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: […]
Comparing Digital Tools: Voyant, CartoDB and Palladio Read More »
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
Doing Digital History with Palladio Read More »
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
Doing Digital History with CartoDB Read More »
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
Text Mining with Voyant Read More »
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
A Review of the Metadata of Music Online: African American Music Reference Read More »
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”
Review of African American Music Reference Read More »
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
A Reflection on Digital Humanities Projects Read More »
Textmining Colonialism Nigerian Annual Colonial Reports, 1897-1938 As a historian, I privilege physical archives. I love to touch the original documents, smell them and mentally go back in time to when they were created. I had some skepticisms when I ventured into textmining these annual colonial reports. Most of my research has been on colonial
A Reflection on my Project Textmining Colonialism Read More »
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
Crowdsourcing Digitization Projects Read More »
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
Deconstructing Wikipedia: Is it Useful? Read More »