Week 3: What is Digital History?

Read:

• Cohen & Rosenzweig, Digital History, Introduction, Ch. 1
• “The Promise of Digital History.” Journal of American History 95 (2008).
  

• *Ayers, “The Pasts and Futures of Digital History.”

• Robert Townsend, “Google Books: What’s not to Like?” AHA Blog, April 30, 2007.
• Poe, “Fight Bad History with Good, or, Why Historians Must Get on the Web Now,” Historically Speaking 10, no. 2 (2009): 22-23.

Case Studies:

CHNM, “History Matters” http://historymatters.gmu.edu/

“Valley of the Shadow” http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/

Library of Congress, “American Memory” http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

Theban Mapping Project http://www.thebanmappingproject.com/

National Gallery of the Spoken Word: Historical Voices http://www.historicalvoices.org/

The Lost Museum http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu/home.html

Martha Ballard diary online:  www.dohistory.org

Studio: Fun with Google and other search engines

Working with search options. Choose a person from your research. Go the main Google search page, type in the name and keep track of your results. Now you are going to try various options to see if you can make the results more useful or more interesting (it’s your research, so you get to decide). Google allows phrase and boolean searching, negation of terms, synonyms, wildcards and many other options. It also allows you to limit the search by filetype, site, title, url, etc. See The Essentials of Google Search and Advanced Search Made Easy. You might also spend some time playing with Soople.

Search Grids: Choosing a few terms from your research, try the search grid option at Find Forward. Are there any unexpected (or unexpectedly productive) results? Find Forward also lets you make a number of other lateral moves from your initial search strategy, like returning possible questions for a given search term, or adding a random word to your search.

Other Google applications:

Google Books, Google Scholar, Google Docs.