will soon find ourselves only studying convenient history; we’ll stop discovering new pre-internet sources, and instead focus on the myriad emails, web pages, and digital records available to us. Perhaps, even more alarming is the potential that we will allow the sources that have been digitized to become representative of the past.

The Internet is revolutionizing the practice of history, as more and more sources are being digitized or are born digitally daily. In order to survive in a digital world, historians need to learn a new set of skills. We must learn how to research again, and we must learn how to use the Internet to our advantage. Historians in a digital age need to know how to work with digital files, search digital databases effectively, and we need to know when the convenience of the digital is not enough. If we learn those skills, the Internet can be our friend instead of our enemy.

Sources:

Lutz, John Sutton. “ Digital Literacy: What Every Graduate Student Needs to Know.” Canadian Historical Association. Retrieved October 6^th, 2009 from http://seankheraj.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/lutz-cha-bulletin-article.pdf

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance: Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” American Historical Review. 108 (3). Retrieved October 6^th, 2009 from http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=6

Turkel, William J. Digital History Hacks: Methodology for the Infinite Archive (2005-08). [Weblog.]

Defining Ourselves as Public Historians

In the almost five months since I made the decision to pick up my life and move to London to attend UWO I’ve heard one question more times than I care to count. Imagine this scenario:

I’m sitting across from my grandma, this is probably the second to last time I saw her before I moved.

“So, Nana,” I say, “Mikkel and I are moving to London- I’m going to the University of Western Ontario to do my masters in Public History.” Now my nana is a smart cookie, and age certainly hasn’t slowed her down any, but I can tell watching her that she’s trying to decide what on earth this “public history” is. Finally she breaks down and asks:

“Well dear, what exactly is Public History?”
At this point, I flounder, like I’ve floundered almost every time I’ve been asked this question. Its not even an issue of not knowing, its an issue of the complexity, subjectivity, and sheer scope of my potential answers. Sometimes I tell people its museum history, or cryptically, history as we present it to the public, or even more theoretically, I tell people it’s the study of how we as a group remember our history and how what historians do to present it changes that.

It was reassuring to realize that as a budding public historian I am not alone in my inability to create a single complete definition of my field. In fact public historians in general have not been able to create one overarching definition. For example In her 2007 Presidential address of the Canadian Historical Association, Margaret Conrad summarizes 7 or so definitions from 4 different historians.

So, if we haven’t been able to come up with one definition or perhaps mission statement for our field, what then are we as student public historians studying, how do we define what we hope will become our life’s work? Perhaps instead we should define how public history is different from academic history, or, perhaps one overarching definition might be too limiting to a broad field that in my opinion bridges the gap between academia and the public. Perhaps we should flounder, so that we can continually redefine ourselves in a quickly changing world.

Source:

Conrad, Margaret. (2007) "2007 Presidential Address of the CHA: Public History and its Discontents or History in the Age of Wikipedia" Journal of the Canadian Historical Association. 18(1). p. 1-26.

Let's Start at the Very Beginning

The idea of a blog, to me, is at once both an anxiety-ridden concept and one I must confess to being extremely curious about. I have never had a blog, let alone a diary, I don’t contribute to online forums, and I haven’t written letters since junior high. I am not a recorder, and I certainly don’t record my thoughts for the world to see. So, to quote Maria Von Trapp, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” The beginning here, I guess, is me.

I was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia on a rainy Saturday in November 1983. Until June 29^th, 2009 I lived there. I attended Sacred Heart School of Halifax where I got a strong basis in academics, and then proceeded to make the rounds of local universities. Something Halifax has in spades. I started at Dalhousie University in September 2001 in a science degree, leaning towards, of all things, neuroscience and medicine. I very quickly realized that medicine was not for me, and instead followed my strong interest in environmental issues to Dal’s fledgling Environmental Programs department. I graduated in May 2006 with an unofficial minor in history and decided I wanted to become an environmental educator. I enrolled at Saint Mary’s University as a change of pace to get the rest of my requisites for a teaching degree. At Saint Mary’s I fell in love with history, and in particular Public History which I had first been briefly introduced to by Dr. Claire Campbell at Dalhousie. It was, however, Dr. Nicole Neatby at SMU who truly introduced me to public history and was integral in my introduction to oral history, social memory, and more specifically UWO’s public history program. At that point, I gave up on the BEd and my mind was made up- I needed a break, but I would apply to Western for fall 2009.

That, essentially, is how I ended up here, writing my first post in my first blog practically shaking in my seat. Hold on world, Becca Rahey has a blog, this could get interesting- at least as soon as I figure out what to write about.

The incredible, but apparently inevitable has happened.

Fasten your seat belts world, Becca Rahey has a blog.