1. Who is the Digital
Historian?
BL Labs Roadshow, LJMU, March 2017
slideshare.net/drjwbaker
James Baker
Lecturer in Digital History/Archives
@j_w_baker
james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License. Exceptions: quotations, embeds from external sources, logos, and marked images.
4. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
Rudy,
Kathryn. ‘Dirty
Books:
Quantifying
Patterns of
Use in
Medieval
Manuscripts
Using a
Densitometer’
. Journal of
Historians of
Netherlandish
Art 2, no. 1–2
(June 2010).
doi:10.5092/jh
na.2010.2.1.1
7. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
Hitchcock, Tim,
and William J.
Turkel. ‘The Old
Bailey
Proceedings,
1674–1913: Text
Mining for
Evidence of Court
Behavior’. Law
and History
Review, August
2016, 1–27.
doi:10.1017/S073
8248016000304.
Distribution of trial lengths in words for “killing” displayed
as red circles; all other trials are displayed as gray dots.
“Killing” includes all trials tagged for the offenses of
“infanticide,” “murder,” “petty treason,” “manslaughter,”
and “killing: other,” by the Old Bailey online.
10. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
Autumn
1. What is History / What is Art History
2. Reading History / Reading Art History
3. Library
4. Archives
5. History on the Web I: Search and Retrieval
7. History on the Web II: History in Public
8. Referencing
9. Zotero
10. Counting History I (theory)
11. Counting History II (practice)
12. Being a Historian in the Digital Age
Spring
1. Doing Digital History
2. Foundations: data types and data fields
3. Making historical data I (theory)
4. Making historical data II (practice: getting data)
5. Making historical data III (practice: cleaning data)
6. Visualising historical data I (theory)
7. Visualising historical data II (practice: graphs)
8. Visualising historical data III (practice: maps)
10. Storing and preserving historical data
11. Sharing historical data
Year 1 Digital
History at Sussex
Baker, James. ‘Fostering Digital
History: Integrating Digital
Research Skills into an
Undergraduate History
Curriculum’, 1 October 2016.
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/66712
12. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
Until relatively recently records were tangible –
often boxes of papers, photographs and maps.
This is no longer the case. Now we have digital
records, which not only comprise written or
intelligible content but also intangible bits, data
and code.
National Archives. ‘Digital Strategy’, January 2017.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/the-national-archives-digital-
strategy-2017-19.pdf
13. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
Archival practice hinges on the tangibility of the
physical record and a thoroughly established
record keeping tradition. Digital records are
very different. Records are not just documents.
National Archives. ‘Digital Strategy’, January 2017.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/the-national-archives-digital-
strategy-2017-19.pdf
14. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
xkcd. Old Files, 2015. https://xkcd.com/1360/.
Methods that were
creaking with digitised
documents...
Hitchcock, Tim. ‘Confronting the Digital: Or
How Academic History Writing Lost the Plot’.
Cultural and Social History 10, no. 1 (2013): 9–
23. doi:10.2752/147800413X13515292098070.
...won’t work for born-
digital documents
16. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
Laura Carroll,
Erika Farr, Peter
Hornsby, and
Ben Ranker. ‘A
Comprehensive
Approach to
Born-Digital
Archives’.
Archivaria 72 (2
December 2011)
17. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
Mar 6 08:33:42 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
NetworkManager[852]: <info> Policy set 'Wired connection 1' (eth0) as default for
IPv4 routing and DNS.
Mar 6 08:33:42 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
NetworkManager[852]: <info> Writing DNS information to /sbin/resolvconf
Mar 6 08:33:42 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
dnsmasq[3507]: setting upstream servers from DBus
Mar 6 08:33:42 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
dnsmasq[3507]: using nameserver 139.184.32.26#53
IP 139.184.32.26 is University of Sussex.
So at 08:30 on 6 March 2017 I was at work.
Wired means I was probably in my office.
18. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
Mar 6 12:24:52 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
dnsmasq[3507]: using nameserver 139.184.32.27#53
Mar 6 12:24:52 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
dnsmasq[3507]: using nameserver 139.184.32.28#53
Mar 6 12:24:52 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
NetworkManager[852]: <info> (wlan0): roamed from BSSID 00:0C:E6:5A:B2:3D
(eduroam) to 00:0C:E6:5A:C1:09 (eduroam)
IP 139.184.32.27 is University of Sussex.
So at 12:24 on 6 March 2017 I was still at work.
Eduroam suggets somewhere else on campus.
19. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
Mar 14 10:22:15 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
NetworkManager[827]: <info> address 192.168.0.9
Mar 14 10:22:15 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
NetworkManager[827]: <info> prefix 24 (255.255.255.0)
Mar 14 10:22:15 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
NetworkManager[827]: <info> gateway 192.168.0.1
Mar 14 10:22:15 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
NetworkManager[827]: <info> nameserver '192.168.0.1'
Mar 14 10:22:15 bakers-RV420-RV520-RV720-E3530-S3530-E3420-E3520
NetworkManager[827]: <info> domain name 'Home'
IP 192.168.0.1 is a generic home router.
So at 10:22 on 14 March I was likely at home.
Though this would be harder to pin down.
20. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
Image from Milligan, Ian.
‘Finding Community in the
Ruins of GeoCities:
Distantly Reading a Web
Archive’. Bulletin of IEEE
Technical Committee on
Digital Libraries 11, no. 2
(2015). http://www.ieee-
tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/pa
pers/milligan.pdf.
See also Brügger, Niels,
and Ralph Schroeder,
eds. The Web as History.
London: UCL Press,
2017.
21. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
Gaining access to someone else's computer is
[..] like finding a master key to their house, with
the freedom to open the cabinets, cupboards,
and desk drawers, to peek at family photo
albums, to see what's recently been playing on
the stereo or TV, even to sift through what's
been left behind in the trash
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing,
2016. 215.
22. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
[We] must be conversant in the antiquarian
cants of vanished operating systems, file
formats, and emulators, just as we expect an
early modernist doing book history to know
something of signatures and collation formulas
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing,
2016. 233.
24. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
Windows 3.11 (1992) https://archive.org/details/win3_stock
Bingocat, Using Windows 3.11 for the First Time! (5 May 2016)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk4c12DcrBg
25. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
A GeoCities diary on your browser:
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20000622112212/http://www.ge
ocities.com/TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary.html
A GeoCities diary on old Internet Explorer:
http://oldweb.today/ie4/20010314115631/http://www.geocities.c
om/TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary.html
A GeoCities diary on old Mac Netscape:
http://oldweb.today/nsmac3/20010303110059/http://www.geociti
es.com/TheTropics/Cabana/1516/diary.html
26. @j_w_baker -- james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
You don’t need to be a
digital historian
But we do need:
Historians who are confident working
with digital data
To foster critical digital
To inspire students and citizens
To start asking more questions that
aren’t yoked to paper
27. Who is the Digital
Historian?
BL Labs Roadshow, LJMU, March 2017
slideshare.net/drjwbaker
James Baker
Lecturer in Digital History/Archives
@j_w_baker
james.baker@sussex.ac.uk
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License. Exceptions: quotations, embeds from external sources, logos, and marked images.