I first took a statistically significant sample of issues form my collection. I then helped design a program to overlay a grid onto each image of a newspaper page.

National metropolises such as San Francisco, Baltimore, or Boston were surprisingly muted in the�Houston Daily Post�relative to their populations, especially in comparison to the midwestern cities of Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City

The second period, 1894-1901, marked Houston’s final years as a minor commercial city before its ascension to the energy capital of the United States during the twentieth century.

Run through its various steps so that you end up with a json file of results

Crowdsourcing is becoming more widespread, and thus, it is important to understand exactly how, and if, it works. It is a viable and cost-effective strategy only if the task is well facilitated, and the institution or project leaders are able to build up a cohort of willing volunteers.

In short, while Bentham’s manuscripts comprise material of potentially great significance for a wide range of disciplines, much of the collection – far from being even adequately studied – is virtually unknown.

Crowdsourcing is an increasingly popular and attractive option for archivists, librarians, scientists, and scholarly editors working with large collections in need of tagging, annotating, editing, or transcribing.

And some focused thinking about the ways we communicate with those publics is in order, I would suggest, because many of our fields are facing crises that we cannot solve on our own

The commodification of ideas as currency in academia means that writing is often concealed until publication, leaving the interim versions in the struggle towards a publishable version unseen.  These processes often leave the academic writer isolated. Writing in public counters this.

As data management plans become mandatory components of research proposals, maybe we should start looking out for what historians will be doing with their notes and research data? It’d be a potential to really kickstart historical research, speed up some research, increase efficiency (time for me to duck), and help decrease PhD completion times. Not a magic bullet, but … maybe 10% of one?

Hyperlinks would not have solved the other weakness of Phillips’s notebook: its inability to track, at a fine-grained level, changes to a page or to his thinking over time. Digital notebooks, however, could overcome this challenge as well. The solution here is version control, a technology familiar to the open-source software world and embedded (behind the scenes) in many of the tools historians already use. Microsoft Word’s “track changes” feature is essentially a version of version control, a way of seeing precisely how a text has been modified at a particular moment of time. Wikipedia’s “history” pages provide a more powerful version of the same feature. And as Konrad Lawson has shown in a recent Profhacker series on Github, programs like Git provide the most powerful version control systems of all, allowing their users exceedingly fine-grained views of when and how files were changed.

So, the question is, when it takes 15 seconds instead of 15 hours to fact check a source do we think historians will start to write differently, or otherwise change how they do their work?

How many people would retrace a historians footsteps through archives scattered around the world to double check each citation?

For those who made satirical prints, these contacts included suppliers of raw materials, individuals and businesses who could undertake out work, and groups whose trustworthiness could be guaranteed. Relationships within these networks were established and maintained by direct, indirect, environmental, and community ties.

As history becomes digitized in ever-increasing scales, historians without the ability to research both micro- and macroscopically may be in danger of becoming mired in evidence or lost in the noise.

Microhistory involves the rigorous and in-depth study of a single story or moment in history, whereas macrohistory susses out long-term trends and eddies,

good historians, like good detectives, test their merit through expansion: the ability to extract complex knowledge from the smallest crumbs of evidence that history has left behind. By tracing the trail of these breadcrumbs, a historian might weave together a narrative of the past.

Often, macroscopes produce textual abstractions or data visualizations in lieu of direct images.[1]

The Digital Humanities—and by inclusion, Digital History—cannot be a playground for the privileged. Letting it become so will undo decades of important work done in the humanities to listen for and amplify the voices of those who are too often ignored. The instrument of the digital historian, a macroscope, is just as able to obscure the context of violence as it is to highlight that violence.

By not explicitly pointing out tools and approaches that embrace feminist values and diverse outlooks, we risk perpetuating incongruities, barriers, and biases in DH research

We wrote it in the open, inviting the world to contribute their edits, ideas, and advice for our final draft. We engaged with our readers, and were heartened and encouraged when the Macroscope began appearing on syllabi; when students started leaving comments, we were overjoyed.