Accompanying language analysis tools are encoding standards manifest in eXtensible Markup Language (XML), a Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard that defines textual elements without compromising the integrity of the original document. Text encoding becomes necessary for making digital representations of original analog materials, a particularly crucial step in digital research for scholars studying eras prior to the proliferation of computers and electronic-born texts. Encoding not only serves to structure sustainable projects but allows for sophisticated analysis of text by a flexible ability to define elements within a document. Furthermore, making texts digital with proper encoding allows more rigorous examination and manipulation of said texts. The more digital texts available for analysis, the better for digital textual analysis tools to articulate and produce visualizations that can create a framework to define, query, and highlight the associations in the record of the past.

TokenX analyzes XML files that can be manually input to the software (assuming the XML document is stored on a server) or built into a digital project, a task accomplished by Pytlik Zillig and CDRH (see, for example, Framing Red Power, William Jennings Bryan and the Railroad, and What Shall be the Character of this Vast Western Territory?). Once a file is “Tokenized,” users can generate word clouds, highlight keywords, view keywords in context, create word counts, and a host of other forms of analysis. Newer features currently being integrated into TokenX allow for n-gram analysis and concordance views of text, both of which help deconstruct texts even further by counting phrases containing an n number of words. Word clouds provide a visual depiction of the frequency of words in a document’s content. Shown by a variation in font size or color depending on their frequency, the word clouds identify the most crucial words used in a document. Another impressive feature in TokenX’s textual analysis rests in being able to view particular words in context. Emphasizing words in their immediate context allows one to visualize that word’s usage in several instances within a document. Through such features, researchers and historians can mine the text for information not visible without machine-aid to demonstrate some connective tissue between the text and a historical argument. Textual visualizations allow scholars to glean what a text or corpus of text is narrating about particular themes, people, or events. Certain elements are highlighted and scholars can investigate these texts in numerous ways to determine why particular words or contexts come into focus while others fade in importance. In terms of scholarly communications, the digital presentation provides an accessible way for historians to narrate their argument. TokenX’s visualizations provide in-depth insights into word contexts within individual and corpus texts and serve as a method for analyzing the connective tissue within language and across texts in time and place.

Recently, TokenX was integrated into student projects with assistance from Pytlik Zillig. This digital tool has aided the students in crafting original historical arguments by highlighting language and word trends. The students first transcribed each of the historical documents used as their source base. Transcribing textual documents into a digital form also provides the historian a deeper familiarity with the document’s content, context, and type of discourse. With a significant corpus of documents made digital users can investigate different keywords and perform the other functions of analysis offered by the tool. Having TokenX integrated into digital projects enable the authors of those projects to make their argument interactive rather than static screen captures of visualizations. The integration of TokenX into digital projects requires you to work through Pytlik Zillig to “Tokenize” the documents and host the material on a server, thus limiting the design capabilities of TokenX. However, the design limitation does not detract from the usefulness of the analysis tool and the value it adds to digital scholarship.

Historians and history instructors will find textual analysis tools, like TokenX, critical for piecing together and visually demonstrating historical analysis to students and colleagues alike.

Brent Rogers and Jason Heppler
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Reviewed: August 2009

Cross-posted at Digital History.

Furthermore, since Google Earth is a map in a virtual environment, teachers can literally “fly” students through the terrain that, for instance, Alexander the Great traveled and fought [link]. The ability to see the geography raises new questions and can give students a real sense of what actors in the past dealt with. Taking the students down to the hilly coastal terrain that Alexander and his troops confronted in the Siege of Halicarnassus gives them a clear idea of what they dealt with. The included image overlay conveys not just the geography, but the historical layout of Halicarnassus as it looked in 334 BCE. Pathways can be applied to the terrain to visualize the route armies took over the land. Students could likewise examine the terrain and see battle maps of Alexander’s fight against Darius III in the Battle of Issus.

What ties all of these ideas together is not just the ability to show students something new and exciting, but for them to interact with the tools. Students are free to explore spatial information in constructing historical arguments rather than just present information through lectures and texts. Google Earth also presents the opportunity to increase the exposure to primary sources, including maps, documents at the Library of Congress, or films deposited at the Internet Archive. As we read about in Marie-Laure Ryan’s piece, “Will New Media Produce New Narratives?” (Reading Analysis 7), engaging users with interactive material (in Ryan’s case, hypertext) allows them to draw connections on their own and explore the past through a variety of mediums.

Google Earth presents many “wow” moments as well. The Lewis and Clark map overlay provided by Rumsey was one of those moments. A flat map on a table or in a book might give an idea of what they experienced, but to see the map and discover the breadth of the area they traveled. The archival record is given context not to who or when, but to the terrain and a global picture. An overlay of 1853 San Francisco does not stand alone, but connects itself to the surrounding region and gives users a greater sense of the geography and historical changes that occurred over time.

While we cannot embed Google Earth into our digital scholarship, we can certainly offer the files to readers for them to download and interact with our work. The descriptive HTML can explain key spatial points to our scholarship and include hyperlinks to categories like interpretive essays, secondary literature, and primary sources. Hyperlinking to our online scholarship keeps the project self-contained and thus contributes to project sustainability. Additionally, the XML-based KML encoding ensures a sustainable digitized collection. The interactive possibilities with Google Earth serve historians, students, and general readers in exploring spatial relationships in history.

Rawley Conference
At the end of April I was elected to be the Chair/Director of the James A. Rawley Conference in the Humanities, a graduate-student run conference held on the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  Over the next few months the groundwork will be put in place for the conference, including when the conference will be held, the theme of the conference, and arranging the keynote speaker.

We’re also hoping to launch a blog to make it easier for us to keep in touch with those interested in the Rawley Conference.  In the mean time, you can follow updates on the Conference with Twitter.

Wedding Bells in the Air
At the end of June I married my best friend and other half.  We were also in the process of relocating to a new apartment.  She was also busy finishing up tasks related to her degree/new job.  Needless to say, May and June were incredibly busy for both of us.

Onwards and Upwards
In the middle of moving and wrapping up wedding plans, I finished writing my thesis in June and successfully defended it at the beginning of this month.  The last week or so has been spent trying to finish revisions and suggestions brought up by my thesis committee.  It will be a great feeling to have it off my desk!  This fall I’ll be starting the Ph.D. program at UNL.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
Brent and I were both hired to work as Research Assistants for the coming academic year with the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, which is starting the Papers of Buffalo Bill digital history project.  Brent is handling research on the Rough Riders and I am tackling the show Indians Cody used in his Wild West shows.  The goal, on my end at least, is the creation of a database tracking the name of Native American performers, tribal and linguistic affiliations, their hometowns, what parts they played in the show, among other things.

Teaching Historical Thinking
During the spring semester I served as a teaching assistant for Dr. William Thomas, along with my colleague Leslie Working.  Throughout the course of the semester we devoted much time and energy to fostering historical thinking among our undergraduates by using digital technology such as PRS Clickers and Wikis for group writing assignments.  Leslie and I are co-writing an article about the results we received over the semester that we hope to publish in the near future.  In October, we will be presenting our results to the Teaching History Forum hosted by the History Department at UNL.

TokenX Review
Brent and I are also co-writing a review of TokenX that should appear on Digital History in the next couple of weeks.

Related to Digital History, we’re currently in the process of creating a digital historian directory, which will provide a way for historians to connect with one another and view projects they are working on.  You may want to watch Digital Clio or the Doing Digital History blog for news of its launch.

Book Chapter Drafts
Brent and I both have book chapters either out to publishers, or will soon have them submitted to publishers.  I anticipate heavy amounts of editing in the future, but for the mean time, they’re off my desk.

A Blogging Resolution
Finally, I hope to pay much more attention to the blog from here on out.  I hope the blog will become a central place where you can see my thought process or read my thoughts/ideas on digital history.  My plan is to set aside chunks of time to devote to the blog where I can post something new at least twice a month (baby steps…), but ideally I would have something new every week.  You can also follow me on Twitter (@jaheppler) or FriendFeed (jaheppler).  If you haven’t already, you may want to subscribe to our blog.

1. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic (July 1945)
2. Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanta-History and History (1974)
   
3. Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier, and Josh Brown, Who Built America? From the Centennial Exposition of 1876 to the Great War of 1914, CD-ROM (1993)
4. Roy Rosenzweig and Michael O’Malley, “Brave New World or Blind Alley?  American History on the World Wide Web,” JAH (1997)
5. Edward Ayers, “The Pasts and Futures of Digital History“  (1999)
6. Edward Ayers, “History in Hypertext” (1999)
7. Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-century Paris” AHR (2000)
8. Philip J. Ethington, “Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge” (2000)
9. Roy Rosenzweig and Michael O’Malley, “The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web,” JAH (2001)
10. David Staley, Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology will Transform Our Understanding of the Past (2002)
11. Orville Burton, Computing in the Social Sciences and Humanities (2002)
12. Edward Ayers and William G. Thomas, The Valley of the Shadow (2003)
13. Edward Ayers and William G. Thomas, “The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities,” AHR (2003)
14. Roy Rosenzweig, “Scracity or Abudance?  Preserving the Past in a Digital Era” AHR (2003)
15. Dan Cohen, “History and the Second Decade of the Web,” Rethinking History (2004)
16. William G. Thomas, “Computing and the Historical Imagination” (2004)
17. Edward L. Ayers, “Doing Scholarship on the Web: Ten Years of Triumphs–And A Disappointment” Journal of Scholarly Publishing (2004)
18. Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web (2005)
19. William G. Thomas, “Writing a Digital History Journal Article from Scratch: An Account,” Digital History (2007)
20. William Turkel, The Programming Historian (2008)
21. Andrew Torget, Texas Slavery Project (2008)
22. “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” JAH (2008)

If you were completely new to digital history and trying to get a grasp of what it was about and what it entailed, this is the list I would probably hand you.  The texts might be a bit heavy on the development of digital history as a field rather than the theory of digital history, but at twenty-one books, essays, and projects, I thought I’d cut the list off before it became unwieldy. Perhaps I’ll add a post about reading material for a theory of digital history to my blog post idea list (which grows and grows…).  Clearly, this list is not a definite canon of digital history, but I think it gives you a good picture of where the field has been and where it might be going.  I’ve tried to catalog a variety of projects and reading material that I found important to my understanding how the field has (and is) developed.

Any other suggestions?  Nit-picks?  Disagreements?  Leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!

EDIT: Fixed link on the Thomas (2007) piece.

]]> http://tdhxp.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/foundational-material-in-digital-history/feed/ 2 tdhxp http://tdhxp.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/wssa-scholarship-in-the-digital-age/ http://tdhxp.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/wssa-scholarship-in-the-digital-age/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:12:08 +0000 Jason Heppler http://tdhxp.wordpress.com/?p=181 ]]> On Friday, Brent, myself, and our colleagues Nic Sweirscek, Michelle Teidje, and Robert Voss will be participating at the Western Social Sciences Association Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a roundtable we proposed entitled “Historical Scholarship in the Digital Age: Asking New Questions and Exploring New Forms of Scholarly Communication with Digital Techniques.”  You can find our abstract below the fold.

The conference is open to the public, so we hope some of you can join us.  If you cannot, we will be doing a wrap-up of the discussion on the blog.  Also, I hope to provide a live feed of sorts on Twitter by tweeting the roundtable (you can follow me @jaheppler).

ABSTRACT:  The development of digital history as a field and historical research methodology offers scholars tools to manage and make sense of the unprecedented and instantaneous access to the extensive source base that historians must encounter in the digital age.  Digital technologies allow historians to explore the multitude of sources in more depth and ask questions not immediately seen without such tools.  Scholarship in the digital age represents the manifestation, arguments, and analysis that historians can make with the assistance of digital tools and techniques, while providing them a new means to communicate their scholarly findings.  As more people turn to the Internet for more information, historians have the ability to construct and present quality scholarship to broad audiences, thereby radically democratizing knowledge.  This roundtable discussion will demonstrate the range of possibilities and opportunities with digital tools and address how historians engage with the technology to produce scholarship to communicate with the scholarly community and the public at large.  The discussants have all employed digital tools and techniques in their research methodologies and in constructing historical arguments.  As a part of this roundtable, the discussants will demonstrate how they have implemented these tools and how it has informed their arguments.

The American Indian Movement forcefully inserted their agenda into public discourse and used the print medium to insert their voice into public policy debates. What sort of things were activists talking to the media about? What was the media reporting? Omitting? What was AIM’s message? Did the media report the demonstrator’s goals or was the message lost in the sensationalism of the occupation? Was the occupation of the BIA a successful strategy for disseminating their agenda? Framing Red Power analyzes the ways newspapers covered the American Indian Movement by bringing together digital technologies and traditional historiographical methodologies, allowing historians to pose new questions about the interaction between media sources and political actors.

My first decision in the planning process of the project was an editorial constraint: what sort of print sources would I include in the digital scholarship? I made the decision to focus on major newspapers at the national (New York Times and Washington Post), regional (Minneapolis Tribune and Chicago Tribune), and local (Argus Leader and Rapid City Journal) level. I began compiling my sources by searching online digital repositories like ProQuest and hunting down microfilm sources for anything not digitized. Once the primary sources were located, I began the process of transcription and “mark up” with eXtensible Markup Language (XML), a method of encoding documents with specific information.

A sample of a document marked up in XML. For a complete view of an XML document, visit the "Documents" section of Framing Red Power, click on a newspaper article, click "View" in your toolbar, and click "Page Source."

With a corpus of digitized newspaper articles, next came the process of integrating digital tools that assist historians in analyzing material. Digital technologies are not an end in and of themselves but rather a method for querying and analyzing material in new ways. Since my purpose was to analyze text and language, I turned to textual analysis tools like Wordle (though I hope in the near future to integrate TokenX, a powerful textual analysis tool developed by Brian Pytlik-Zillig at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, into my project to provide more penetrating and interactive analysis of the articles). With Wordle, I developed visual representations of the newspaper articles that allowed me to spot recurring themes in the text.

Cumulative word cloud of the newspaper articles.

Collectively, the newspaper articles appear to focus on Indians, the BIA building, and the federal government far more than they focus on what the activists have to say or why they are in Washington demonstrating. The issues that AIM wanted to call attention to during the demonstration, such as treaty rights or tribal government, are lost in a narrative more interested in the federal response. To prevent skewed results in the word cloud, certain phrases have been strung together. For example, the “Indian” in American Indian Movement is not read by the program as an individual word but rather as part of a phrase. The same is true for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Trail of Broken Treaties, and several other phrases.

The ability to analyze sources with digital technologies allows historians to ask new questions of historical events. Tools like word clouds help to highlight the frequency of language in text, a process impossible (or nearly so) to achieve in print, and reveal ways we can visualize narratives and analyze their significance.

[Cross-posted at Doing Digital History]

(Thanks: Dan Cohen)