Microblog

Thanks to the hard work of Erik Steiner and Jan Lahmeyer, the Spatial History Project has compiled what I believe is the most complete dataset on U.S. population figures over two centuries. The dataset tries to compile historical city populations decennially between 1790 and 2010 for cities above 2,500 people (when the U.S. Census Bureau first added them to their records), but the data is spottier for cities with populations below 2,500.

There’s more thorough documentation in the README about the sources for the data and method of compilation. We’ve placed the data on Github for use and improvement by others, so I hope you’ll check it out. Feel free to submit pull requests or get in touch with Erik or I with questions or suggestions.

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Nice collection of AeroPress recipes from Tools & Toys. My own favorite is still 12g of fine ground coffee dumped into an inverted AeroPress, steeped in water poured up to the “3” mark for about a minute, then a quick flip and press.

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If you, like me, will be heading to Nashville in a few weeks for the National Council on Public History’s annual meeting, you might find Elizabeth Catte’s guide to Nashville’s food and culture on a budget useful for your pre-trip research.

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Interesting piece over at the Duke Library blog on defining digital humanities (hat tip to Mike Widner).

The research model is going to be harder to quantify. We do have some measurable components: we provide some services, and we do (or will do) some grant-funded projects. We also produce output, including code, web services, papers, articles, and blog posts. But for the most part we focus on building pieces of ever-evolving, ever-growing, resources that are never ‘finished’—resources that are harder to quantify than finished books or articles, websites or databases are. So, in some ways we look more like faculty than staff, in other ways we look more entrepreneurial. Startups take risks on building big things, hoping, of course, that they’ll be profitable. Very often the things they try don’t work, but sometimes they do, or sometimes they suggest a completely different (but better) direction. The thing is: you’ll never catch anything if you don’t put your fishing line in the water. We try to control for risk, to fish where the fishing’s good, but our basic posture is still research-driven and so to some extent risk bearing.

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I’ve been remiss in pointing out that my buddy Elijah Meeks’ D3 in Action has appeared in print. I’ve been getting chapters of the book through Manning’s early digital access for the last few months that he’s worked on the book and can say that it’s an excellent introduction to D3. If you’re looking to get started with the library and, more importantly, how you can use visualization in the humanities effectively, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy.

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Nicely researched piece from Brent Rose. I’ve never really bought the hype around bulletproof coffee. Then again, if butter in your coffee is your thing then don’t let this stop you.

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This weekend I’ll be in New York for the American Historical Association’s annual meeting, where I’ll be on two panels regarding digital history. The first on January 3 is an experimental panel with several scholars on using digital history in teaching and learning:

Digital Pedagogy for History: Lightning Round
Using the “lightning round” method of spreading ideas in the digital humanities, this experimental panel features one-minute expositions on innovative projects and cool ideas in digital history for teaching and learning. Five or more panelists will be invited to register via Twitter at the meeting. Audience members will also be invited to join the lightning round.

The other on January 4 is a career-oriented roundtable with Jana Remy, Mills Kelly, Andrew Torget, and Katina Rogers about tenure, alternative academic careers, and graduate training:

Digital Scholarship, Academic Careers, and Tenure
The digital revolution is disrupting long-established systems within the academy for tenure, promotion, and careers, offering both new opportunities and remarkable challenges for the next generation of historians. The AHA, in response, recently charged a committee to draft guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship in T&P. This roundtable will provide a ground-level discussion of the role of digital scholarship in early-career scholars, as session panelists share how digital scholarship fit into their work on the tenure clock, offered them alternative academic careers based on their digital projects, and the nature of peer review after the digital turn. They will also discuss how the MLA’s publication of guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship could be applied to historians.

There are several digital panels at the AHA this year, many of which I’ll try to get to, as well as a THATCamp being held on January 6th. Should be a great weekend!

In the fall quarter I taught, for the first time, a digital history course, a colloquium with undergraduate and graduate students from history, computer science, journalism, and earth sciences. The course was a blast to teach and I am extremely pleased with how the final projects ended up. I had an amazing group of students who not only seized upon the methods introduced in the course but also helped me to clarify some of my own thinking and challenged some of my ideas.

The end of the course culminated in a beta version of a digital history project that the students were free to choose on their own, so long as the topic revolved around the history of Silicon Valley.¹ The projects:

• Emily Grubert, “What is environmental impact? The evolution of topic in English-language environmental life cycle assessment journal articles, 1995-2014”
• Russell Burg, “Blighted Modernity: Mapping Shantytowns in Park Chung Hee’s Seoul, 1963-66”
• James Hanley and Wayne Shu, “Silicon Valley Meets Wall Street”
• Jenny Farman, “Women in CS at Stanford”
• Paul Carroll, “Silicon Valley, according to the New York Times”

They compressed a lot of work into a short amount of time (quarters are so short), and I’m quite happy with the analysis the students were able to complete in our short amount of time together. Much of their work became public-facing, either presented on the web (above), during our public electronic poster session at the end of the quarter, and through our course blog. We had a few fits and starts, mainly with getting up to speed on GitHub early on in the quarter, but by and large things felt like they went pretty smoothly.

I’m already spending time thinking about things I would change about the course, and hope that I’ll get a chance to teach the class again next fall.

Thanks to my colleague (and co-host) Elijah Meeks for pointing me to a project by Nils Weidmann, who has put together CShapes – an R package and GIS shapefile of country boundaries and capitals between 1946 and 2008.

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This fall I am teaching an undergraduate/graduate colloquium called “Digital History,” joining the lineup of the History Department’s stellar Visualizing Evidence, Spatial History, and The Digital Historian’s Toolkit. My aim is to get students familiar with various approaches to digital history – data mining, spatial history, visualization, and so on – and how to apply these approaches to historical questions.

The main outcome for the course will be a beta project that serves as an equivalent to a capstone paper. To get there, the undergraduates in the course are spending our time focusing on the history of Silicon Valley and exploring questions and issues relevant to this region’s history. That means I’ll have students working in the university archives, digitizing material, creating historical data, and building visualizations. I have some additional ideas for the graduate students in the course, which I will share soon. I cannot wait to see what we all come up with over the course of the quarter.

Here is the syllabus for the course.