Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's MacroscopeThe Digital Humanities have arrived at a moment when digital Big Data is becoming more readily available, opening exciting new avenues of inquiry but also new challenges. This pioneering book describes and demonstrates the ways these data can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for research and in teaching and learning. It helps humanities scholars to grasp Big Data in order to do their work, whether that means understanding the underlying algorithms at work in search engines, or designing and using their own tools to process large amounts of information.Demonstrating what digital tools have to offer and also what 'digital' does to how we understand the past, the authors introduce the many different tools and developing approaches in Big Data for historical and humanistic scholarship, show how to use them, what to be wary of, and discuss the kinds of questions and new perspectives this new macroscopic perspective opens up. Authored 'live' online with ongoing feedback from the wider digital history community, Exploring Big Historical Data breaks new ground and sets the direction for the conversation into the future. It represents the current state-of-the-art thinking in the field and exemplifies the way that digital work can enhance public engagement in the humanities.Exploring Big Historical Data should be the go-to resource for undergraduate and graduate students confronted by a vast corpus of data, and researchers encountering these methods for the first time. It will also offer a helping hand to the interested individual seeking to make sense of genealogical data or digitized newspapers, and even the local historical society who are trying to see the value in digitizing their holdings.The companion website to Exploring Big Historical Data can be found at www.themacroscope.org/. On this site you will find code, a discussion forum, essays, and datafiles that accompany this book. |
Other editions - View all
Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope Shawn Graham,Ian Milligan,Scott B. Weingart,Kimberley Martin No preview available - 2022 |
Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope Shawn Graham,Ian Milligan,Scott B. Weingart No preview available - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
algorithms AntConc Archive average path length basic begin big data blog browser chapter citation clustering coefficient color column command communities connected Connectia corpus create CSV file database dataset digital history digital humanities discussed documents example explore folder Gephi Google graph graphic variables Graphville important information visualization install interactive interface Internet Internet Archive labels look macroscope MALLET matrix Microsoft Microsoft Excel Netland network analysis network visualization Ngram NodeXL Nodopolis Notepad++ Old Bailey open source OpenRefine output Outwit Hub Overview PageRank Pajek path length pivot table plugin Programming Historian query regex regular expressions represent scholars script social network spreadsheet STMT structure textual analysis TextWrangler topic model Topic Modeling Tool UCINET Voyant Tools Wget Windows word cloud Zotero