Public History and Digital Humanities

Digital Paxton: A Digital Archive and Critical Edition of the Paxton Pamphlet War is a collaborative online project that documents the reaction to a conflict that took place between European immigrants and Native Americans in 1763, as a result of increasing tensions following the French and Indian War and Pontiac's War, when Scots-Irish settlers encroached on Native lands in the Pennsylvania frontier. In two separate attacks during December 1763, a vigilante group that later became known as the Paxton Boys massacred all twenty members of a Susquehannock (called the Conestoga by the English) settlement in retaliation for purportedly participating in violent acts carried out by the settlement on British settlers.  The majority of the Susquehannock who died were brutally murdered and mutilated while being held in protective custody in Lancaster by the Pennsylvania government, and it was later revealed that the settlement had coexisted peacefully with Europeans for decades, and had ...

Geographies of the Holocaust , edited by Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano (2014), demonstrates the possibilities afforded by Digital History and GIS in allowing for innovative analyses of thorny yet much-studied historical topics, moving beyond well-traversed paths to open up new opportunities for historical exploration. The project hearkens back to earlier nineteenth and twentieth century ideas of history as a science so markedly that it received grant funding from the National Science Foundation, an award which the authors acknowledge “stretched the bounds of “GIScience” (Acknowledgements). The book is also the result of broad collaboration, not only among US institutions (Middlebury College, Texas State University, Stanford University, DePaul University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Indiana University) but also the University of Bristol and Victoria University, Wellington.  It incorporates feedback from scholars at conferences repre...

Historical GIS is an “umbrella term covering the many ways researchers are using geospatial technologies and analytical techniques for historical research and writing” (xiv). As a melding of several disciplines with different training and products--primarily history and geography--it builds on the Annales’ school’s concept of geohistoire to merge “historical geography and spatial and digital history” (7). Typically, the underlying framework used to support these analysis is geospatial information systems (GIS) technology, often through the form of free-standing GIS software programs that allow users to aggregate, analyze, and create visual displays of data (2). GIS can offer many advantages to teachers.  It offers a way to use interdisciplinary methods to “teach valuable analytical and problem-solving strategies that transcend disciplinary boundaries” (63).  Historical GIS also may appeal to students who are visual learners, in what is largely a “logocentric profession” (2)....

Text-mining is one example of the use of "big data" (Grossman) in conjunction with digital tools to analyze a textual work or corpus of works.  One tool that can be used in text-mining is Voyant:  https://voyant-tools.org/   For the purposes of this post, I used Voyant to analyze Homer's Iliad , as translated from the Ancient Greek into English by Samuel Butler in 1898.  As a former Classics major, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are my favorite works of historic literature.  While Samuel Butler is not considered to be among the greatest translators of Homer into English--that triumvirate includes Alexander Pope (1720), Richard Lattimore (1950), and Robert Fagles (1990), with Fagles' translation being my personal favorite--I chose Butler's translation because I was able to find a free, full-text version of his translations as a plain-text HTML files, without an accompanying introduction or footnotes, which I thought might detract from the text analysis:  htt...

The Digital Humanities comprises what Robertson calls a "big tent" encompassing interdisciplinary digital scholarship carried out in fields such as "history, English, art history, archaeology, and media studies" (Robertson, 2011).  Digital history instead focuses on the discipline of history, and the approaches and tools that are the most useful to historians and those seeking to educate others about history.  Seefeld and Thomas call this branch of history "an approach to examining and representing the past that works with the new communication technologies of the computer, the internet network, and software systems" (Seefeld and Thomas, 2009). Rising out of computing advances in the 1960s and 1970s, Digital History's origins began in the 1980s CD-ROM textbooks, history-based computer games, and Hypercard stacks (Thomas, 2019 and Ayers, 1999).  My personal initiation to the world of Digital History came in 1997, when my fourth-grade Hypercard stack p...

Although much of Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto's The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars is relevant to my work as an archivist, I was particularly interested in Chapters 5 and 6 on Digital Tools and Digital Environments. Gardiner and Musto begin by discussing the traditional "tools of the humanists": "books, speeches, and letters" (67).  These manuscript materials, together with other forms of paper-based record keeping, make up the the majority of archival collections, which Gardiner and Musto call "the public aggregations that humanists use" (67).  I could write a whole blog post on how much I appreciate and plan to adopt this pithy summation of the vital work of archives when describing what I do and why it is important.  However, for the purposes of this class, I will focus instead on Gardiner and Musto's description of digital scholarly environments, and how these digital environments create challenges and opportun...