This document is a slideshow presentation about digital history and research at the British Library. It discusses how digital tools and large digitized corpora allow historians to analyze millions of documents at scale and develop a systemic understanding of how texts were valued and transmitted. It also addresses how digital historians differ from digital humanities scholars and provides examples of projects using computational methods to study patterns of reading in medieval manuscripts and analyze the content of 19th century newspapers.

1. Digital Research at
the British Library
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker

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Text attribution Greg Wilson, Two Solitudes, SPLASH 2013 (29 October 2013)
http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/splash-2013
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“Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their
analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human
capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less make sense
of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of computational
linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are working toward a
large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were valued and
transmitted during this period”
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, ‘Infectious Texts:
Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers’ (2013)
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf

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discipline
camp and
camps sentence

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‘[...] en histoire, comme ailleurs, ce qui
compte, ce n’est pas la machine, mais le
problème. La machine n’a d’intérêt que dans
la mesure où elle permet d’aborder des
questions neuves, originales par les
méthodes, les contenus et surtout l’ampleur’
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
‘L’historien et l’ordinateur’, Le
territoire de l’historien (Paris 1973)
‘In history, as elsewhere, what
counts is not the machine, but
the problem. The machine is only
interesting insofar as it allows to tackle
new questions that are original
because of their methods, content and
especially scale’

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Michael Hancher: blog, exercise

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© Nicola
Demonte

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© David
Normal

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23. Who are these
digital historians?
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker

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27. What is Digital
History? (and how
does it differ from DH)
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker

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Historians accustomed to accept only things
proved by irrefutable documentation, quite
justifiably find these uncertain methods
disturbing. Statisticians share neither their
misgivings nor their timidity.
Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800, (1967), 6-7.

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Newspaper Man photograph courtesy of
Flickr user Ed Stevenson / Creative
Commons Licensed

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‘Early users of medieval books of
hours and prayer books left signs
of their reading in the form of
fingerprints in the margins. The
darkness of their
fingerprints correlates to
the intensity of their use
and handling. A densitometer
-- a machine that measures the
darkness of a reflecting surface --
can reveal which texts a reader
favored.’
Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books: Quantifying
Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts
Using a Densitometer’, Journal of
Historians of Nederlandish Art (2010)

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Virtual St Paul’s
Cross Project
Notes from talk at Institute of
Historical Research, 18 February
2014.

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Bob Nicholson, ‘Counting Culture; or, How to
Read Victorian Newspapers from a Distance’,
Journal of Victorian Culture 17:2 (2012)
“Faced with this mountain of print, we have two choices: to
continue subjecting tiny fragments of Victorian culture to close
reading, or to supplement this approach by exploring a much
larger proportion of the archive through ‘distant reading’.”

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The emergence of the new digital humanities
isn’t an isolated academic phenomenon. The
institutional and disciplinary changes are part
of a larger cultural shift, inside and outside the
academy, a rapid cycle of emergence and
convergence in technology and culture
Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014)
My review at Reviews in History

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Thank you!
@j_w_baker
james.baker@bl.uk
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/