To be completed by May 24th
Watch
Sometimes the embed seems to not load, at least for me. If that happens to you, just watch it on youtube (click on the youtube logo).
(My speaking notes for the video)
Read
Something given. That’s a nice way of thinking about it. Of course, much of the data that we are ‘given’ wasn’t really given willingly. When we topic model Martha Ballard’s diary, did she give this to us? Of course, she couldn’t have imagined what we might try to do to it. Other kinds of data - census data, for instance - were compelled: folks had to answer the questions, on pain of punishment. This is all to suggest that there is a moral dimension to what we do with big data in history. Johanna Drucker famously framed it as data versus capta, or ‘things captured.’
In the tutorials for this part of the course, we’re thinking about some of the ways historical materials find their ways online (read the thread behind that link!), and we’re learning some of the ways we can pull that information onto our own machines for our own research. Read these two pieces discussing the way the Transcribe Bentham project organized the digitization of Bentham’s papers.
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Causer, Tim, Grint, Kris, Sichani, Anna-Maria and Terras, Melissa, ”Making such bargain: Transcribe Bentham and the quality and cost-effectiveness of crowdsourced transcription’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 33:3 2018, pp. 467-87 . Open access version.
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Causer, Tonra, & Wallace, 2012. Transcription maximized; expense minimized? Crowdsourcing and editing The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham LLC 27.2
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Baker, James. 2017. ‘The Soft Digital History That Underpins My Book’ https://cradledincaricature.com/2017/05/24/the-soft-digital-history-that-underpins-my-book/
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Baker, James. 2017. ‘https://cradledincaricature.com/2017/06/06/the-hard-digital-history-that-underpins-my-book/'
Do
- Continue on with the sequence of tutorials you began with - the newcomer sequence, the standard sequence, or the going-further sequence.
- Use the template provided in the part two folder in the repo to write your log and to write your reflection. Use markdown conventions to indicate headings, emphasis, bullets, links, etc. The reflection prompt is below:
The tutorials for part two of the course revolve around ways of getting data from the web and onto our own personal machines. Here are some prompts to think about in the context of that work, and the readings listed above.
Who pays for work to end up online? Who does the work? What are some of the ethical dimensions of doing this work? Does Carleton give you any resources for getting those materials onto your own machine in formats you can read? What are some of the barriers to accessing the resources that Carleton does make available to you? Where do you fit into this digital history machine?
What is the value of/for historians (regular historians) showing their work, as opposed to, or in contrast to, what digital historians have to do? Where is the scholarly value in showing your work - and contrast this with how you’ve written history to date.
When You Get Stuck
There is no shame, there is no trick! You will get stuck. When you do, make a post in the help channel in Discord indicating what tutorial you’re working on, the error message that you are receiving, share a screenshot, explain what you were trying to do. There is no shame in asking for help; I do not want to learn that you have been suffering in silence trying to figure things out on your own. People who ask for help learn faster and have a better experience in this class and generally do better. You may ask me privately for help in Discord; we can screenshare and voice-chat as needed.
I will be in Discord nearly every day, and always on Wednesday afternoons.
Submit Your Work
Put any ephemera you create as you do the tutorials into the part two folder in your copy of the github repo I provided. (the ‘hist3814a-starter’). Make sure your log and reflection are up to date. Submit the link to the part one folder in your version of the repo using this form.