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This book offers a practical introduction to digital history with a focus on working with text. It will benefit anyone who is considering carrying out research in history that has a digital or data element and will also be of interest to researchers in related fields within digital humanities, such as literary or classical studies. It offers advice on the scoping of a project, evaluation of existing digital history resources, a detailed introduction on how to work with large text resources, how to manage digital data and how to approach data visualisation. After placing digital history in its historiographical context and discussing the importance of understanding the history of the subject, this guide covers the life-cycle of a digital project from conception to digital outputs. It assumes no prior knowledge of digital techniques and shows you how much you can do without writing any code. It will give you the skills to use common formats such as plain text and XML with confidence. A key message of the book is that data preparation is a central part of most digital history projects, but that work becomes much easier and faster with a few essential tools.
experience tracking as restricting their lives. When users report negative attitudes to devices, part of their disenchantment is caused by arriving at ‘dead ends’: devices break, batteries die; they no longer enjoy playing with the gadgets or data visualisations; they fail to see progress or achieve their primary goals, which makes tracking tedious ( Kristensen and Ruckenstein, 2018 ). In contrast, in research on the Global South, the focus is typically on connectivity and communication rather
visual phenomenon than an intersection of algorithmically organised data flows. Complicating this familiar story, recent changes in the photographic medium have been paralleled by a growing dependence on data visualisations. Emerging in their modern form more than a century before the invention of photography, these sorts of graphic representations are designed to make even the largest, most complex bodies of information accessible to the lay viewer. The crucial point for my discussion is that the charts and graphs of big data now openly compete for documentary and
could not be improved. Indeed, we encourage you to critique our efforts and consider what might be done better. Although presentational visualisation will be our focus, there is not necessarily a sharp distinction between producing work for the consumption of others and developing your own ideas and gaining an overview of your data. Visualising your own data in a variety of ways can provide new insights or avenues for research, just as ideas often develop further in the course of being formally written up. VISUALISATION AND HISTORICAL PRACTICE Edward Tufte, the
European comparison 199 % reporting working to tight deadlines all or almost all of the time 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 Sloakia Lithuania Czech Republic Italy Latvia Estonia Poland Netherlands Bulgaria Germany Croatia Austria Portugal Finland Denmark Slovenia Sweden Hungary Luxembourg France Greece Belguim Cyrpus Malta Ireland Romania Spain UK 0 Figure 10.4 Intensive work effort – working to tight deadlines, Europe, 2015 Source: Data extracted from the European Working Conditions Survey 2015 data visualisation tool on: http://eurofound.europa.eu/surveys/data-visualisation
analysis by those working on the project, it also means that the data can be used by other researchers following the completion of BtM. The data and a range of tools and visualisations are openly available as a valuable resource for future research ( www.beyondthemultiplex.org/ ). Structuring the data in this way thus underpinned the open access data website and suite of data search and data visualisation tools. The technologies that support this include a PHP Symphony back-end, which communicates with a React Javascript front-end through an Elasticsearch server. The
be curious about adapting it for their own research situation. The considerations for setting up the research and working with these forms of data are non-trivial, but the approach can be done by those of us who do not possess engineering or data science skills. This was not always the case. Five or ten years ago, working with sensors used to be much more difficult. Even today, sensing systems can be tricky to set up, and data visualisations can fall flat. Working with data as a qualitatively trained person always produces a certain amount of hesitance about where
internalised them as everyday resources, as if we had always enjoyed them, as if they were quite natural and had not completely changed our profession’s way of working. 26 We can look to the availability of tools on desktop computers to help explain the rise of certain techniques in digital history. To take two examples from data visualisation, which we shall discuss in Chapter 7 , Excel comes equipped with a number of default charting tools, where data can be visualised at the click of a button and rendered differently at the click of another. Many articles that
of what observing the entire planet might look like, we are guided through a series of data visualisations, starting with a section called ‘Feed the World’, which displays data on global crop yield, and then a series of other data visualisations of crop farming monitored from space. We are subsequently introduced to data about the location of fish shoals in the Indian Ocean, Inuit communities, gas reserves, ice sea coverage, where to place renewable energy stations, Tunisian river flood control, microscopic phytoplankton, alongside citizen science data on Japanese
object becomes even more pertinent with the abundance of digital maps and data visualisations. Several elements of this are important: the ability to incorporate increasingly large datasets and draw together ever more disparate elements; the progressively near real-time capacity to respond to empirical fluctuations; and the proliferation of devices and the diverse forms of interaction they afford. All of these add to the complexity of relationships between the map and the territory and, moreover, highlight the influence of maps and their potential to affect. An object