Category Archives: digital history projects

Public History on the Web

digital history projects, HIST696, public history, readings

The confluence of public history and technology has enabled the average person to explore historical topics without ever leaving their home. Over the past two decades, the growth of websites dedicated to public history, including museums, historical sites, archives and libraries has been countered with a decline in actual in-person visits. The idea of the museum as a place is something that I have questioned before. Does a visit to the physical museum trump a visit to a virtual one? Or is it the other way around? I see benefits in both types of visits, especially if done well.

When Smith asked if serious history could be done on the web back in 1998, the web looked much different than it does today. Besides benefitting from cleaner and more sophisticated web design, today’s historical websites offer more interactivity than previously available, as evidenced by the evolution of the Great Chicago Fire website produced by the Chicago History Museum and Northwestern University. Although it maintains its core features of images, texts, and essays, the site today is visually different and more user-friendly than the original version.

The ability to create an exhibit online, such as the Great Chicago Fire, allows historians to bypass the traditional route of relying on a physical space. While this makes accessing more original documents and images that one probably wouldn’t encounter in a traditional museum exhibit, the experience of visiting a museum in person is lost. Although virtual tours are common, as described in Anne Lindsay’s #VirtualTourist article, there is something about the museum experience that cannot be replaced fully online. But does this matter?

In a way, the online museum is much more “public” than traditional public history institutions. By increasing access to those who cannot visit in person, allowing educators to bring museums into the classroom,  allowing users to help organize the National Library of Australia online, and putting a city’s history into the palm of one’s hand through a mobile application, the democratization of history can easily been seen. I think serious history can be done on the web, it just looks different than what traditionally has been done in the past. By combining the physical museum experience with the digital one, there is a greater potential of creating more dynamic and interactive examples of public history. In another twenty years public history on the web will probably be even more seamless, especially as we become more accustomed to accessing everything, including history, online.

Text Mining and Visualizing History

digital history, digital history projects, digitization, HIST696, OCR, readings, text mining

This week’s readings on the topic of text mining has helped me to understand a little bit more clearly just why historians might want to consider such an aspect of digital history. Text mining and topic modeling can both help reveal new patterns and themes about events, people, and documents that might otherwise have been overlooked. When information is presented in a visual map, whether it’s a chart or graph, or even word cloud, that information takes on a new perspective that researchers can choose to investigate more fully, although it is important to remember the context that surrounds the original data.

I’ve come to realize that I am very much a visual learner, which makes text mining and topic modeling quite interesting to me. By seeing the data maps that Cameron Blevins used in his article by using a program that measured the instances of geographic locations mentioned in two Houston newspapers during the 1830s/1840s and then later in the 1890s. The idea of “imagined geography” was new to me when I read the article and accompanying website, and I think it is aptly named. At the time when the newspapers’ articles, features, railroad schedules, etc were being written, I hardly doubt that anyone was thinking of all of the locations that were being referenced, nor their sociological/historical impacts.

Having read Ted Underwood’s tips for starting your own text mining project before diving into Blevin’s or Kaufman’s Quantifying Kissinger project, I had a basic understanding of the large amount of text needed for such undertakings. Underwood’s FAQ style post puts the idea of text mining into easy to understand concepts, which I found most helpful. When I saw the Wordle example, I though, “hey, I’ve done that before!” which put a personal connection to this week’s readings. Then I tried out Google’s ngram viewer, which is a cool tool for visualizing the usage of a word or phrases over time, but clearly the context is lacking, especially since we can’t see which texts are being searched.

Moving on from last week’s discussion about “buckets of words,” this week’s readings tell how we can take those buckets, do our keyword searching, and find out how those words stack up across time, for whatever it’s worth. While I think text mining definitely has a cool factor because of its employment of data maps, which I really find helpful, I need to remember that due to poor OCR and lack of context, text mining is just another tool to use in the grand historian toolbox.

Finding Online Digital History Projects

digital history, digital history projects, HIST696, practicum

This week’s practicum required our class to search for digital history projects on our research area of interest. I’m interested in 19th century US history, specifically on the social history of rural America. However, when searching good ol’ Google, this topic didn’t receive much attention. So I decided to hone in a little more on the impact of railroads and tried search strings such as (railroad digital history project) and (19th century US railroad history digital projects) and found a variety of results. Some were good, some not so good, and some were great. The usual suspect of the Library of Congress’ American Memory Project led me to historical railroad maps, which was published online in 1998. However, a link on that page directed me to a newer presentation of the maps. The newer page obviously looks more clean and visually appealing, but I am glad the original is still up on the web for comparison. The map collection is searchable and downloadable, and each map is displayed with its bibliographic cataloging information as well. There are also articles and essays that provides context for the maps.

Another good example is Stanford’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America project, which is still in development. The website offers a sampling of digitized materials that range from photographs to manuscripts, with oral histories and artwork as well, among other sources. The website promises to make the entire collection digitally accessible when it is finished, so online researchers are only left with a handful of primary sources at the moment. However, the website itself is easy to use and also includes a timeline of events that surround the topic of Chinese railroad workers, and it is one I’ll be bookmarking to come back to within the next year or so.

The most complete digital history project on this topic that I was able to find is William G. Thomas’ Railroad and the Making of Modern America project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  The project is broken up into ten different topics, such as Slavery and Southern Railroads, the 1877 Railroad Strike, the Origins of Segregation, and other socially historic related topics. Each topic contains original documents that relate to the theme, which ranges from manuscripts/letters, to maps and photographs, and even payroll records. The site itself also has a section called “Views” which are basically mini-digital history projects in themselves. The Views contain essays and related documents, and even maps and charts, thus presenting history in a contextualized manner. There’s also space dedicated just to data, which includes historical GIS, a search function (which I found to not work with any of my searches), and a place for educators to find teaching materials for their own class use. There is also a page dedicated to student work at UNL that relates to the role of the railroad in American history. This project contains a well-curated selection of materials, but the problems I encountered with searching makes me believe that exploring this project could take a long time since I’ll have to rely mainly on browsing the collection.