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Reflecting on my Online Contributions.

Undergraduates researching with computers.

  • This year I have decided to become part of this movement that fuses both social media and the world of academia. I have embraced my love for history and used it to engage fervently with my University Discussion Page, blogging sites and to some extent twitter. Perhaps it is time to examine whether this movement is worthwhile and if it has proved beneficial to my studies. Have I learnt anything about the impact of digital academia?  Were my digital interactions with other students and historians valuable? Or is it all just a waste of time? Let’s see.

What have I Learnt from using Digital Media to support my studies?

  •  Admittedly, I was a bit pessimistic about using digital tools to supplement my research. I felt a touch skeptical that my online resources could help me pursue my historical inquires as effectively as traditional scholarly methods. How wrong I was. There are many different facets of digital media and research.  Including online forums and digital databases that have improved my approach to historical study. Online contact with my students has forced me to convey my research in small bite-size chunks instead of overflowing paragraphs that I would use in a formal essay. I had to convey my information in this way as it would be quite discouraging for my fellow student to trawl through every sentence and plus I wanted a response fairly quickly.  I use to have a tendency of writing well over the word-count for my assignments, but using online forums [such as my University Discussion Page] I have learnt to portray my information in a way that is concise, has clarity, fluent, yet still informative and interesting. I’m still not a forum-posting-wizard, but I’m now able to communicate my ideas and arguments without the need for excessive waffling.
Making this transition was fundamental for clear writing.

Making this transition was fundamental for clear writing.

  • Also, blogging as a digital media tool has given me several tips to improve my literary ability. Writing for a non-academic environment has taught me to get rid of pointless jargon and detail that is oh too familiar of the scholarly world. A non-academic audience usually wants to know the crux of what you’re actually banging on about, so developing good clarity skills is essential to keeping your reader on track. Moreover, to achieve this properly I learnt how to write in a more engaging manner. This may have included punchy, gripping sentences that were slightly informal in character or it could be just could be using shorter sentences. Either way, I learnt how to write for a non-academic audience which I believe is vital in a world where scholars are relying on the general public for their research.
  • There is a ‘but’ though! I have found it particularly difficult to ensure I don’t patronize my reader. Just because they might not work in academia doesn’t mean they don’t know their stuff. Digital History has taught me about how ‘non-academic’ historians can access the world of research without the constraints of academia. The growing accessibility of online resources has merged the academic world and the world of the public enthusiast.  I’ve thus had to make sure I tune that fine balance between producing something that is fun and easy-to-read without insulting their intelligence. I’ve learnt how to do this better but I believe with more experience I could turn this ability into a skill.
An Amateur historian teaching a group of students about manuscripts in a manner not that different from many Universities.

A non-academic historian teaching a group of students about manuscripts in a manner not that different from many Universities.

  • One tip I have learnt to bridge this gap is to use informative images, animations and diagrams, I found this particularly useful when I posted my ‘Critique on Google Ngram Viewer‘. Using a video or embedding pictures in your post means you apply a relatively large amount of detail in a way that doesn’t make it arduous for the reader to absorb. Learning these things have all helped me to communicate my thoughts more clearly. Visualizations are also part of this parcel, and it is definitely a digital tool that is worth exploiting but unfortunately I don’t have the technical skills to create this sort of digital history. Again I think with more experience with the nuts and bolts of software animation will help me apply it to digital history.   However, I have learnt that when making online contributions, you have to express information in a format that quickly captures the mind of your reader. The internet is a fast-paced environment, I have learnt that my contributions have to match that pace if I really want worthwhile responses.
Where did I make my Online Contributions?
  • As previously said,  I found that Blogs were a nice little arena to vent my thoughts and my opinions about Digital History. A few of my fellow students found Twitter quite useful, for me it was a polar opposite. Although I learnt that twitter can provide a network other historians to either share your various resources to build up a level of prestige by broadcasting your knowledge. I found the ‘140 character’ post limit a restriction on the level of information that I could share quickly. I felt that I had to simplify my information to level that would make it difficult for me to get my point across fully.
twitter-vs-blogger
  • I thus found my ‘University Discussion Page’ a bit more appealing. Still I had to condense the amount of detail I posted, but I could include enough to develop my research. Using University forums I could participate in a community that was outside of the classroom and onto the internet, I found this consistent access to a digital community a great way to keep historical discussion fluid and engaging, it encouraged me to incorporate weblinks to articles and videos on the forums. I was no longer responding to topics as a bleary-eyed student, but as an enthusiast that wanted to immerse himself scholarly conversations.
So are Online Contributions actually worthwhile?
  • It depends but it certainly isn’t a waste of time. The world of digital history is a great opportunity for participation, as long as you know what you’re doing and how best to do it. I found that selecting the correct tools for contribution will only make the whole thing more enjoyable. As you proceed you will develop some skills quickly in terms of improving your writing style, others will take a bit longer(as I found with visualization software). But participating in Digital academia will get you thinking about using the ‘Net’ more effectively – As it did with me –  i.e using the facilities to provide yourself with more knowledge and to disburse knowledge to the public appropriately. How will the impact of digital academia affect you?
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A Critique of Google NGram Viewer

Google NGram viewer(GNV) is an application that allows the intellectual enthusiast to find out the popularity of a particular word(s) from 1500 to the year 2000. This video gives a neat example of how to make best use of its functions.

GNV has said to revolutionize the ways in which we conduct historical research. It is considered to be part of this new academic movement called Cultronomics, which is basically the practice of analyzing large social datasets. For Google, “analyzing the growth, change, and decline of published words over the centuries,” allows the researcher to look at how cultural trends developed over time. Google employs this methodology by using its own database of books, pamphlets and written material from across the centuries. Using a database is more than appropriate in this case,  as it saves the historian from having to carry out complex technical queries and allows for a quick linkage of data.

However  GNV does encounter some technical problems. It uploads many of its books and pamphlets through Optical Character Recognition, a system that attempts to scan typewritten/printed text into computer-readable text. Although it claims to have 98 percent accuracy, this is measured mainly down to successful scanning of a character and not a whole word. For example  an OCR scan of “I ihall no. be able to sufil” instead of ‘I shall not be able to fulfil’, will still yield an accuracy of over 95 percent even if the significant words are incorrectly spelt because most of the letters have been scanned successfully, suggesting that any searches through GNV may lead to misleading results.

This Aged Portion - niis aged pntkm?

OCR GONE WRONG?! – This Aged Portion – niis aged pntkm?

OCR also raises some historical problems, the formation of the letter ‘f’ was written in the shape of an ‘s’ up until the  late eighteenth century, it is unlikely that the OCR system would find it hard to differentiate between words that actually begin with the letter ‘s’. Interestingly this should make us question the nature of the computer to provide us with relevant information and should remind us that the computer works systematically according to the information it is given, it is hard to make it operate like the human mind that can accommodate for differing historical contexts. Binder actually critiques Google’s Metadata(specification of data structures), she claims that because cataloging and organization is so vital to having a correct dataset and to digitizing history this undermines Google as a trustworthy as a scholarly source.

An example of Google Books mixing up its 'f' and 's'.

An example of Google Books mixing up its ‘f’ and ‘s’.

‘.

However this decision to use Optical Character Recognition is part of a larger problem in approaching the data we use. Hitchcock has discussed the evolution of close and distant reading, as we move away from looking closely at each piece of primary source and instead trying to obtain a vast amount of information from looking at sources collectively. GNV aims to exercise the latter, which in this case is good and bad for academic research. It is an appropriate use of methodology as it emphasizes the accessibility and the searchability of digital researching in comparison to manually flicking the pages desperately looking for relevant information.

But, we must take the information we visualize with a pinch of salt, as we can only investigate the words’ meaning by searching by Google books. E.g, the popularity of the word ‘Antichrist’ can be easily acknowledged in the 1640s as the Ngram shows a huge increase. Although without a proper understanding of why the word is popular and the actual meaning of the word, the results only appear to give us a superficial impression of its popularity without its historical significance. Secondly, we must remember that whatever context you can obtain from a ‘close reading’ of Google books, it must be remembered that these books are a limited collection organized by Google. Google’s collection has gone through a  selective process, thus whatever ‘topic modelling‘ is constructed by GNV, this is only subject to Google’s selection of books and NOT every single book that has been published.

Context

Despite the limitations in the Google books collection, there is great flexibility in GNV.  Many scholars have welcomed the flexibility of the GNV mainly because you can manipulate the data.  Karch has explicitly recognized the fact that you can search for verb and noun variations of different words, whilst also changing the time-frames as well as comparing trends amongst different words.  This is vitally important, because by giving the researcher the tools of direction, it helps to create greater creativity and more original studies. Plus, because this creativity is visualized in chart form, it makes researching more appealing and engaging to both scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. Unfortunately the ability to use Boolean searches(e.g “AND”) does hinder how precise and creative you can actually be, however incorporating this in such a large data set would probably have proven difficult.

Lastly, moving away from technical approaches, GNV has raised some theoretical issues to academic research. Firstly, Ngram Viewer has encouraged  greater interdisciplinary analysis as the study of semantics, computing and history can build upon each other to create new areas of research.

An example of how Google Ngrams encourages its users to share research with others in different areas of study.

An example of how GNV’S website embedding system encourages its users to share research with others in different areas of study.

However there is a danger according to Hitchcock, that these new programs may create a historical positivism. In that fusing socio-sciences and the humanities will make Historians believe that their research must be fit into neat conclusions. It must be ensured that Cultronomical projects like GNV promote the process of ‘interpretation’ instead of just searching for pure facts.

Fancy some extra reading? | Bibliography of Links

Visualisations – Prostitution in Twentieth Century Philadelphia

Visualisations - prostitution in philadelphia

Prostitution in Philadelphia | 1912-1918

This is an interesting depiction of American Prostitution in the early twentieth century. Interestingly the authors used criminal statistics to support this project. I think this particular project is in stark comparison to the Old Bailey Online Database which was also created using criminal statistics. Despite the fact that you can interpret the data with the same ease as the Old Bailey Online, by using heat maps and actually visualizing the data it makes the data much more accessible and it easier to trace criminal patterns varying from regions rather than just browsing through vast paragraphs of text as with the case for Old Bailey Online.

The makers aim to explore the distribution of prostitution arrests in Philadelphia during the 20th century. They wished to focus on the city where the most prostitution arrests occurred, unfortunately they only surveyed a period from 1912-1918 which makes it hard for the visitor to analyze how the criminal patterns changed rapidly over a long period of time.

In terms of its sources, it used a sample of approximately 25% of data collected on just over 4,000 police arrest records (1,124 total records used) for disorderly street conduct from 1912 to 1918. This makes their data less proportionate than Old Bailey online, although the authors admit the project is only a means to encourage other users to consider the potential roles of spatial significance and explore the data on their own.

Unlike many visualizations, it does reveal some important information about Philadelphia city. The first piece information is that one region is a “defacto red-light district” and the other region (7th Ward) is an official city unity with a high concentration of Black residents, which they attribute to the “Great Migration of African Americans”. This sort of context is vital to the understanding of why regional variations in crime might occur. It also provides a small profile of the basic details of every individual arrested which is great for the visitor to dig a little deeper in his or her research.

One of my favorite elements about this project is the fact that you can manipulate the data really easily. You can filter your results down to ethnicity (not possible in ‘Old Bailey Online), age, and the type of arrest, the exact sentence, and the duration of the exact sentence. And also one can manipulate the variables involving both arrests and residences using a heat map.

My final point is that this project exemplifies what a visualization should look like, the colored heat maps make it genuinely attractive, more importantly it helps to facilitate a mixture of close and distant reading as one can look the historical patterns whilst also looking at individual profile information.

It would be useful if publishers could incorporate this in eBooks it would help to illustrate the points that a historian makes, animating historical information could eventually bridge the gap between  the academic and public audience.

An analysis of the blog – http://historycarnival.org/

An analysis of the blog – http://historycarnival.org

    • I personally found this blog particular interesting, mainly because of its structure and the way in which it lays out its information, it appears to portray itself very much like a digital magazine in a bite-size format. Whereas the previous blog appears to be quite conversationalist in the way it aims to interact with its audience. This blog aims to capture that feeling of public engagement but in the format of an updating news site.

     

    • The Blog operates very much in a catalouge format, rather than have a vertical list of every recent blog post, the author utilizes the space on the sides of the blog for additional information regarding contacts, other blogs etc, this different format subconsciously engages the reader to scroll around the blog for relevant ideas. It also makes the blog more entertaining and eye catching for the reader, the color schemes help this, but the unusual layout is what will retain the attention of the reader.

     

    • More specifically, the use of the blog is interesting, the author appears to make the blog operate as a network for other bloggers ro connect with each other. The Blog also appears to summarize the the main themes of other bloggers and introduces you to other historians. It operates very much like an Events Blog, but its good accessibility helps to make this a more useful blog for the general blogger rather than a particular academic. Furthermore its desire to operate as digital networking hub very much resembles the purpose of the Historical blog which is to help provide the dissemination of sources and knowledge of historical research.

An Analysis of the Blog – http://www.dancohen.org/

An Analysis of the Blog – http://www.dancohen.org/

  • One of the main things about this blog that I preferred over Trevor Owen’s was his simple and clear layout. By having a black screen he is drawing the User’s attention to the important content within the text.  Although his posts appear quite long in some cases, he creates shorter paragraphs to make it a bit more manageable for the visitor.
  • Although the Blog isn’t striking visually, it is clearly laid out with a neat categorization of the different sections within the blog. He also tags many of his posts to key themes which makes it easier for uses to find his blog, it also improves the accessibility of his blog within vast realm of digital media.
  • It is also worth pointing out the general tone of the blog, this blog doesn’t appear to be as specialist as Trevor Owen’s it is very much a research blog, where Mr Cohen is talking about his personal researching adventures. His style is very much informal but no colloquial, a unique trait as it draws in the causal blogger interested in historical research whilst maintaining his academic audience.
  • In General, the Clarity of his posting and the easy laid our structure makes for very attractive viewing, if he did however include some relevant picture (no need to be striking or huge in size) it would make his blog perhaps a little more eye catching.

An analysis of the Blog – http://www.trevorowens.org/

An analysis of the Blog – http://www.trevorowens.org/

  • This Blog can be seen as primarily one of a specialist nature. It is quite clear this is the sort of blog that would be shared amongst academics who also discuss the same sort of themes as he does, his audience would not be for those who were just getting to grips with the subject.
  • Although he appears to put some emphasis on color visualization, this can appear cluttered and distracting to the main body of text. Having said that, it looks like he has an overload of text on his homepage, he does try to break this up with images and photographs but some of his post are over the custom length for a post (1000wrds) which may put off certain people from revisiting the blog.
  • There are some positive aspects to the Blog, firstly he has several hyperlinks which are embedded within the posts themselves, making it easier for the User to navigate around the website and locate exactly what they are looking for. It is also interesting how he uses the blog in order to sell/advertise his expertise to other bloggers and historians on digital media. This relates very much into the purpose of blogging in general which is to share your arguments and opinions with the wider audiences.

 

  • Overall, it is certainly his use of colors and images makes this an intriguing blog, but the excessive detail within his posts makes it clear that this is a blog for those Historians who are experts within this field who may offer him advice to adapt his research.

Invisible Australians Living under the White Australia Policy

Invisible Australians Living under the White Australia Policy

This website differs from the website listed in the previous post in that its primarily a blog and not a database. In its attempt to look for the different ethnicities and their struggle against white nationalism within Early Australia It hasn’t collectively brought all the research into one particular place.

It’s structure is primarily consisted of blog-posts about new findings of information and its biographical information found in the records to link together racially diverse lives, revealing the real face of White Australia. It also has a section called resources which is categorized in a similar way to the ‘Old Bailey Online’ website, in  that you can browse via name and through certain documents although you can’t manually browse for a specific identity (unlike ‘Old Bailey Online’), thus enhancing the time and difficulty for effective researching.

In terms of the way in which the sources have been uploaded to the website, many of the sources are photos which have been either scanned manually from the Australian archives, although this maybe an advantage to the Old Bailey Online’s OCR method, in that you get a first-hand look at the physical details of the source(measurements, handwriting etc), many of the details are hard to actually read due to inappropriate photography material or amateur methods.

The Website indeed has an interesting outlook, with its homepage showing picture of many Australian immigrants, although this perhaps could be misleading as its information consists more of items and citizenship documents than mere photos. It is worth noting that the website is much more of an individual project with one of its developers aiming that to make Australian history much more engaged with its public whereas Old Bailey Online appears to have a more academic purpose. The fact that there pages and pages of citations could be that it is prompting its public to do further research and conduct its own studies.

This website doesn’t appear to have any mention of its XML mark up system or the ways in which the researcher can manipulate the data. Although it lists certain programs that allow you to export data or control, these programs are not integrated within the website and are merely suggestions for dealing with other national Australian archives.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913

A database about criminal trials based in London from 1674 – 1913 with a vast number of trials currently standing at 197,745. Its layout is fairly simple it gives links to other useful websites regarding the history of non-elites.

In terms of its categorization, it allows you to separate data according to Offences, Verdict, Punishment, Surname and Forename and you can categorize the data right down to the very month in which the crime took place, allowing to query and search material quite specifically. There is the ability for you to see the XML of each cited trial, it also outlines its process of using XML which was double checked by a team of 5 technicians. the XML of the texts was roughly the same apart from a few variations according to the specific use of a word or phrase.

All the documents were done by manual transcription or a system of double re-keying whereby two volunteers transcribed the same text, and the two transcriptions were checked by computer for inaccuracies.

In terms of actually manipulating the data, it’s “API”(Application Programming Interface) allows you to search by the trial name instead of its , you can export this data to different programs for statistical and linguistic analysis.