Slides from a talk I gave at 'Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library', College of Charleston, 21 June 2014. Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/eba50cd2f2e07e3a9ba5

1. Mind the gap!
…posing problems to unify research with
digital research
Dr James Baker
Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker

2. www.bl.uk 2

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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)

4. www.bl.uk 4
Virtual St Paul’s
Cross Project
Notes from talk at Institute of
Historical Research, 18 February
2014.

5. www.bl.uk 5
“It should not be assumed that, because DH
emphasizes practice and making use of
computers, it's therefore naively instrumental
or positivist in its assumptions, or that its
hands-on doing necessarily precludes theory.
Only an impoverished view of theory as pure
verbal and written discourse, separate from
practice, would produce such an assumption”
Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014), 179.

6. www.bl.uk 6
“Statistics may serve to reveal or clarify a
particular tendency; but how we interpret that
tendency - the significance we attach to it and
the causes we adduce for it - is a matter for
seasoned historical judgement, in which the
historian trained exclusively in quantitative
methods would be woefully deficient”
John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (1984; first edition), 197.

7. www.bl.uk 7
“Economic history (like some other fields) is a
fundamental part of the discipline, of which
every student ought to have some
understanding […] Faced with the choice
between courses on the history of sport or the
history of animals and those on economic,
political, social or intellectual history, I would
hope students would be able to see that the
latter are likely to be of more general use than
the former ”
Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (2000; first edition), 202.

8. www.bl.uk 8

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11. www.bl.uk 11

12. www.bl.uk 12
Michael Hancher: blog, exercise

13. www.bl.uk 13

14. www.bl.uk 14
Thank you!
@j_w_baker
james.baker@bl.uk
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: slideshare.net/drjwbaker http://slidesha.re/T3Dp6i
Notes: gist.github.com/drjwbaker http://bit.ly/1i4UacS