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.
Outreach and learning communities at British Library Digital Research: what w...James Baker
Notes from a talk I gave at 'Digital Literacies: Building Learning Communities in the Humanities', HEA event at Liverpool John Moores, 2 April 2014.
Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/9889496
Slides from a talk I gave at the HistoryLab+ organised 'Life After the PhD' event at the Institute of Historical Research, 5 June 2014.
Notes at https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/b84881664c3ae7e34255
Reseach in the Digital Age, 19th Century Periodicals Research Day (8 November...James Baker
Reseach in the Digital Age, 19th Century Periodicals Research Day (8 November 2013, Liverpool John Moores)
Script: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qieNc1E39xqAc2JPLtx_VETUOayYXsLX12WbMs4EQcE/edit?usp=sharing
My notes from the day: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/7373223
Outreach and learning communities at British Library Digital Research: what w...James Baker
Notes from a talk I gave at 'Digital Literacies: Building Learning Communities in the Humanities', HEA event at Liverpool John Moores, 2 April 2014.
Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/9889496
Slides from a talk I gave at the HistoryLab+ organised 'Life After the PhD' event at the Institute of Historical Research, 5 June 2014.
Notes at https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/b84881664c3ae7e34255
Reseach in the Digital Age, 19th Century Periodicals Research Day (8 November...James Baker
Reseach in the Digital Age, 19th Century Periodicals Research Day (8 November 2013, Liverpool John Moores)
Script: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qieNc1E39xqAc2JPLtx_VETUOayYXsLX12WbMs4EQcE/edit?usp=sharing
My notes from the day: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/7373223
A million first steps: Information management in practiceJames Baker
Slides from a lecture given at Information Management and Policy module for the MSc programme in Library and Information Science at City University, 31 October 2014
Notes at http://jameswbaker.tumblr.com/post/101409618042/a-million-first-steps-information-management-in
Reusing digital content: towards making research using this content limited b...James Baker
Notes from a short talk I gave at the Mining Digital Repositories: Challenges and Horizons event at the KB, The Hague, 11 April 2014.
Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/10422453
Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities: some thoughts on what, why, and ...James Baker
Slides for a talk I gave at CHASE Digital Training Programme Opening Conference, Open University, 20 February 2015.
Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/a95f4cee472af0d1773f
Future Libraries: considering 'publishing', City University, London, 10 April...James Baker
Slides for a lecture I gave as part of the 'Libraries and Publishing in an Information Society' Masters module at City University, London, on 10 April 2015
Notes at https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/9fbd71e4e4e232052265
Slides for lecture given at City Unviersity to Libraries and Publishing in an Information Society MA/MSc group, 14 March 2014.
My notes available at https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/9546972
Doing a dissertation: how the Digital Humanities can help youJames Baker
Notes from a lecture I gave to a third year dissertation preparation module class at Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Roehampton
Creating, Curating and Collecting Interactive Fiction at the British LibraryStella Wisdom
Presentation for DRHA: Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts 2020, Panel 1A, 11:00-12:30, Monday 7th September 2020, http://www.drha.uk/salford2020
A million first steps: Information management in practiceJames Baker
Slides from a lecture given at Information Management and Policy module for the MSc programme in Library and Information Science at City University, 31 October 2014
Notes at http://jameswbaker.tumblr.com/post/101409618042/a-million-first-steps-information-management-in
Reusing digital content: towards making research using this content limited b...James Baker
Notes from a short talk I gave at the Mining Digital Repositories: Challenges and Horizons event at the KB, The Hague, 11 April 2014.
Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/10422453
Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities: some thoughts on what, why, and ...James Baker
Slides for a talk I gave at CHASE Digital Training Programme Opening Conference, Open University, 20 February 2015.
Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/a95f4cee472af0d1773f
Future Libraries: considering 'publishing', City University, London, 10 April...James Baker
Slides for a lecture I gave as part of the 'Libraries and Publishing in an Information Society' Masters module at City University, London, on 10 April 2015
Notes at https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/9fbd71e4e4e232052265
Slides for lecture given at City Unviersity to Libraries and Publishing in an Information Society MA/MSc group, 14 March 2014.
My notes available at https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/9546972
Doing a dissertation: how the Digital Humanities can help youJames Baker
Notes from a lecture I gave to a third year dissertation preparation module class at Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Roehampton
Creating, Curating and Collecting Interactive Fiction at the British LibraryStella Wisdom
Presentation for DRHA: Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts 2020, Panel 1A, 11:00-12:30, Monday 7th September 2020, http://www.drha.uk/salford2020
Similar to Digital History @ British Library (University of Kent, School of History, HI878 Methods and Interpretations in Historical Research) (20)
Decolonial Futures for Colonial Metadata, 1838-presentJames Baker
Institute of Historical Research Digital History Seminar, 21 May 2019 https://ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2018/08/james-baker-decolonial-futures-for-colonial-metadata-1838-present/
The Programming Historian: Open Access, Open Source, Open ProjectJames Baker
Slides for talk I gave at Research Hive Seminar on 'Open publication: exploring alternative models and practices', University of Sussex (22 March 2018)
Library Carpentry: software skills training for library professionals, Chart...James Baker
Notes for a keynote I gave at the Chartered Institute for Library and Information Professionals Cataloguing and Indexing Group biennial conference, University of Swansea, 31 August - 2 September 2016.
Notes at https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/96a32b70da2e03035272b6e5656696ad
Enabling Complex Analysis of Large-Scale Digital Collections: Humanities Rese...James Baker
Talk at Digital Humanities 2016 with Melissa Terras, James Hetherington, David Beavan, Anne Welsh, Helen O'Neill, Will Finley, Oliver Duke-Williams, Adam Farquhar, and Martin Zaltz Austwick.
Abstract http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/2584
Hard disks as archives of everyday lifeJames Baker
Deck for a talk I gave at Born digital big data and approaches for history and the humanities, School of Advanced Study (University of London), 8 June 2016.
Notes https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/24ec7f744911800d51fb768cedb64510
Notes for a keynote I gave at the [Digital Humanities Early Career Forum](http://www.dhecf.group.shef.ac.uk/), University of Sheffield, 27 May 2016
My notes: http://jameswbaker.tumblr.com/post/144971807912/ditching-the-digital
The Hard Disk as the new Paper Archive: opportunities and challenges for hist...James Baker
Deck for a talk I gave at Digital History Seminar, University of Cambridge, 23 February 2016.
Notes at https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/db1815e36ab64eb1a074
Deck for a talk I gave at Contemporary Political History in the Digital Age, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 11 February 2016.
Notes at https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/e01a3d03040c3ccdd4c1
This deck is for Library Carpentry week one, held 9 November 2015 at City University London. Lesson materials are at https://github.com/LibraryCarpentry/week-one-library-carpentry
Library Carpentry is generously funded by the [Software Sustainability Institute](http://software.ac.uk/). The Software Sustainability Institute cultivates world-class research with software. The Institute is based at the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Southampton and Oxford.
On Open Access monograph publishing for Arts, Humanities and Social Science R...James Baker
Deck for a talk I gave at the Open Access Week Open Access Seminar, University of Sussex, 20 October 2015
Talk at http://jameswbaker.tumblr.com/post/131273373912/on-open-access-monograph-publishing-for-arts
7. www.bl.uk 7
You are free to:
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Text attribution Greg Wilson, Two Solitudes, SPLASH 2013 (29 October 2013)
http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/splash-2013
This work is licensed under a
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9. www.bl.uk 9
“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
11. www.bl.uk 11
‘[...] 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’
27. What is Digital
History? (and how
does it differ from DH)
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker
28. www.bl.uk 28
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.
31. www.bl.uk 31
‘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)
32. www.bl.uk 32
Virtual St Paul’s
Cross Project
Notes from talk at Institute of
Historical Research, 18 February
2014.
34. www.bl.uk 34
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’.”
38. www.bl.uk 38
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