In fact, even before a dataset is complete, visualizations can be used to recognize errors in the data collection process.

The use of visualizations to show the distribution of words or topics in a document is an effective way of getting a sense for the location and frequency of your query in a corpus, and it represents only one of the many uses of information visualization

Note that the process outlined relies on a back and forth between machine reading of the texts and close readings of the individual items

This is extremely valuable for the “small” words that the human brains tends to slide over when reading [these words are often call “stop words” in machine reading because the programming ignores them before analyzing a corpus].

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If you were using a text editor on your own computer

Emphasizing technology, however, risks overshadowing an even more important commonality: collaboration.

I shaped the project around the availability of digitized and machine-readable sources. Accessibility can be a major impediment to digital analysis.

Their daily or weekly print cycles also allow historians to track temporal changes in much finer detail than do other sources such as maps or novels.

. Finally, the overwhelming presence of Texas places reveals the dominance of regional space. Galveston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, and San Antonio may have occupied a relatively lowly position in the nation’s urban hierarchy, but they sprawled across the Houston Daily Post’s imagined geography.

we included a discussion forum on the Desk’s main page where volunteers could swap ideas, ask questions, or make requests of the project editors.

we also tried to build a dedicated user community to enable sustained participation by, for example, implementing a qualitative and quantitative feedback and reward system.

Transcribing the difficult handwriting, idiosyncratic style, and dense and challenging ideas of an eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosopher is more complex, esoteric, and of less immediate appeal than contributing to a genealogical or community collection. 7

build up a cohort of willing volunteers

For instance, $ twarc search canada150 > search.json will search Twitter for posts using the canada150 hashtag.

The team is just now addressing my project, and trying to determine how to handle publishing two sets of images

not incidentally, why it would not be a waste of time for those of us who work in those fields to take a good hard look at ourselves and the ways that we engage with one another, in order to ensure that we’re doing everything we possibly can to model the ways of being we’d like to see manifested in the world.

I draft all my work in documents shared with readers for comments and critique.

But still, we can learn quite a bit – shifting occupations of elected and defeated candidates, how party candidates may have changed over time, what occupations are overrepresented amongst the overall, the defeated, and the victorious – and I believe there’s a fantastic MA paper in this data.

Rather than dozens of us all flying to Library and Archives Canada, taking our own photographic record of RCMP/CSIS records, say, wouldn’t it better if we cooperated more?

it’s our data, we collected it, and if somebody else wants the data, they should collect it themselves.

as well as support the expansion of inter-disciplinary research

our writing is often hampered by the paralyzing fear “that someone is always watching, eager to find fault.”

but to the underlying data, methods, and experimental results that drive research projects forward.

Understand the ways digital tools change us as we use them, to create compelling history that is self-reflexive

We must approach it with care, and not let it become the only lens through which we see the past.

We wrote it in the open, inviting the world to contribute their edits, ideas, and advice for our final draft.

actually can change the character of how we ‘read’ a sentence, a word, a phrase, a genre – by giving a norm against which to compare it.

By placing government data about farms next to data on the weather, history allows us to see the interplay of material change with human experience, and how a changing climate has already been creating different sets of winners and losers over decades.

Applying Paper Machines to text corpora allows scholars to accumulate hypotheses about longue-durée patterns in the influence of ideas, individuals, and professional cohorts.

In our own time, many analysts are beginning to realise that in order to hold persuasive power, they need to condense big data in such a way that they can circulate among readers as a concise story that is easy to tell.

I made a spreadsheet. On that spreadsheet I recorded the title, date of publication, and publisher of every Isaac Cruikshank print I could get my hands on. I then recorded the places depicted in each print.

Network analysis is the ‘corpus level quantitative’ work.

they helped orientate and shape my thinking rather than provide ‘results’ that I analysed, interpreted, and/or presented in the book.

As historians develop technical skills, and computer scientists develop humanistic skills, fruitful collaborative undertakings can develop

Historians must be open to the digital turn, thanks to the astounding growth of digital sources and an increasing technical ability to process them on a mass scale.

THIS TEXT

but they push him as much as he pushes them.