It makes sense that the largest percentage of people are those in acedemia and students. It would be very difficult to make Bentham sexy to anyone not already interesting in history.

Having a constant stream of activity and communication is key for a community like this. Also ensuing an interface that is usable by more people would assist. It is interesting to read how they have continued to gain collaborators and contributors as the project went on.

Just like kinda what we're doing in class, we are contributing towards a collaboration. Although the work itself is still our own.

Crowdfunded projects face these challenges that projects run by corporations likely wouldn't run into as easily.

A good solution to my last question.

This sort of defeats the intention of open collaboration projects. How could participants engage with each other more? Peer revision?

This also strikes me as odd. I would have thought that collaboration is especially important for deciphering Bentham's handwriting -- some people may be more familiar with it than others.

Hypothetically, what if someone tried to sabotage the project?

Again, this is wonderful that people don't pride themselves on their work, but instead seek to make a contribution to the larger picture. This shows that they are truly participating because it is meaningful to them.

I think it's great that volunteers found intrinsic meaning within the project, and simply didn't treat the process as a means to an end.

This surprises me. I would have thought that this is an effective way to spread the word and recruit participants.

Why is this so? Would this be the result of accidentally clicking on an advert?

This answers my previous question regarding whether other projects try to create this online sense of community.

This illustrates the notion of trying to create a community. I wonder if most or all open source/crowd funded projects do this.

I wonder what the turnover rate is for some of these projects. Maybe some participants would want to contribute, say, a single fact, whereas others would want to oversee a larger aspect of the project.

This hardly seems true if the volunteer quoted could not even read Bentham's handwriting!

I wonder if nowadays, crowdfunded/open projects will make use of social media to spread the word and recruit historians. This is a free alternative to spending money advertising in academic journals.

I wonder about the types of undergraduates represented in this number! It was much higher than expected...I thought that many truly amateur laypeople would attempt to volunteer their time

I'm sure that different subjects would attract different numbers of people. Could a project with crowd support be of the same quality as one with community support?

I like this distinction between the types of volunteers possible for a project! It depends on the nature of the work which is more preferable but the structured nature of a "community of volunteers" addresses issues of shoddy workmanship or inaccuracies.

Is there a particular reason why some works were omitted, or was it just poor workmanship?

I wonder how long this process will take...

This sounds so neat! I will definitely be checking this out on my spare time.

I agree...I think that the planning and execution of crowdsourcing needs a coherent strategy to be viable. Not only willing volunteers but clear instructions so that the volunteers are producing useful and accurate work! I think that unorganized crowdsourcing projects could get very sloppy and end up taking up more time to sort and correct results. Enthusiasm is not enough !

I think this phrase "raise the profile of academic research" can be interpreted two ways...the first is that crowdsourcing could allow the general public to get involved in academic research in new and exciting ways that bring further attention to the research in question (media, etc.), but it could also mean raising the "quality" of academic research and I'm not sure if crowdsourcing always does this. I think that crowdsourcing can also lead to issues of lack of accountability for accuracy and sourcing, tainting results.

To counter my previous annotation, I suppose the very nature of crowd-sourcing relies on the differing backgrounds and knowledge bases. You choose to use a crowdsourcing initiative with this in mind, fully aware that not all the participants come from the same background.

Previously in the article it said the volunteers needed no special skills or relevant previous knowledge. If it's complex, is it really the greatest idea to allow those previously mentioned volunteers deal with it?

This would lessen the workload of those trying to find something in Bentham's work immensely. A searchable repository is so convenient and would make it accessible to so many other people.

This make me question if the quality would remain consistent over all the transcriptions.

This would be such a helpful feature. Bentham is so widely known and I have discussed him in so many different courses that I'm sure this database would be a huge help for those in school.

Great to see progress. Our standards and expectations have changed over time and it is important to have work accessible that reflects that and can cater to modern needs.

For large collections it makes sense to enlist many people to help. The project would be completed way faster with, presumably, just as much accuracy. The only issue I could see arising is giving credit or equal distribution of work to recognition.

For future reference.

All sounds like a great idea, as long as speed and cost doesn't reduce quality.

Increases the number of eyes on a project and minds coming together, crowdsourcing can result in different ideas and perspectives coming together.

I'm interested to see where this goes. I think both ideas will help create this dedicated user community they are looking for. Personally, I tend to be more involved when my work is recognized and appreciated.

But could a volunteer who might not have much background on the subject or experience, be able to comprehend and analyze the data correctly??

I can understand how this might be challenging at times

Answering my previous question! I find this so interesting. In Historian craft we had a guest lecture by an archivist how explained the process of cataloging and creating collections. Although I do not remember specific terms he used it was a long process for one person to create what many of us use for research. This not only saves time but gets others involved in the process. I wonder how often is crowdsourcing used? Any other projects that anyone knows of I could look at?

This is so interesting. To be involved in this work would be fascinating. How does one get involved in crowdsoucring? Postings? Is it as simple as being picked to do the job or is some experience needed?

Oh my God. I literally never understood what JavaScript was until I read this. I'm not sure yet how I'd use it, but I guess like everything else in this course I'll just have to play around with it one day.

Aha! No wonder XML seems familiar to me.

This is a good point. I just see myself getting halfway into a text then realizing that my markup won't provide the results I need. Maximize planning, minimize hours wasted, etc.

This blew. My. Freakin. Mind. The possibilities are endless - literally, because XML definitions can be anything, and then transformed into any kind of display.

Hence the TEI, so that we have some standards to build a communal collection of data that can be used by scholars. I wonder how widespread TEI is? Are there other common XML schemes used by scholars in the humanities? What about in other disciplines?

This was illuminating for me. As a member of the Neopets/Proboards/Geocities generation, I learned basic presentational markup from a relatively young age. I had literally never considered the possibility of descriptive markup until this class. I think I love it so much because it combines my interest in textual analysis with the comforting tags I spent so many years perfecting in my messages and webpages. The tag-based structure of XML is almost second-nature to me.

I had never considered this before, but it makes a lot of sense. Most texts have underlying structure; making it visible with XML helps make us conscious, as researchers, of the structures underlying our texts. It could also help us understand better the connections between different texts - the Macroscope readings we did in the first week discussed doing so with Old Bailey records.

Are we suppose to have this much? for a purpose are we using all of these file for something in the future or are we just downloading for and exercise?

I am still confused on how to do this?

No cell service in the farm yard, waiting on a verification code forever! Gunna take a walk down the lane way. Rural vs Urban problems.

Has anyone gotten 401 Client Error Aurhorization required for URL when they this command?

I have tried changing the years in the 1880's and it keeps coming up with not found errors does any one else have this issue? I did get 1883 and 84.

Hi folks - something wonky has happened to this utility (the json2csv program). See this post in our slack space: https://hist3814o.slack.com/files/dr.graham/F6DEUCQUF/twarc_json_to_csv which will walk you through what to do.

or if you're feeling adventurous, you could try installing this https://github.com/jehiah/json2csv/releases/download/v.1.2.0/json2csv-1.2.0.linux-amd64.go1.8.tar.gz to your dhbox. Follow the pattern you used when you installed pandoc, using similar commands. Usage, once it's installed: https://github.com/jehiah/json2csv .

If you're wondering where you can find the extra commands(like -A) you can type wget -help and it will list all the commands wget supports

If you want to go back to your home directory without having to type cd .. several times cd ~ will take you to you home directory in one step

If you are feeling lazy you can also type cd eq which takes you to the first directory(aka folder) that matches the letter eq. The just tells the command cd to find the first directory matching the letters before the . This is super helpful if you have long folder names that you don't want to type like in the exercise when it tells you to type "cd wget-activehistory" you could just type "cd wget"

For some reason this only worked for me when I removed sudo from the command

I'm getting stuck at this step. It responds with "throw err; SyntaxError:/home/claremaier/search.json: Unexpected token {

I ran this, and then saw I was getting a lot of files so I cancelled the run. I did not want to pollute DHBox (my output.txt was 340 mb) So I refined my search using Shawville as the city. I kept getting huge downloads, regardless of the time period. I also used a couple other towns. "Why am I getting all of this for New Germany, Nova Scotia?" I thought. I got better results when I deleted the working files before running $ ./ canadiana.txt I added this to the top of the program: # clean up from the previous session rm results.txt rm cleanlist.txt rm urlstograb.txt

type $ pip install twarc (take out the sudo) to make this work.

Why does this make the file okay to run?

how do you do this? I have tried going back to last week's exercises and I am still just as lost

does this mean to save the excel document of the downloaded war graves into github or to somehow export the nano file from DHBox to github...?

Won't let me download. Says it is " E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?"

Is this "commit" comes in? Should we making comments in the DH Box and and uploading it to Git Hub, or should we be making comments in the Git Hub when we post this?

Step 2 is really the only step you need, don't worry about trying to mirror an entire website.

For this part, I'm only using the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg because when I use the Commwealth War Graves Commission, the page will just refresh. I'm assuming that it's just because it can't find anyone under my last name. But as for the download your results? Not quite sure how to do this?

Im not exactly sure how to use this function of the Dbox. Is there anyone who could give me some help?

typo. should be an 8

the ./ is important! don't forget it.

chmod = 'change mode'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chmod

you might want to write out on paper what you think each step in this program does. Google any strange words you see in there - these are smaller commands/programs already in DHBox that we've pieced together to do our bidding!

for when you get around to installing tesseract on your own personal computer

ie, to your own machine via DHBox's filemanager.

when you burst a single file into individual pages, many files result.

the 'burst' command is part of pdftk (pdf tool kit, geddit?) so that's why you needed to install that.

Please: this is the part that I want you to do. This is because of memory issues lately discovered. Otherwise I'd get you to grab everything. But for now, pick a decade...

I doubt such a broad comparison will ever be made and instead propose we examine a more constructive thought: that being, how can we adequately communicate and preserve relevant source material in the internet era. I agree it is important to respect social media's place in the annals of history however it is also important for us to productively articulate and archive it. Non-profits like Internet Archive have gone to great extents to accumulate and archive popular public records that will assist future generations in depicting our contemporary social landscape. Large amounts of data are only as valuable as they can be navigated and interpreted. If we fail to address these truths we’ll make big data more of a burden than a blessing for future historians to come.

I love this metaphor and Milligan expands on it brilliantly in the interview. It's good practice to contextualize digital history as a new form of history, rather than getting overwhelmed by how very big big data can be. It's not a one-to-one comparison, obviously - the methodologies of digital archaeology are obviously different from the methodologies of a physical dig site - but it helps emphasize the value of the data that was lost at the demise of Geocities. If we historians cry over the library of Alexandria, we should cry over Geocities all the more.

Wonderful and concise list of questions. I can't believe I've never asked some of these (developing a plan, advocating for data) questions before. They aren't simple questions, but just considering them opens up a lot of potential avenues for growth and new research.

This is something I want to keep in mind as a scholar. Reading over some of my old papers (yes - I am both a nerd and a narcissist) I'm shocked at how simplistic and reductive my conclusions used to be. I still have a long way to go, and part of my growth over these past three years at university has been learning to love the mess.

This perfectly captures one of my concerns with working with data. It sounds curmudgeonly, but sometimes hard data can feel static or stuffy - not as amenable to fluid interpretation as traditional sources. Of course, through this class, I've come to understand that many digital historians, like Morgan, appreciate the "mess" of digital data and handle data accordingly.

When we are looking to ill in this information are we allowed to look in the rest of the leaflet for this information? or are we only allowed to look at this one page?

Small formatting error here!

I think the double quotation marks "" is a typo, should be one ".

"This page contains the following errors:

error on line 2 at column 1: Extra content at the end of the document Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error."

This is what i'm getting. I know the file and browser are fine because the 8 shows up. Did anyone else get this? I'm just not sure what I did wrong, I've checked everything so far.

That there are actual scanned documents.

The layout of the website as well. Usually it's not as flashy.

I'll use the page number from the viewer (example: page 19) instead of the page number from the document (page 32 or 33) in this example.

In GitHub, when I viewed subfolder "tei-hist3907" I had to click on repository module3-wranglingdata to download it all as a zip. (Not sure if there is a slicker way to just get only the subfolder of the repository)

It doesnt seem to come from a scholarly source. I could be wrong.

I want to see this done on screengrabs of Geocities sites by different 1990s fandoms or interest groups. I bet the websites of stamp collectors looked really different from websites of punk fans and Riot Grrls!

Better digital methods make for better scholarship, period. There are analog methods of recording this information, of course, but this class is all about harnessing the new opportunities afforded by good digital practice.

Wow! Data management may not be sexy, but apparently it's useful. I think this article (and Beals' other articles on her workflow) are super useful to anyone doing history in a digital age - not just digital historians. She outlines clearly how she made digital tools work for her rather than against her.

This is a very succinct argument for looking at digital texts as editions. It covers many of the topics we've been discussing in class regarding the availability and reliability of digital sources. I think the most important part to remember here is that the circumstances under which a digital text is created can let a researcher know certain limitations of that text. It's important to know, for example, if an OCR-based search of the text will be effective given the quality of digitization; or if related texts are missing due to inequalities in funding.

Without any consensus on how to decide between digitizing "influential" and inclusive materials (or even how to define "influential" and "inclusive"), digital archives are going to be skewed for a long time yet. For example, Penn State may have decided to go for geographic coverage, but another state university might focus on one or two cities. Even raw numbers of newspapers digitized, then, cannot express the state of the digital archive.

DIGITIZATION IS EXPENSIVE!!! This is an incredible number to keep in mind. No wonder so few newspapers are digitized, and that less are digitized well.

This is exactly the point I was trying to make in my blog posts for module 2! I think it's so important to consider why and how texts get digitized, and to consider the ideological impact that digitization can have on our projects.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I've never thought about textual reproduction "within an industrialized framework" before, but it has heavy implications for text-based scholarship. One question that it raises in my mind: why do we care so much if machines are transcribing texts if we never really cared about the people who typeset the originals back in the 18th, 19th, 20th century? If human error is different from machine error (and I believe it is), why don't we talk more about the conditions that produced human errors in text? Cordell implies that asking questions about human textual production helps us better understand the implications of mechanical production.

This is an interesting point: what potential are we missing when we want only perfect OCR, and ignore the variety of things that can be done with digital sources?

I've always had trouble, even as an undergrad student, citing digital books. When do I cite the original publisher, and where do I acknowledge the digital publisher? Should I date it to the day the website was uploaded, or the date of the print release? Should I note how the source was digitized (scan, transcription, other)? This is definitely a conversation that needs to be had.

Hmm, interesting. It's easy to look at a poorly OCR'd text and dismiss it - just say "that's wrong, throw it out." But that isn't failing productively, that's just giving up. By asking these sorts of questions - what is an OCR'd document, really, and what can it be used for - we can wrangle with important questions about big data and digital methodology even if, character for character, the OCR "failed."

This is very true- we instill all our faith in it working, it is a bit magic every time it does

As with most things in life I don't think there will ever be a completely seam free manner to do this- there is always going to be one aspect that will not be what someone wants. Maybe striving for more seamless as opposed to seam free is more realistic?

I don't think I understand what this means

This reminds me of a quote I cannot seem to get my hands on right now about how every generation has its own type of magic- and this was theirs!

Hmm, but at what cost? Google has ease-of-use down pat, but I have to wonder what kind of concessions you make as a user (without necessarily realizing) in terms of the kind of information you're receiving.

Excellent point. While we champion digital history and public history as a way to make minorities visible, we have to still be aware of who is doing the work, coding the search formulas and such. I recall a conversation about the importance of including women programmers on projects to address online bullying and harassment because they bring a different perspective and work on the problem from a different angle.

Never knew that it was referenced as that. Shows how important the research of history is.

Never heard of Trove, but from some of the professors I have, they all say Wikipedia is horrible. Prior to University, I use to always use it for high school projects and etc. Weird to think that something I trusted nearly my whole life for education is now something unreliable. Probably learned a good portion of knowledge that ended up being false.

I remmeber reading a while ago that Google keeps track of your information, for example, your location, therefore whenever you search something, it is based on what you would need. For example, if I just went to google and typed in online shopping, it will all be in Canadian dollars and direct me to either an American or Canadian Website rather than to an Australian one. This really made me think about how this kind of search engine is a lot more complex than I thought. Even all the advertisements are all based on what I would like, or something that I have previously searched.

I specifically relay on the internet for this purpose. To go through libraries to search certain information takes so much time. For example, if you have the PDF, all you need to do is press control f, and you have the ability to search a book. This is so useful in a massive textbook when you want to use something as a reference that you read previously. I really only go to the library because I like the environment to study in and it helps me focus. Realistically though, everything I do there can almost all be done at home.

This defiantly holds true, as long as you have a good internet connection, you can access anything online within seconds.

Never heard of this term before.

Even if content does exist, does it matter if it can not be found?

This is so interesting! Games like this really encourage interest especially in people who may not have heard of these types of things in any other way before!

I think this actually opens up a really interesting concept! I remember how growing up I enjoyed learning about mythology through game like Age of Mythology! Not only did it spark an interest in Greek mythology and history, the game also held some pretty interesting historical facts as well. I think turning historical study into games can have a huge positive impact on how kids might become interested and learn about history.

Reminds my of the Diary of Anne Frank, it touched so many people, yet was never intended for others to read.

I think this is cool. It's a good way to mobilize volunteer work, and I think the transcriptions that result would be as accurate as any (as long as they are checked for quality, which is another issue discussed well in this article about the Bentham Project) What do the rest of you think of "gamifying" historical contribution? Does it improve the amount or quality of sources being digitized? Does it impact how scholars should look at the resulting source?

This seems to be mirrored in the 'open research' idea. Scientists find the idea useful, effective and that it adds value to their field, and this idea is found also to be useful in other fields.

This is something which is important to keep in mind if you run straight to JSTOR for your academic research. JSTOR is one of these databases and tends to be three to four years out of date, something I only learned last year.

This seems like a double-edged sword to me - on the one hand, obviously there's a financial incentive to create more and more journals that universities and libraries will then be obliged to buy according to this system, but on the other hand, the creation of more journals means more opportunity for academics to get published...which I guess leads to a whole other conversation about the premium placed on academic publishing as a form of accreditation.

Is this extra revenue passed on or is it pure profit for the journal publisher? Could we argue that online journals also cost money because they are considered valuable and Western culture typically associates value with high costs?

I'd be interested in knowing more about the work that goes into a journal production. I don't think we students appreciate this enough.

We still use a mainframe where I work for a healthy amount of the transaction processing and data storage we do. As governments and companies "move to the cloud" workplaces are moving back to accessing more centralized computers, often in huge data centres run by large companies such as Microsoft. Sort of more mainframe than ever.

Monopoly or creator's rights? If I was talented enough to produce music or write a book I would want to get royalties from the work, not have copies of my work downloaded for free (unless I chose to do that). I like music and books, to get new music and books musicians and authors need to make a living to produce new works. Royalties are part of that living and worth protecting.

Like my pervious comment, when working on a government computer, I'm careful with what I say in personal emails about my job or the people I work with.

property rights as in while your "here" you have certain rights, but human rights are always yours (or should be, at least). No matter where you are, who you are, you should always have your human rights.

I work in government and I guess the human equivalent is an ATIP request. At any point, you may be asked to provide information on someone or something. It stands for Access to Information and Privacy. The access to privacy throws me off a bit, but I suppose using government servers kind of takes away your privacy.

Why is this a positive aspect of having a TPM?

Are we talking about robots here? or maybe artificial, mechanical joints or nerves implanted as a kind of transplant during a hip replacement or something?

Science will never FULLY take over the social roles of humans because of the important nuances that make individuals non-programable or not 100% decipherable/predicable by computers.

At first, I wondered if the author was being melodramatic, but I see his point and hadn't thought about the types of situations he presents. Like him though, I don't have any solutions. I'd like to say people wouldn't do those things, but "we are only human".

I'm not sure I quite understand what DRM and TPM are. Perhaps someone could summarise or suggest a helpful video? Thanks

<del>FAILING PRODUCTIVELY</del>

Yeah... still learning this. I'm grateful that the blogosphere has allowed for scholars in similar fields to share these kinds of thoughts. It's not something I've ever been taught in class - until now, of course - it's something that every scholar seems to have to learn the hard way. Collaborative online learning spaces that allow for posts like this can make this process less necessary, or at least less painful.

This is fascinating! I love the idea of XML containing "layers" that can be added or removed as necessary, letting us manipulate data on-the-fly. It kind of reminds me of the iterative nature of github. Flexibility is a digital historian's best friend.

This is the case with most long projects, I'd assume. I think a level of uncertainty in tagging is almost inevitable. Projects are going to evolve, and human understanding will always be adding new layers of understanding to previously-categorized texts. Beals gives some good examples of how digital methods can cut down on some of the mess.

This sounds like... everything I've ever done. I can't tell you how many times I've pulled up an old file full of citations and notes and gone, "what?" It's interesting to note that not all digital history practices have to have some grand, open-access-world-changing goal. Best practices are useful for the individual scholar, too.

I love these side notes. The breakdown helps me understand the basis of the commands.

This is a very important line. Sums up the article and his argument very well. people need to start using this technology to make advancements instead of using it for stuff we already know.

It's very cool how this research he did was able to be spread around so fast, and to so many different types of academic research.

I find this is often the case - even in daily life. In trying to set some colleagues up for a task this week, I wrote out what I thought were clear instructions. Soon found out that there were numerous details which I understood, but were not set out and were causing confusion and extra work to sort out. Useful, but unnecessary eye-opener.

I feel like I need to make a sparkly animated .gif that says "FAILING PRODUCTIVELY" so I can link it every time a reading suggests doing just that. Seriously, though, this is so important for us students of digital history. We need to DO it before we can theorize about it. We need to know the limitations AND the abilities of our tools before we start planning what we can (or can't, or should, or shouldn't) build.

What kind of audience are we reaching with our blogs? I'm consciously writing my blog posts to my classmates, though I know Dr. Graham shares some of our stuff on Twitter. Should I be writing for a wider audience? How will I write about digital history after this class? Can I use these methodologies in other classes, and if so, how should I introduce them? We should all be considering these questions.

This compelled me to think about the times when i would be shocked by the words i had to end up using in order to find material. Those instances made me reflect on my own knowledge, and the endless frustration that accompanies searching for works via text search.

My high school teachers always said not to use Wikipedia for research - but to use it to broadly understand a topic before arming yourself with key words and ideas for in-depth research.

I wonder if this interdisciplinary concept of digital humanities will ever come to eclipse the current and more popular humanities and social science disciplines.

The enormous potential for interdisciplinary research here is a little scary.

I think that this is the best way to use search engines. They are a great way to find and follow potentially interesting and important leads. However, in terms of analyzing the content in a more qualitative fashion, more in depth study will no doubt be required.

I think that as digital search tools and open notes become more prevalent in the historical discipline, the prior assumptions and confirmation bias' currently in place will continue to be challenged as a broader context of opinions and point of view are brought to the fore. This is an excellent example of why learning and practicing digital history is so important!

This point makes me think that one of the most useful ways to use a simple search engine is to discover or support a narrative. If you can connect a series of events or ideas across years and in different sources using simple words as a search tool, it is much easier to propose a narrative as a result of your research.

This point would make an excellent argument in McDaniel's article concerning the concept of open notes!

This isn't a new idea! Humanists have been using similar methods for decades. It is just a matter of adapting to the new digital medium, and is not necessarily re-writing the guidebook.

I find this very interesting. The fact that the basic 'search' method is literally just looking for a true or false answer to the data you inputted in the search bar really breaks down the process and demonstrates how simple it is in practice. Not only this, but it also shows why it's important to be specific in what you are trying to search for.

The phrasing of this really drove home the dangers of full-text search for me. I tend to project quite a bit onto the texts I read; it's a habit of close reading, and something I know to be aware of and counteract. I haven't ever applied such a careful corrective measure to search terms.

Again, digital tech seems to blind us to confirmation bias, because if it's shiny and new and exciting, how can it be biased? Do we even know enough about some of these search algorithms to determine their internal biases?

It's important to be aware of confirmation bias in all forms - digital (encoded into the algorithm itself) and human (in the ways we use these algorithms). There's bias in regular scholarship too, but this is a good point about how "big data" can be particularly convincing, tempting us into being less discerning as scholars.

I can't believe I'd never even considered this before. This has massive implications not only for "digital history" like we do in this class, but for ALL my academic work. I remember being told in first year that MacOdrum's Summon Search is an unreliable and inefficient search (it searches too many things with too few options for parameters). By second year, I abandoned that advice and Summon Searched without caring what I missed. I wound of spending a lot of time looking at articles that weren't quite what I needed. Given that digital history relies even more heavily on the results from such search technology, this kind of laziness could be fatal to a digital history project.

Put this way, its loss is truly horrific. However, as historians, I think the ever-present caution about ethics is important too. It would be fascinating information (for anthropologists as well), but should we really access it?

I think it's important to note that the information gained through text mining needs to be compared to that found through a close reading, not simply used on its own. Yes text mining is a valuable way to analyze large quantities of data, but without a combination with close readings, it's always possible to miss something. Topic modeling is a good way to help understand the data gained through text mining, as it offers a new way of interpreting it.

This is actually super helpful, especially when it comes to analyzing historical documents with outdated words or spellings as the program could otherwise miss out on important information that the researchers wouldn't necessarily find. Having a program be able to analyze such a large collection of writing is really amazing and allows for greater possibilities when it comes to historical research. I am really excited by the doors this avenue of work can open in the field.

I like how honest Milligan is. Truth be told none of this is my expertise so it's reassuring to know that we all can't be well-versed in everything! I do appreciate how Milligan explains his research, it makes for an enjoyable read. I am not one to discuss politics -frankly political vocabulary is not my strong suit- but in 'Political Open Data', I was able to digest the information with ease.

This can be a huge problem when working with data bases as there can be so many different words used to describe the same thing. It is something I've have struggled with before in my program trying to organised this imperfect data that has been submitted.

This seems like it could end up poorly but I do agree the public should have access to read and view it. Allowing full open access seems like a wikipedia page style disaster of misinformation.

Clearly Moravec has found her calling and is well-versed on the subject of Woman's studies.

Moravec appears to be covering a lot of ground in her research with linguistics, digital humanities and feminism.

Interesting question I had not considered before. If data is aggregated poorly or presented poorly, is the researcher at fault (for example, faulty medical studies leading to harmful reactions to medicines?)

Oh, the amount of times I have made that mistake...

I mentioned it in Trevor Owens article but this is why providing a URL/URI as a source can be problematic. I wanted to know more about this but sadly was greeted by a 404 page not found error :/

This plays well into our course where every final assignment will be a collection of everyones work and annotations the work of a community not a single person. Where in most other classes our work is individual like essays or tests we now are a class developing projects together while developing our individual understanding of digital history.

I have to say, seeing this comment is one of the most interesting parts of this article for me! There really seems to be a contrast here between what Michelle Moravac suggests regarding writing in public as a means of countering isolation in academic writing and Sheila Brennan's experience of increased isolation from the academic community as a result of creating work publicly.

Owens is open with his research and writings by providing various links to his featured work. Very beneficial. Highlighting this to take a look at these in the future.

This is exactly what I was hoping would happen!

I type this and it says that git cannot auto-detect my email address...I can't write any more commands now

This is a amazing text editor :D

This is a bit awkwardly worded. It took me a second to understand what the instruction was.

do i hit enter after each command line? there's always an error message when I get to the pandoc -v part. Plus, I just tried to start from the beginning and now it wont lit me log in in the command line

I tried using git checkout -b branchname <commit> without the < > and adding my own unique branchname and got errors. anyone else get this?</commit>

This command is listed as not found and I'm stuck in my repository from exercises 1-5.

NOPE! The response I got was -bash: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'. I don't know what that means. I've tried it twice.

Here is where I hit a wall. I am no longer getting the $ on new lines to type commands. I now have > on new lines. Attempting to fix now.

What I really wish Git had was an actual visual of all the individual files in the main branch and all other branches, showing when and where they merge. That I think would be helpful to see the progress of the project for me.

I do not know what this means

I like that he touches on the value of using both micro and macro to create the strongest statement possible.

This is a major problem to me for how digital history could be represented incorrectly either by fault or on purpose. Large data sets being broken down into easily understood snipits can lead to biases.

I find that working towards a minor in history I have already benefited in my major in Computer Science. Not only has it help with reasoning but it also helped with communication skills (A skill that I feel like is missing from my field sometimes).

This is very fascinating to me

I think this is very true. Oftentimes arts students are overlooked because all we do is "write essays" and read but at the end of the day: it is a skill set. Being able to communicate your thoughts in an effective manner is not something every major seeks to teach their students.

As an Archeologist it is very interesting to create visual display from data sets on a mass scale which could be useful for predicting where artifacts or ruins could be uncovered.

I see a problem arising where data (which always has the risk of being misinterpreted or misrepresented) can be used incorrectly on a much larger scale.

Creating historians who are skilled in both Macro and Micro history is very useful and seems to me like the future of history.

This is something that has always struck me as odd- a lot of important history- or the things people deem important- is based on very few sources, which makes the rarity of it all something of an appeal readers and other researchers, it adds a challenge. Would we lose this effect if too much information ( if there is such a thing) occurred was made available?

I agree to be a nice guy at all times

Github Domain

I have a twitter account but do not use it very often. This will be a chance to use it again.

Clearly a person who is open to digital humanities.

We have to be careful assuming URI's are permanent, as people remove/take things down for various reasons. When something is hosted it cost money to keep it accessible and over time it might be removed to save on cost!

I am sure this will be an exciting read... being from the Ottawa region it will be fun studying something close to home.

Personally, I don't agree with considering Python or Ruby "languages" per se... As they are what I consider code. I have some knowledge of Python, albeit very minimal, but I still would not consider it a language such as Japanese.