Who is the Digital Historian?

Who is the Digital
Historian?
BL Labs Roadshow, LJMU, March 2017
slideshare.net/drjwbaker
James Baker
Lecturer in Digital History/Archives
@j_w_baker
james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
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License. Exceptions: quotations, embeds from external sources, logos, and marked images.

@j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
You don’t need to be a
digital historian

Lincoln Mullen, Computational
Historical Thinking: With
Applications in R (2017): http://dh-
r.lincolnmullen.com

Rudy,
Kathryn. ‘Dirty
Books:
Quantifying
Patterns of
Use in
Medieval
Manuscripts
Using a
Densitometer’
. Journal of
Historians of
Netherlandish
Art 2, no. 1–2
(June 2010).
doi:10.5092/jh
na.2010.2.1.1

Wall, John. ‘Virtual Pauls Cross Project: A Digital Re-Creation of
John Donnes’ Gunpower Day Sermon’, 2013.
https://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/.

Finley, Will. Making
an Impression: Book
Illustration and their
Technologies, 1780-
1850. Phd Thesis,
University of
Sheffield.
Forthcoming 2017.

Hitchcock, Tim,
and William J.
Turkel. ‘The Old
Bailey
Proceedings,
1674–1913: Text
Mining for
Evidence of Court
Behavior’. Law
and History
Review, August
2016, 1–27.
doi:10.1017/S073
8248016000304.
Distribution of trial lengths in words for “killing” displayed
as red circles; all other trials are displayed as gray dots.
“Killing” includes all trials tagged for the offenses of
“infanticide,” “murder,” “petty treason,” “manslaughter,”
and “killing: other,” by the Old Bailey online.

You don’t need to be a digital
historian
But you do need to be a
little critical digital

Year 1 Digital
History at Sussex

Autumn
1. What is History / What is Art History
2. Reading History / Reading Art History
3. Library
4. Archives
5. History on the Web I: Search and Retrieval
7. History on the Web II: History in Public
8. Referencing
9. Zotero
10. Counting History I (theory)
11. Counting History II (practice)
12. Being a Historian in the Digital Age
Spring
1. Doing Digital History
2. Foundations: data types and data fields
3. Making historical data I (theory)
4. Making historical data II (practice: getting data)
5. Making historical data III (practice: cleaning data)
6. Visualising historical data I (theory)
7. Visualising historical data II (practice: graphs)
8. Visualising historical data III (practice: maps)
10. Storing and preserving historical data
11. Sharing historical data
Year 1 Digital
History at Sussex
Baker, James. ‘Fostering Digital
History: Integrating Digital
Research Skills into an
Undergraduate History
Curriculum’, 1 October 2016.
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/66712

You don’t need to be a digital
historian
But if you aren’t then
researching the 1990s
will be tricky

Until relatively recently records were tangible –
often boxes of papers, photographs and maps.
This is no longer the case. Now we have digital
records, which not only comprise written or
intelligible content but also intangible bits, data
and code.
National Archives. ‘Digital Strategy’, January 2017.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/the-national-archives-digital-
strategy-2017-19.pdf

Archival practice hinges on the tangibility of the
physical record and a thoroughly established
record keeping tradition. Digital records are
very different. Records are not just documents.
National Archives. ‘Digital Strategy’, January 2017.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/the-national-archives-digital-
strategy-2017-19.pdf

xkcd. Old Files, 2015. https://xkcd.com/1360/.
Methods that were
creaking with digitised
documents...
Hitchcock, Tim. ‘Confronting the Digital: Or
How Academic History Writing Lost the Plot’.
Cultural and Social History 10, no. 1 (2013): 9–
23. doi:10.2752/147800413X13515292098070.
...won’t work for born-
digital documents

Laura Carroll,
Erika Farr, Peter
Hornsby, and
Ben Ranker. ‘A
Comprehensive
Approach to
Born-Digital
Archives’.
Archivaria 72 (2
December 2011)

Mar 6 08:33:42 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
NetworkManager[852]: <info> Policy set 'Wired connection 1' (eth0) as default for
IPv4 routing and DNS.
NetworkManager[852]: <info> Writing DNS information to /sbin/resolvconf
dnsmasq[3507]: setting upstream servers from DBus
dnsmasq[3507]: using nameserver 139.184.32.26#53
IP 139.184.32.26 is University of Sussex.
So at 08:30 on 6 March 2017 I was at work.
Wired means I was probably in my office.

NetworkManager[852]: <info> (wlan0): roamed from BSSID 00:0C:E6:5A:B2:3D
(eduroam) to 00:0C:E6:5A:C1:09 (eduroam)
IP 139.184.32.27 is University of Sussex.
So at 12:24 on 6 March 2017 I was still at work.
Eduroam suggets somewhere else on campus.

NetworkManager[827]: <info> address 192.168.0.9
NetworkManager[827]: <info> prefix 24 (255.255.255.0)
NetworkManager[827]: <info> gateway 192.168.0.1
NetworkManager[827]: <info> nameserver '192.168.0.1'
NetworkManager[827]: <info> domain name 'Home'
IP 192.168.0.1 is a generic home router.
So at 10:22 on 14 March I was likely at home.
Though this would be harder to pin down.

Image from Milligan, Ian.
‘Finding Community in the
Ruins of GeoCities:
Distantly Reading a Web
Archive’. Bulletin of IEEE
Technical Committee on
Digital Libraries 11, no. 2
(2015). http://www.ieee-
tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/pa
pers/milligan.pdf.
See also Brügger, Niels,
and Ralph Schroeder,
eds. The Web as History.
London: UCL Press,
2017.

Gaining access to someone else's computer is
[..] like finding a master key to their house, with
the freedom to open the cabinets, cupboards,
and desk drawers, to peek at family photo
albums, to see what's recently been playing on
the stereo or TV, even to sift through what's
been left behind in the trash
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing,
2016. 215.

[We] must be conversant in the antiquarian
cants of vanished operating systems, file
formats, and emulators, just as we expect an
early modernist doing book history to know
something of signatures and collation formulas
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing,
2016. 233.

Windows 95 (1995) https://archive.org/details/win3_W95DEMO
spsman69, Windows 95 PC (6 April 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Ge9UqHKlaNU

Windows 3.11 (1992) https://archive.org/details/win3_stock
Bingocat, Using Windows 3.11 for the First Time! (5 May 2016)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk4c12DcrBg

A GeoCities diary on your browser:
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20000622112212/http://www.ge
ocities.com/TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary.html
A GeoCities diary on old Internet Explorer:
http://oldweb.today/ie4/20010314115631/http://www.geocities.c
om/TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary.html
A GeoCities diary on old Mac Netscape:
http://oldweb.today/nsmac3/20010303110059/http://www.geociti
es.com/TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary.html

You don’t need to be a
digital historian
But we do need:
Historians who are confident working
with digital data
To foster critical digital
To inspire students and citizens
To start asking more questions that
aren’t yoked to paper

Who is the Digital Historian?

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