47 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2017
    1. a  vast  field  of  haystacks  within  which  they  must  locate  the  needles  -­  and  presumably,  use them  to  knit  together  a  valid  historical  interpretation.

      Love this explanation! Historians who face Big data struggle more, but emerge with a unique interpretation.

    1. As usual Heather Froelich saved my ass here by pointing out I might want to reconsider methodology.

      Trial and Error!!!

    2. The uses of female don't exhibit these stark divides, although I found it fascinating that prior to the Civil War, neither  female citizen nor female suffrage appeared in the male corpus.

      This is super neat. It really sums up the type of patterns we as historians are to be looking for, to build our knowledge of history at those times even greater then before. Studying of linguistics has many perks!

    1. Machine reading of sources provides two advantages for the historian  1.  Machines can deal with far larger volume of source material than the human brain can, anything from hundred to hundreds of thousands  2.  Machines can find patterns and relationships that the human brain cannot.

      Here is a good summary of one of this classes learning goals. To understand this and be able to do this!

  2. Jul 2017
    1. brief coda offers a glimpse into the potential for digital analysis to answer this question through a comparison of the Houston Daily Post and an earlier Houston newspaper, the Telegraph and Texas Register.

      Neat to see data pulled from something as simple as the newspaper then digitized to show society/space being changed.

    2. At the heart of this orientation stood a commercial railroad network that had been expanding for the past half century

      This make complete sense to me, as the world expanded with the railroad so did space, places, time. As places became relevant, the news in these places would too!!

    3. Newspapers print, and thereby privilege, certain places over others

      Even as new medias arise, this issues is still strongly noticeable. The digital divide between urban/rural!!

    4. By printing some places more than others, papers such as the Houston Daily Post continually reshaped space for nineteenth-century Americans.

      Ah yes, the power of media. I love this topic. Similarly In another class, we talked about how the invention of the train reshaped peoples perception of space and time. Spaces became shorter, yet larger, and time itself grew.

    1. The grid system

      The grid systems out here in country side of manitoba are square miles, set with correction lines. Getting lost is fairly hard, but when you do loose your sense of direction out on the gravel it will toss your senses off, the world feels HUGE all of a sudden, until you hit a main highway that is. At least here in manitoba the dirt roads are numbered, not like in sask.

    1. agment, though, may be merely well balanced, and there are stages in a digital humanities project where you may need to create well-balanced XML fragments that you will insert into an XML document, producing a well-formed (and perhaps also valid) XML document at the end. We’ll discuss the use of well-balanced XML fragments later in the course. Entities and numerical character references An XML document uses angle brackets to delimit markup. For this reason, XML cannot contain an angle bracket that is meant to represent a textual character, since XML software would be unable to distinguish this textual data from markup. XML reserves two characters that cannot be represented directly in text: the left angle bracket or less-than sign (“<”) and the ampersand (“&”). When these characters occur in text that is to be represented in XML, they must be replaced in the underlying marked-up document by entities. Entities begin with an ampersand and end with a semicolon; the part in between identifies the meaning of the entity. If you need to include these

      These bad boys really show how particular and aware one has to be when doing this type of work! If one does not take the time to make sure everything is correct the initial end result would be soooo disappointing.

    2. ts are not nested because

      Would anyone want to give me a simpler definition of serialization?

      Thanks

    3. XML trees has made scholars reluctant to surrender those practical advantages

      I can understand why. It would be hard to give up something that makes work go better!

    4. Computers can operate quickly and efficiently on trees (ordered hierarchies), much more quickly and efficiently than they can on non-hierarchical text. This means that if we can model the documents we need to study as trees, we can manage and manipulate large amounts of data efficiently.

      Not only that, but there would be less formatting issues in general.

    1. this extra effort should not really be considered extra to a scrupulous historian

      As you have read, there are clearly benefits that accompany using a technical plan. "Plan" being the key word, it should always be apart of your digital work.

    1. We believe that this confusion was partly responsible for the evolution of the project from a tool where collaboration and community support was envisioned, a process of sharing authority, to one where we the historians seem to be using the crowd more as a reservoir, contrary to our intentions.

      Interesting point.

    2. Crowdsourcing should not be a first step. The resources are already out there;

      May as well attempt to build and starting point. Though by doing this i think the type of materials would be very different from the ones crowdsourced.

    3. Finally, we had a number of potential contributors who were worried that what they had to contribute was not “professional” enough

      Fair enough. It would be intimidating to submit something if one has never done it before, or felt they were smart/knowledgable enough too do so. I think crowdsourcing projects like this can really show populations they have something to contribute no matter the content.

    4. echnical literacy, closed algorithms for search engines, unequal access to quality hardware, and poor Internet connections mean that there is a disparity among users in their ability to manipulate the Internet for their own purposes.

      Ideally, everyone in the world should have the access to the web. Unfortunately this is not the case. Even on my farm here, home in Manitoba there is a obvious disconnect between urban/rural internet connection and the services provided. In town, 20 minutes east, internet is fast and reliable and usually unlimited for much cheaper. Here on the farm it is limited, expensive and pretty terrible. (want to watch a facebook video? Yeah not a chance unless you're home alone) That being said, it is clear that i have less web access then those who use it in town.. digitized democracy is not attainable when such digital divides are present.

    1. associate a cell phone number with your account

      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.

    1. a detail that might interestingly complicatea scholar’s assumptions about moral consciousness

      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.

    1. Command line' allows you to interact with the computer at the terminal prompt or command line

      can someone explain this further please?

    1. *Fruits *apples *oranges *Grapes *Dairy *Milk *cheese

      SOS.

    1. I am committed to building digital projects and public programs that reach wide audiences and empower individuals to be active participants in their communities.

      This here really shows her views on DH.

    1. ad I been asked two years ago if my project could have served as a prototype or guinea pig for the digital publishing initiative UMP is leading I would have been glad to help shape the development and design for authors producing narrative-driven digital publications.

      This goes to show how fresh the digital humanities really is. There are still so many obstacles and unknown areas of policy, and how to's out there. Progressive scholars are going to have to deal with these issues patiently.

    1. hypermediated

      With regards to future of digital humanities this will play an important roll in the progress DH will endure. (I believe that progress is going to happen as everything becomes mediated by technologies)

    1.  I try to publish open access as frequently as possible and share that work online.

      She takes pride in her work and really understands there are benefits that come from sharing the information she has collected.

    1. The commodification of ideas as currency in academia means that writing is often concealed until publication,

      This is a perspective i did not see at first. I always valued the outcome of works more than the research but realistically the research has a equal if not higher value then the outcome of a project itself. I say this because the research itself provides more evidence, more insight and paints the picture of how the project came to be.

    1. We’re relying on the data as it was submitted

      As milligan previously mentions, not all historians are willing to give their research out. So we are dealing with the information at hand; i can see this proving to bring difficulties and grey areas in research.

    1. My primary research focus is on how historians can use web archives.

      He is clearly open to what it has to offer historians

    1. a medium with several built-in liabilities

      All mediums come with various affordances and disallowances - all new mediums challenge the old ones.

    2. enable historians to easily share information about our research as it happens.

      I think this has the potential to act as a review zone for researchers by fellow researchers. By seeing the direction of ones research another can suggest a different approach ect.

  3. www.trevorowens.org www.trevorowens.org
    1. “ability to think outside the professional norm.

      Though a professional from what i read here, he is clearly open to new things, that may become norms.

    1. linked connection to secondary literature

      I can imagine the weight that would be lifted from a historians shoulder if this was a readily available feature. Especially for primary sources, from previous attempts at finding primary sources for my ancient greek classes, this would've been very helpful with the outcome and the time it took to do so.

    1. Projects like the Virtual St Paul's Cross, which allows you to ‘hear’ John Donne’s sermons from the 1620s, from different vantage points around the square, changes how we imagine them, and moves from ‘text’ to something much more complex, and powerful

      Similarly, radio has more power behind it then the television, the words alone carry more influence as the listeners are not distracted by the images. I think this carries over well into the idea that text is less powerful then speech.

    1. We should invest in tools and forms of analysis that look critically at big data from multiple sources about the history and future of our institutions and societies.

      Yes, we should and yes we can! By looking to the past and critically assessing the changes, trends and patterns that have arisen with the new tools available; the present day and future institutions/societies can move forward progressively, learning from past mistakes ect.

    2. resisting the powerful pull of received mythology

      Can someone explain this further?

  4. Jun 2017
    1. didn’t need to analyse every aspect of every print to make my case

      he did not have to use all of the aspects from the big data he was working with

    1. rather my thinking

      Relating back to the definition of the macroscope this makes a lot of sense. Compression of this information allowed the researcher here to create a clear relation/pattern from his information.

  5. www.themacroscope.org www.themacroscope.org
    1. Geographic Information Systems

      what is this?

    1. Macroscopes are not bound by time, but rather quantity.

      This made macroscope make sense to me!