Digital history
Encyclopedia
Digital history is the use of digital media
and tools for historical practice, presentation, analysis, and research. It is a branch of the Digital Humanities and an outgrowth of Quantitative history
, Cliometrics
, and History and Computing. Some of the previous work in digital history includes digital archives, CD-ROM
s, online presentations, interactive maps, time-lines, audio files, and virtual worlds. More recent digital history projects focus on creativity, collaboration, and technical innovation, all of which are aspects of Web 2.0
. Future work in digital history will likely include projects such as text mining
.
Many online history projects facilitate large-scale conversations (one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many), producing new kinds of distributed 'texts'. Further research is required to understand the significance of these texts for historical studies.
Narrative forms continue to be central to history in digital environments, even as experiments in nonlinearity challenge and extend conventional boundaries and understandings of narrative. "Digital history could be both a catalyst and a tool in the creation of a more literary kind of history," Ayers wrote in his landmark essay 'The Pasts and Futures of Digital History'.
led these historians to ask and answer several kinds of new quantitative questions. Historians turned to computers as they quantified data found in censuses, election returns, city directories, and other records. Through this process, social historians came up with new generalizations about communities and populations. By the late 1970s younger historians turned to cultural studies, but the outpouring of quantitive studies by established scholars continued. Since then, Quantitative history
and Cliometrics
have been used primarily by historically-minded economists and political scientists. In the late 1980s quantifiers founded The Association for History and Computing
. This movement provided some of the impetus for the rise of digital history in the 1990s.
The more recent roots of digital history were in software rather than online networks. In 1982, the Library of Congress
embarked on its Optical Disk Pilot Project, which placed text and images from its collection on to laserdiscs and CD-ROMs. The library started offering online exhibits in 1992 when it launched Selected Civil War Photographs. In 1993, Roy Rosenzweig
, along with Steve Brier and Josh Brown
, produced their award-winning CD-ROM Who Built America? From the Centennial Exposition of 1876 to the Great War of 1914, designed for Apple, Inc that integrated images, text, film and sound clips, displayed in a visual interface that supported a text narrative.
Among the earliest online digital history projects were The Heritage Project of the University of Kansas and medieval historian Dr. Lynn Nelson's World History Index and History Central Catalogue. Another was The Valley of the Shadow
, conceived in 1991 by current University of Richmond
President Edward L. Ayers
, who was then at the University of Virginia
. The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
(IATH) at the University of Virginia adopted the Valley Project and partnered with IBM
to collect and transcribe historical sources into digital files. The project collected data related to Augusta County in Virginia
and Franklin County in Pennsylvania
during the American Civil War
. In 1996, William G. Thomas III joined Ayers on the Valley Project. Together, they produced an online article entitled "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities," which also appeared in the American Historical Review in 2003 http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/. A CD-ROM also accompanied the Valley Project, published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2000.
Rosenzweig, who died October 11, 2007, founded the Center for History and New Media
(CHNM) at George Mason University
in 1994. Today, CHNM boasts several digital tools available to historians, such as Zotero
and Omeka
. In 1997, Ayers and Thomas used the term "digital history" when they proposed and founded the Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) at the University of Virginia, the earliest center devoted exclusively to history. Several other institutions promoting digital history include the Center for Humane, Arts, Letters, and Sciences Online (MATRIX) at Michigan State University, Maryland's Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska. In 2004, Emory University launched Southern Spaces, a "peer-reviewed Internet journal and scholarly forum" examining the history of the South.
Some of the noteworthy projects emerging from these pioneering centers are The Geography of Slavery, The Texas Slavery Project
, and The Countryside Transformed at VCDH and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution and The Lost Museum at the CHNM. In each of these projects, mediated archives holding multiple types of sources are combined with digital tools to analyze and illuminate an historical question to a varying degree; this integration of content and tools with analysis is one of the hallmarks of digital history – projects move beyond archives or collections and into scholarly analysis and the use of digital tools to develop that analysis. The differences between the ways projects incorporate these integrations are a measure of the development of the field and point to the ongoing debates over what digital history can and should be.
While many of the projects at VCDH, CHNM, and other university's centers have been geared towards academics and post-secondary education, the University of Victoria
(British Columbia), in conjunction with the Université de Sherbrooke
and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
at the University of Toronto, has created as series of projects for all ages, "Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History." Laden with instructional aids, this site asks teachers to introduce students to historical research methods to help them develop analytical skills and a sense of the complexities of their national history. Issues of race, religion, and gender are addressed in carefully constructed modules that cover incidents in Canadian history from Viking exploration through the 1920s. One of the original co-creators of the project, John Lutz has also developed Victoria's Victoria http://web.uvic.ca/vv/ with the University of Victoria and Malaspina University-College
.
In addition to Ayers, Thomas, Lutz, and Rosenzweig, numerous other individual scholars work with digital history techniques and have made and/or continue to make important contributions to the field. Robert Darnton's 2000 article, "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris" was supplemented with electronic resources and is an early model of the discussions around digital history and its future in the humanities. One of the first major digital projects to be reviewed by the American Historical Review (AHR) was Philip Ethington's "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge" http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/historylab/LAPUHK/index.html -- a multimedia exploration of changes to Los Angeles' physical profile over the course of several decades. Patrick Manning, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History at the University of Pittsburgh, developed the CD-ROM project "Migration in Modern World History, 1500-2000." In the "African Slave Demography Project," Manning created a demographic simulation of the slave trade to show precisely how declined in West and Central Africa between 1730 and 1850 as well as in East Africa between the years 1820 and 1890 due to slavery. Jan Reiff, of UCLA, co-edited the print and online versions of the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Andrew J. Torget, founded the Texas Slavery Project while at VCDH and continues to develop the site as he completes his PhD—likely a model for new digital scholars who will incorporate digital components into larger research agendas.
Another notable project that makes use of digital tools for historical practice is The Quilt Index
. As scholars became increasingly interested in women's history, quilts became valuable to study. The Quilt Index is an online collaborative database where quilt owners can upload pictures and data about their quilts. This project was created due to the difficulty of collecting quilts. Firstly, they were in the possession of various institutions, archives, and even civilians. And secondly, they can be too fragile or bulky for physical transport.
HTML
-editor Adobe Dreamweaver. Other tools create more interactive digital history, such as Databases, which provide greater capacity for information storage and retrieval in a definable way. Databases with features like Structured Query Language (SQL) and Extensible Markup Language
(XML) arrange materials in a formal manner and allow precise searching for keywords, dates, and other data characteristics. The online article "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities" used XML for presenting and connecting evidence with detailed historiographical discussions. The Valley of the Shadow project also employed XML to convert all of the archive's letters, diaries, and newspapers for full text searching capabilities.
The Differences Slavery Made also used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze and understand the spatial arrangement of social structures. For the article, Ayers and Thomas created many new maps through GIS technology to produce detailed images of Augusta and Franklin counties never before possible. GIS and its many components remain helpful for studying history and visualizing change over time.
The Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILE
) project at MIT develops robust, open source tools that enable access, management, and envisaging digital assets. Among the many tools built by SIMILE, the Timeline tool, which employs a DHTML-based AJAXy widget, allows digital historians to create dynamic, customizable timelines for visualizing time-based events. The Timeline page on the SIMILE website declares that their tool "is like Google Maps
for time-based information." Additionally, SIMILE's Exhibit tool boasts a customizable structure for sorting and presenting data http://digitalhistory.unl.edu/t-reviews/exhibitgant.html. Exhibit, written in Javascript
, creates interactive, data-rich web pages without the need for any programming or database creation knowledge.
Creating visualizations of textual elements open new interpretations and new uses of historical data. Text-analysis software like TokenX, developed at the University of Nebraska's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, generates word-frequency lists and word clouds to illustrate language usage and word significance within historical resources.http://libtextcenter.unl.edu/cocoon/cdrh/mountainmeadows/visualizations/index.html The Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) based in Canada has also developed a web portal for experimentation with text analysis tools. On del.icio.us
, an online bookmarking and research tool, tag clouds visually depict the frequency and importance of user-generated tags. These tags promote new modes of learning, exploration, research, and communication that foster the production of knowledge in a more efficient manner by elucidating related subjects and making connections based on related information.
Digital media
Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital form. It can refer to the technical aspect of storage and transmission Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital (as opposed to analog) form. It can refer to the technical aspect of...
and tools for historical practice, presentation, analysis, and research. It is a branch of the Digital Humanities and an outgrowth of Quantitative history
Quantitative history
Quantitative History is an approach to historical research that makes use of quantitative, statistical and computer tools. It is considered a branch of social science history and has three leading journals: Historical Methods , Social Science History , and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History...
, Cliometrics
Cliometrics
Cliometrics, sometimes called new economic history, or econometric history, is the systematic application of economic theory, econometric techniques, and other formal or mathematical methods to the study of history . It is a quantitative approach to economic history...
, and History and Computing. Some of the previous work in digital history includes digital archives, CD-ROM
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....
s, online presentations, interactive maps, time-lines, audio files, and virtual worlds. More recent digital history projects focus on creativity, collaboration, and technical innovation, all of which are aspects of Web 2.0
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
. Future work in digital history will likely include projects such as text mining
Text mining
Text mining, sometimes alternately referred to as text data mining, roughly equivalent to text analytics, refers to the process of deriving high-quality information from text. High-quality information is typically derived through the devising of patterns and trends through means such as...
.
Defining digital history
Digital history is a rapidly changing field. New methods and formats are currently being developed. This means that 'digital history' is a difficult term to define. However, it is possible to identify general characteristics. Digital history represents a democratization of history in that anyone with access to the Internet can have their voice heard, including marginalized groups which were often excluded in the 'grand narratives' of nation and empire. In contrast to earlier media formats, digital history texts tend to be non-linear and interactive, encouraging user participation and engagement. Digital history is studied from various disciplinary perspectives and in relation to a range of interrelated themes and activities. The field includes discussion of: archives, libraries, and encyclopedias; museums and virtual exhibits; digital identity and biography; digital games and virtual worlds; online communities and social networks; Web 2.0; and e-research and cyber-infrastructure.Issues and challenges
Digital methods in historical research offer new ways to record, communicate and preserve documents, artifacts and knowledge of the past. However, there are challenges. These include: developing efficient ways to determine the authority and authenticity of digital content; shifting from long established archival preservation systems designed for earlier media formats to using relatively unstable digital preservation formats and standards; and ensuring better accessibility for those who lack access to the technology due to age-related or socio-economic disadvantage.Many online history projects facilitate large-scale conversations (one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many), producing new kinds of distributed 'texts'. Further research is required to understand the significance of these texts for historical studies.
Narrative forms continue to be central to history in digital environments, even as experiments in nonlinearity challenge and extend conventional boundaries and understandings of narrative. "Digital history could be both a catalyst and a tool in the creation of a more literary kind of history," Ayers wrote in his landmark essay 'The Pasts and Futures of Digital History'.
History
Some historians began using computers to develop new research methods in the mid-1960s. The new interest in social historySocial history
Social history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...
led these historians to ask and answer several kinds of new quantitative questions. Historians turned to computers as they quantified data found in censuses, election returns, city directories, and other records. Through this process, social historians came up with new generalizations about communities and populations. By the late 1970s younger historians turned to cultural studies, but the outpouring of quantitive studies by established scholars continued. Since then, Quantitative history
Quantitative history
Quantitative History is an approach to historical research that makes use of quantitative, statistical and computer tools. It is considered a branch of social science history and has three leading journals: Historical Methods , Social Science History , and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History...
and Cliometrics
Cliometrics
Cliometrics, sometimes called new economic history, or econometric history, is the systematic application of economic theory, econometric techniques, and other formal or mathematical methods to the study of history . It is a quantitative approach to economic history...
have been used primarily by historically-minded economists and political scientists. In the late 1980s quantifiers founded The Association for History and Computing
Association for History and Computing
The Association for History and Computing is an organization dedicated to the use of computers in historical research.The AHC is an international organization with the aim of promoting the use of computers in all types of historical study, both for teaching and research.It was originally proposed...
. This movement provided some of the impetus for the rise of digital history in the 1990s.
The more recent roots of digital history were in software rather than online networks. In 1982, the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
embarked on its Optical Disk Pilot Project, which placed text and images from its collection on to laserdiscs and CD-ROMs. The library started offering online exhibits in 1992 when it launched Selected Civil War Photographs. In 1993, Roy Rosenzweig
Roy Rosenzweig
-References:* * * Memorial website-External links:* Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media**...
, along with Steve Brier and Josh Brown
Joshua Brown (historian)
Joshua Brown is an American social historian, and Executive Director, of the American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning, at City University of New York....
, produced their award-winning CD-ROM Who Built America? From the Centennial Exposition of 1876 to the Great War of 1914, designed for Apple, Inc that integrated images, text, film and sound clips, displayed in a visual interface that supported a text narrative.
Among the earliest online digital history projects were The Heritage Project of the University of Kansas and medieval historian Dr. Lynn Nelson's World History Index and History Central Catalogue. Another was The Valley of the Shadow
The Valley of the Shadow
This page is about an American Civil war project. For other uses, see Valley of the Shadow The Valley of the Shadow is a digital history project hosted by the University of Virginia detailing the experiences of Confederate soldiers from Augusta County, Virginia and Union soldiers from Franklin...
, conceived in 1991 by current University of Richmond
University of Richmond
The University of Richmond is a selective, private, nonsectarian, liberal arts university located on the border of the city of Richmond and Henrico County, Virginia. The University of Richmond is a primarily undergraduate, residential university with approximately 4,000 undergraduate and graduate...
President Edward L. Ayers
Edward L. Ayers
Edward Lynn Ayers is an American historian. He is the current president of the University of Richmond, having served in this capacity since July 1, 2007. Prior to his appointment, he had been on the faculty of the University of Virginia since 1980, most recently as the Buckner W. Clay Dean of the...
, who was then at the University of Virginia
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
. The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities is a research unit of the University of Virginia, USA. Its goal is to explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research. To that end, IATH provide Fellows with consulting, technical support, applications...
(IATH) at the University of Virginia adopted the Valley Project and partnered with IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
to collect and transcribe historical sources into digital files. The project collected data related to Augusta County in Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
and Franklin County in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
during the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
. In 1996, William G. Thomas III joined Ayers on the Valley Project. Together, they produced an online article entitled "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities," which also appeared in the American Historical Review in 2003 http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/. A CD-ROM also accompanied the Valley Project, published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2000.
Rosenzweig, who died October 11, 2007, founded the Center for History and New Media
Center for History and New Media
The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University was established by Roy Rosenzweig in 1994 to research and use digital media and information technology in historical research, education, digital tools and resources, digital preservation, and outreach.- Digital preservation...
(CHNM) at George Mason University
George Mason University
George Mason University is a public university based in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, south of and adjacent to the city of Fairfax. Additional campuses are located nearby in Arlington County, Prince William County, and Loudoun County...
in 1994. Today, CHNM boasts several digital tools available to historians, such as Zotero
Zotero
Zotero is free, open source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials . Notable features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes and bibliographies, as well as integration with the word processors...
and Omeka
Omeka
Omeka is a free, open source web publishing system for online digital archives, and uses an unqualified Dublin Core metadata standard. Completely web-based, it allows users to publish cultural heritage objects, extend its functionality with themes and plugins, and curate online exhibits with...
. In 1997, Ayers and Thomas used the term "digital history" when they proposed and founded the Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) at the University of Virginia, the earliest center devoted exclusively to history. Several other institutions promoting digital history include the Center for Humane, Arts, Letters, and Sciences Online (MATRIX) at Michigan State University, Maryland's Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska. In 2004, Emory University launched Southern Spaces, a "peer-reviewed Internet journal and scholarly forum" examining the history of the South.
Notable projects
The collaborative nature of most digital history endeavors has meant that the discipline has developed primarily at institutions with the resources to sponsor content research and technical innovation. Two of the first centers, George Mason University's Center for History and New Media and the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia have been among the leaders in the development of digital history projects and the education of digital historians.Some of the noteworthy projects emerging from these pioneering centers are The Geography of Slavery, The Texas Slavery Project
Texas Slavery Project
The Texas Slavery Project is a digital history project created by Andrew J. Torget, currently Assistant Professor of History at the . It aims to explore the expansion of slavery between the years 1837 and 1845 in the lands in and around what would eventually become the state of Texas...
, and The Countryside Transformed at VCDH and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution and The Lost Museum at the CHNM. In each of these projects, mediated archives holding multiple types of sources are combined with digital tools to analyze and illuminate an historical question to a varying degree; this integration of content and tools with analysis is one of the hallmarks of digital history – projects move beyond archives or collections and into scholarly analysis and the use of digital tools to develop that analysis. The differences between the ways projects incorporate these integrations are a measure of the development of the field and point to the ongoing debates over what digital history can and should be.
While many of the projects at VCDH, CHNM, and other university's centers have been geared towards academics and post-secondary education, the University of Victoria
University of Victoria
The University of Victoria, often referred to as UVic, is the second oldest public research university in British Columbia, Canada. It is a research intensive university located in Saanich and Oak Bay, about northeast of downtown Victoria. The University's annual enrollment is about 20,000 students...
(British Columbia), in conjunction with the Université de Sherbrooke
Université de Sherbrooke
The Université de Sherbrooke is a large university with campuses located in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada and Longueuil, a suburb of Montreal approximately west of Sherbrooke. It is one of two universities, and the only French language university, in the Estrie region of Quebec.In 2007, the...
and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto is a teachers' college in Toronto, Ontario.-History:OISE/UT traces its origins to the founding of the Provincial Normal School in 1847...
at the University of Toronto, has created as series of projects for all ages, "Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History." Laden with instructional aids, this site asks teachers to introduce students to historical research methods to help them develop analytical skills and a sense of the complexities of their national history. Issues of race, religion, and gender are addressed in carefully constructed modules that cover incidents in Canadian history from Viking exploration through the 1920s. One of the original co-creators of the project, John Lutz has also developed Victoria's Victoria http://web.uvic.ca/vv/ with the University of Victoria and Malaspina University-College
Malaspina University-College
Vancouver Island University is a comprehensive, four-year, postsecondary institution serving Vancouver Island and coastal British Columbia. Established in 1969 as Malaspina College, it has grown into an institution that plays an important role in the educational, cultural, and economic life of the...
.
In addition to Ayers, Thomas, Lutz, and Rosenzweig, numerous other individual scholars work with digital history techniques and have made and/or continue to make important contributions to the field. Robert Darnton's 2000 article, "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris" was supplemented with electronic resources and is an early model of the discussions around digital history and its future in the humanities. One of the first major digital projects to be reviewed by the American Historical Review (AHR) was Philip Ethington's "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge" http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/historylab/LAPUHK/index.html -- a multimedia exploration of changes to Los Angeles' physical profile over the course of several decades. Patrick Manning, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History at the University of Pittsburgh, developed the CD-ROM project "Migration in Modern World History, 1500-2000." In the "African Slave Demography Project," Manning created a demographic simulation of the slave trade to show precisely how declined in West and Central Africa between 1730 and 1850 as well as in East Africa between the years 1820 and 1890 due to slavery. Jan Reiff, of UCLA, co-edited the print and online versions of the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Andrew J. Torget, founded the Texas Slavery Project while at VCDH and continues to develop the site as he completes his PhD—likely a model for new digital scholars who will incorporate digital components into larger research agendas.
Another notable project that makes use of digital tools for historical practice is The Quilt Index
Quilt Index
The Quilt Index is a searchable database for scholars, quilters and educators featuring over 50,000 quilts from documentation projects, museums, libraries, and private collections...
. As scholars became increasingly interested in women's history, quilts became valuable to study. The Quilt Index is an online collaborative database where quilt owners can upload pictures and data about their quilts. This project was created due to the difficulty of collecting quilts. Firstly, they were in the possession of various institutions, archives, and even civilians. And secondly, they can be too fragile or bulky for physical transport.
Technology
Digital technology tools powerfully arrange ideas and promote unique analysis for the presentation and access to historical knowledge online. Some tools exist for basic web development, like WYSIWYGWYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
-editor Adobe Dreamweaver. Other tools create more interactive digital history, such as Databases, which provide greater capacity for information storage and retrieval in a definable way. Databases with features like Structured Query Language (SQL) and Extensible Markup Language
Extensible Markup Language
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
(XML) arrange materials in a formal manner and allow precise searching for keywords, dates, and other data characteristics. The online article "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities" used XML for presenting and connecting evidence with detailed historiographical discussions. The Valley of the Shadow project also employed XML to convert all of the archive's letters, diaries, and newspapers for full text searching capabilities.
The Differences Slavery Made also used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze and understand the spatial arrangement of social structures. For the article, Ayers and Thomas created many new maps through GIS technology to produce detailed images of Augusta and Franklin counties never before possible. GIS and its many components remain helpful for studying history and visualizing change over time.
The Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILE
SIMILE
SIMILE is a joint research project run by the World Wide Web Consortium , Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries and CSAIL and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation...
) project at MIT develops robust, open source tools that enable access, management, and envisaging digital assets. Among the many tools built by SIMILE, the Timeline tool, which employs a DHTML-based AJAXy widget, allows digital historians to create dynamic, customizable timelines for visualizing time-based events. The Timeline page on the SIMILE website declares that their tool "is like Google Maps
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free , that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API...
for time-based information." Additionally, SIMILE's Exhibit tool boasts a customizable structure for sorting and presenting data http://digitalhistory.unl.edu/t-reviews/exhibitgant.html. Exhibit, written in Javascript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
, creates interactive, data-rich web pages without the need for any programming or database creation knowledge.
Creating visualizations of textual elements open new interpretations and new uses of historical data. Text-analysis software like TokenX, developed at the University of Nebraska's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, generates word-frequency lists and word clouds to illustrate language usage and word significance within historical resources.http://libtextcenter.unl.edu/cocoon/cdrh/mountainmeadows/visualizations/index.html The Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) based in Canada has also developed a web portal for experimentation with text analysis tools. On del.icio.us
Del.icio.us
Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, and by the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs...
, an online bookmarking and research tool, tag clouds visually depict the frequency and importance of user-generated tags. These tags promote new modes of learning, exploration, research, and communication that foster the production of knowledge in a more efficient manner by elucidating related subjects and making connections based on related information.
Digital history centers
- Center for History and New MediaCenter for History and New MediaThe Center for History and New Media at George Mason University was established by Roy Rosenzweig in 1994 to research and use digital media and information technology in historical research, education, digital tools and resources, digital preservation, and outreach.- Digital preservation...
at George Mason UniversityGeorge Mason UniversityGeorge Mason University is a public university based in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, south of and adjacent to the city of Fairfax. Additional campuses are located nearby in Arlington County, Prince William County, and Loudoun County... - Maryland Institute for Technology in the HumanitiesMaryland Institute for Technology in the HumanitiesThe Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities is an internationally recognized, rapidly growing research center that is helping to transform the humanities in an era of new media and global information...
at the University of MarylandUniversity of Maryland, College ParkThe University of Maryland, College Park is a top-ranked public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C... - MATRIX: Center for Humane, Arts, Letters, and Sciences Online http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/ at Michigan State UniversityMichigan State UniversityMichigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...
- Center for Digital Research in the Humanities http://cdrh.unl.edu/ at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- Virginia Center for Digital HistoryInstitute for Advanced Technology in the HumanitiesThe Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities is a research unit of the University of Virginia, USA. Its goal is to explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research. To that end, IATH provide Fellows with consulting, technical support, applications...
at the University of VirginiaUniversity of VirginiaThe University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson... - Institute for Advanced Technology in the HumanitiesInstitute for Advanced Technology in the HumanitiesThe Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities is a research unit of the University of Virginia, USA. Its goal is to explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research. To that end, IATH provide Fellows with consulting, technical support, applications...
at the University of VirginiaUniversity of VirginiaThe University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson... - Digital Scholarship Lab http://dsl.richmond.edu/ at the University of RichmondUniversity of RichmondThe University of Richmond is a selective, private, nonsectarian, liberal arts university located on the border of the city of Richmond and Henrico County, Virginia. The University of Richmond is a primarily undergraduate, residential university with approximately 4,000 undergraduate and graduate...
- Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social ScienceInstitute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social ScienceThe Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was established in 2005 to conduct leading-edge research at the intersection of high performance computing and humanities, arts, and social science scholarship...
at the University of Illinois. - Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling http://storytelling.concordia.ca/ at Concordia UniversityConcordia UniversityConcordia University is a comprehensive Canadian public university located in Montreal, Quebec, one of the two universities in the city where English is the primary language of instruction...
Digital history projects
- Robert K. Nelson, Scott Nesbit, Andrew Torget, The History Engine
- Douglas Seefeldt, Envisaging the West: Thomas Jefferson and the Roots of Lewis and Clark
- Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) , Voting America: United States Politics, 1840-2008Voting AmericaVoting America: United States Politics, 1840-2008 is a digital history project created by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. Voting America analyzes data from Presidential elections, both at the state and county level...
http://americanpast.richmond.edu/voting/ - William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers, Valley of the Shadow
- Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History
- The Papers of Abraham LincolnThe Papers of Abraham Lincoln]The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is a long-term documentary editing project dedicated to identifying, imaging, and publishing all documents written by or to Abraham...
- Lincoln/Net: Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project at Northern Illinois UniversityNorthern Illinois UniversityNorthern Illinois University is a state university and research institution located in DeKalb, Illinois, with satellite centers in Hoffman Estates, Naperville, Rockford, and Oregon. It was originally founded as Northern Illinois State Normal School on May 22, 1895 by Illinois Governor John P...
Libraries - Thomas M. Costa, The Geography of Slavery
- Bethlehem Digital History Project
- Virtual Jamestown
- Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project
- Historypin
- National History Education ClearinghouseNational History Education ClearinghouseTeachinghistory.org, also known as the National History Education Clearinghouse , is a website that provides educational resources for the study of U.S...
at George Mason UniversityGeorge Mason UniversityGeorge Mason University is a public university based in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, south of and adjacent to the city of Fairfax. Additional campuses are located nearby in Arlington County, Prince William County, and Loudoun County...
and Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityThe Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...