March 2018

The field of digital humanities is relatively new to me. My first introduction to it was in my historiography class while  a graduate student at West Virginia University, Morgantown. The professor who taught the class had done a Post-doctoral fellowship at George Mason’s Center for History and New Media. He had introduced us to platforms […]

Computers and search technology have changed the way we process text. Google Drive’s search is so good that it can extract key information from a scanned purchase receipt. While computer text has been growing rapidly in the last several years, we must not forget the millions of pages of hand and type writer generated text

For many years, I was conflicted about the use of Wikipedia in the academic setting. My students were strongly warned never to use it as a source in their papers. I strongly discouraged them from looking at Wikipedia as a starting point for their papers because they might be led astray by incorrect information. Looking

There are a variety of tools that are available for doing digital history. In my last three blog posts, I have used Voyant, CartoDB and Palladio to analyze the Slave Narratives of interviews conducted in Alabama. In this blog post, I will compare these tools and conclude by showing how they might be more useful together. These three tools:

Palladio is a web-based platform and so there is no need to download software. All you need to do is to drop your .csv or spreadsheet on the start page and click “load” and all your data will be loaded and ready for analyzing. It allows you to create tables in which more data is

Not too many years ago, attempting to work with mapping software required specialized knowledge. This limited the work of scholars in the humanities who were interested in integrating spatial tools in their scholarship. Mapping Software such as ArcGIS were difficult to master. The launch of google maps in 2005 and the readily availability of google

Text mining is one of the ways of doing digital research in the humanities. It allows you to extract key terms or topics and see their continuity or change over time and also to correlate different sources. One helpful tool for doing text mining is Voyant. Voyant is an open source tool that allows you

In a May, 2014 article published in The New York Review of Books, David Cole quoted the former CIA Director, General Michael Hayden as saying, “We kill people based on metadata.” This was in reference to the bulk collection of phone records by the National Security Agency. In response to American citizens uproar over the

African Americans have a rich musical heritage. For centuries, music has been one of the expressions of their culture. During the Middle Passage, they hummed traditional African tunes as they endured the excruciating pain and abuse of this voyage. It is said that John Newton, a slave ship Captain wrote the words of “Amazing Grace”

As I reflect on some of the digital projects that have been done, one question that comes to mind is, what is the goal of doing a digital project? These projects require significant time commitment, money and hard work and people do not develop them for fun. Having fun doing a project is great, but