17 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2017
    1. Once again, I remind you that I know nothing of Mr Revere, or his conversations, or his habits or beliefs, his writings (if he has any) or his personal life. All I know is this bit of metadata, based on membership in some organizations.

      It's quite amazing what you can derive from simple metadata

  2. Jul 2017
    1. The post doesn’t make an original argument and it doesn’t further our understanding of women’s history, colonial New England, or the history of medicine. It largely shows us things we already know about the past – like the fact that people in Maine didn’t plant beans in January.

      People don't plant beans in January? What?!? I find this is a great example of how people are fascinated by new methods of getting and showing the data we already know.

    2. Once you include the boring stuff, you get a much different view of the world from Houston in the 1890s. I ended up arguing that it was precisely this fragmentary, mundane, and overlooked content that explained the dominance of regional geography over national geography.

      I wonder how many things get over looked due to it being boring. This is pretty interesting what he was able to do utilizing the information that most overlook. Also I find its also important to be careful about large data sets like this as thing can be easily misinterpreted.

    1. A few minutes with this, and it becomes clear that this actually was a child-focused neighbourhood, that digital photography was at a minimum, and that white background cartoons and icons dominated to the detriment of more colourful images.

      I understand that he is showing that using different methods to visualize data can help us find pattern we might miss otherwise. What I don't understand is how this method is particularly useful based on the conclusion.

    1. imagemagick

      This is a really cool and powerful utility that I've have used before! Its fun seeing this show up and being used in Digital History

    2. Hey - you've scrolled all the way down here. Here's the wget command to nicely download the Equity txt files but don't run it just yet:

      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

    3. $ mkdir equity

      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

    4. cd equity

      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"

    1. . Spaces matter. cd.. is a nonsense to the computer: there is no program called cd.. But there is something called cd, and a location ..

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

    1. the recent attention paid to an Excel error made by two economists

      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 :/

    1. the importance that his undergraduate philosophy major has had for his career as a neuroscientist —

      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).

    1. We’re relying on the data as it was submitted, so it’s not going to be perfect.

      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.

    1. permanent URI’s on their cache of scanned source materia

      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!