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This chapter gives a description of the life-cycle of a digital history project, from digitisation of source material onwards, with advice on the practicalities and costs of different approaches to producing machine-readable text. There is introductory coverage of data cleaning and version control using Git, although these are covered more fully in later chapters.
The Introduction provides a summary of the aims and intended audience of the book, and a justification of the choice of tools to be used: the book recommends well-tested, free tools for working with large amounts of text. The Introduction also draws attention to the importance of data cleaning – the preparation of data for use in a project. A precis of the following chapters and appendices is given.
This chapter offers a guide to visualising historical data, with two case studies centred on the Post Office directory data used throughout the book. The first visualisation is two stacked bar charts showing the most common female professions against men in the same professions and breaking down professions by married and unmarried women. The second visualisation is a map of one London street in 1879, with discussion of the process and the thinking that led to the finished visualisation.
This chapter looks at likely trends for digital history over the next few years, with predictions about the impact of historical material increasingly being available solely or additionally in digital form. There is a discussion of the ethics of digital history projects in terms of their environmental impact and in the way they can uncover and make public information about individuals in unprecedented ways.
The first of two chapters on working with text, this chapter covers the difference between plain text formats and proprietary formats, the pattern-matching technique ‘regular expressions’, the command line as an interface for working with large amounts of text, particularly the grep command. All of the examples work on a specific historical text, a Post Office directory for late nineteenth-century London.
The second of two chapters on working with text, this chapter covers structured text and, in particular, the markup language XML, with a short passage on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. As with the previous chapter, the Post Office directory is used throughout as an example historical text.
This book is about the making of London in the period 1660-1720. This period saw the beginnings of a new understanding of built form and a transitional stage in the transmission and articulation of that form in design procedures. The book discusses the processes and methods by which the development of the city was financed and organized. It considers the leading developers and questions to what extent the traditional model which attributes responsibility for the development of London to aristocratic landlords is a viable one. The book looks at the structure of the building industry and assesses how it was adapted to meet the demands of the production of speculative housing on a scale and at a pace never previously experienced. It outlines how concepts concerning the form of the new terraces were communicated and transmitted through the building chain and finally realized in the built product. The book focuses on the discipline of architectural history and is primarily concerned with architectural and urban design issues. It talks about drawings as the sum of an architect's oeuvre, rather than the buildings, or the drawings and the buildings together. The book provides information on the style and layout of the new developments and explores the extent to which they can be categorized as a 'modernizing' phenomenon.
Dan Cruickshank has characterized the constructor of the Georgian speculative house as a builder rather than a craftsman. This chapter investigates who the craftsman was and the ways in which he operated in speculative development, an area in which architects were not involved as designers, although sometimes as developers and investors. It necessarily concentrates upon practice among the higher ranks of the building trades, although more information about the divisions and structures within those trades is needed for a fuller picture. Linda Clarke insists, as the result of a rigidly deterministic Marxist mode of analysis, that the building tradesman remained an artisan; full capitalism, based in her view. The master builder or building contractor is usually seen as a nineteenth century phenomenon, with Thomas Cubbitt in the early nineteenth century being seen as the first of a new breed.
This chapter outlines what is meant by the term 'design'. The central question for design practice in early modern England, as for building practice, is the extent to which there was a separation of design and production. Very little attempt has been made to understand drawings in terms of the contemporary approach to design, or to consider in a broader sense what their purpose might have been. John Harris utilized the techniques of the drawings specialist to catalogue the collection there and established architectural drawing studies as a unique subject area. John Harris's Introduction to the Inigo Jones catalogue contains some interesting and perceptive notes on the direction that drawing studies have taken. Even at the highest levels of architecture it is possible that drawing skills were neither necessary nor common.
In the introductory remarks to his translation of Vignola, Joseph Moxon said that the purpose of the book was to make the use of the orders comprehensible so that, 'any that can but read and understand English, may Readily learn the Proportion that all Members in a Building have one unto an other'. The distinction Eileen Harris makes between books on the orders, and books of designs and pattern books, is of use in this context. By the time Campbell was writing his London Tradesman in 1747 he takes it for granted that all the masters of the major building trades will be able to read English, draw and design their own work and be acquainted with the architectural trends of the time. Design even for mass production was still a collaborative activity.