Doing digital history: A beginner's guide to working with text as data

by Jonathan Blaney, Jane Winters, Sarah Milligan, Martin Steer, Simon Trafford (Editor)

Overview

This book is a practical introduction to digital history. It offers advice on the scoping of a project, evaluation of existing digital history resources, a detailed introduction to how to work with large text resources, how to manage digital data and how to approach data visualisation. Doing digital history covers the entire 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 XML. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526132697
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	05/18/2021
Series:	IHR Research Guides
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Jonathan Blaney was Head of Digital Projects at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London until 2021

Sarah Milligan is an independent scholar based in Victoria, Canada

Marty Steer is Technical Lead, Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London

Jane Winters is Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Glossary
Introduction
1 The context of digital history
2 Formulating your research questions
3 How a digital project begins
4 Working with text 1: unstructured text
5 Working with text 2: structured text
6 Caring for your digital history project
7 Visualising your data
8 What next for digital history?
Test yourself answers
Appendix 1: Getting the data
Appendix 2: Some command line recipes
Appendix 3: Regular expressions
References
Index