Sabrina's Digital Tools for Historians class blog

For this week’s assignment, we were tasked to read Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship, edited by Anne Kelly Knowles and by Amy Hillier. The book examines the merit of GIS and how the tools of GIS can be applied to history or in other words, historical GIS. So, what is historical GIS? GIS stands for geographic information systems, so historical GIS is when you apply mapping tools and other spatial data tools to a historical context. A good example of this would be mapping the path a slave ship such as the Amistad took from its point of origin to its final destination and all of the points it stopped along the way. There is a great deal of information on this slave ship so you could map its path with relative ease. However, this information is widely known and I am sure has been mapped in the past. I will talk about several other good examples of historical GIS later in my blog post that are also discussed in the book we read for this ...

In relation to digital tools, what comes to mind when you think of text mining? Personally, I have rarely used text mining tools. Before the digital age was in full swing, we used the precursor to text mining tools, word bubbles, and we would have to scan the documents ourselves, and even then it was subject to human error. In the digital age, with digital tools there are still errors that can be made both by humans through incorrect information that we input as well as computer error. However in an age where technology is becoming more prevalent, like we talked about in class, it is important to have an extra backup or save file of our important documents to account for error of any kind. Text mining is a program in which you can look at online articles or books and find the words that are most frequently used. This week our Professor tasked us with using text mining tools to see what word might be used the most in an article of our choice. To find the article I used JSTOR, which I...

            For this week’s class, we read a collection of articles that serve as a guide to digital history. Digital history and digital humanities have rather broad subjective definitions. However, as I mentioned in last week’s blog post the most widely acceptable definition of digital humanities would be “digital tools for a digital age,” this would also be the most widely acceptable definition for what is digital history. Digital history is more than this definition or any possible definition, digital history is the tools, websites, universities, museums, libraries, staff, and faculty that use digital history to catalog, apply for grants, map, and build exhibits every day. These tools are used every day of our lives, many of which have become pretty mainstream.                   Digital history since the 1970s has become more accessible to a wider audience....