Digital History seminar

Institute of Historical Research

Lost Visions: retrieving the visual element of printed books

Julia Thomas, Nicky Lloyd and Ian Harvey

(Cardiff)

Despite the mass digitization of books, illustrations have remained more or less invisible. As an aesthetic form, illustration is conventionally positioned at the bottom of a hierarchy that places painting and sculpture at the top. The hybridity or bimediality of illustration is also problematic, the genre having fallen between the cracks of literary studies and art history. In a digital context, illustration has fared no better: new technologies can aid the editing of a literary text far more successfully than they can deal with the images that accompany it.

This paper focuses on the challenges and the implications of an AHRC-funded Big Data project that will make searchable online over a million book illustrations from the British Library's collections. The images span the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, cover a variety of reproductive techniques (including etching, wood engraving, lithography and photography), and are taken from around 68,000 works of literature, history, geography and philosophy.

The paper identifies issues relating to the improvement of bibliographic metadata and the analysis of the iconographic features of the images, which impact on our understanding of 'the image' in Digital Humanities and the negotiation of Big Data more generally. The work undertaken as part of the Lost Visions project allows for the future development of Illustration Studies, repositioning visual culture in the largely text-based process of digitisation and problematising modes of textual production.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Lost Visions: retrieving the visual element of printed books

Julia Thomas, Nicky Lloyd and Ian Harvey

(Cardiff)

Despite the mass digitization of books, illustrations have remained more or less invisible. As an aesthetic form, illustration is conventionally positioned at the bottom of a hierarchy that places painting and sculpture at the top. The hybridity or bimediality of illustration is also problematic, the genre having fallen between the cracks of literary studies and art history. In a digital context, illustration has fared no better: new technologies can aid the editing of a literary text far more successfully than they can deal with the images that accompany it.

This paper focuses on the challenges and the implications of an AHRC-funded Big Data project that will make searchable online over a million book illustrations from the British Library's collections. The images span the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, cover a variety of reproductive techniques (including etching, wood engraving, lithography and photography), and are taken from around 68,000 works of literature, history, geography and philosophy.

The paper identifies issues relating to the improvement of bibliographic metadata and the analysis of the iconographic features of the images, which impact on our understanding of 'the image' in Digital Humanities and the negotiation of Big Data more generally. The work undertaken as part of the Lost Visions project allows for the future development of Illustration Studies, repositioning visual culture in the largely text-based process of digitisation and problematising modes of textual production.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Tracking the Emergence of New Words across Time and Space

Jack Grieve

(Aston)

Very little is known about how new words spread in language. New words are regularly identified by lexicographers, linguists, and the news media, but until recently we have not had access to sufficiently large geo-coded and time-stamped datasets that would allow for the detailed analysis of the geographical diffusion of lexical items in real time. However, with the rise of social media and smart phones, it is now possible to compile very large corpora that meet these requirements, allowing for new words to be identified and mapped across time and space and for the first time. In this presentation, I identify numerous newly emerging words based on a multi-billion word corpus of American tweets from 2013-2014 and map their geographical spread across the United States.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Tracking the Emergence of New Words across Time and Space

Jack Grieve

(Aston)

Very little is known about how new words spread in language. New words are regularly identified by lexicographers, linguists, and the news media, but until recently we have not had access to sufficiently large geo-coded and time-stamped datasets that would allow for the detailed analysis of the geographical diffusion of lexical items in real time. However, with the rise of social media and smart phones, it is now possible to compile very large corpora that meet these requirements, allowing for new words to be identified and mapped across time and space and for the first time. In this presentation, I identify numerous newly emerging words based on a multi-billion word corpus of American tweets from 2013-2014 and map their geographical spread across the United States.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Citizen History and its discontents

Mia Ridge

(Open University)

An increasing number of crowdsourcing projects are making claims about 'citizen history' - but are they really helping people become historians, or are they overstating their contribution? Can citizen history projects succeed without communities of experts and peers to nurture sparks of historical curiosity and support novice historians in learning the skills of the discipline? Through a series of case studies this paper offers a critical examination of claims around citizen history.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Citizen History and its discontents

Mia Ridge

(Open University)

An increasing number of crowdsourcing projects are making claims about 'citizen history' - but are they really helping people become historians, or are they overstating their contribution? Can citizen history projects succeed without communities of experts and peers to nurture sparks of historical curiosity and support novice historians in learning the skills of the discipline? Through a series of case studies this paper offers a critical examination of claims around citizen history.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Interrogating the archived UK web: Historians and Social Scientists Research Experiences

Dr Gareth Millward is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for History in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has research interests in disability and government policy, and more recently notions of the ‘public’ in British vaccination programmes. For the BUDDAH project he is researching disabled people and the Web.

Richard Deswarte is a Lecturer in Modern European History at UEA with research interests in the European idea and integration, as well as Digital Humanities. On the BUDDAH project he is examining the presence and rise of Euroscepticism.

Dr Peter Webster is currently the British Library lead on the BUDDAH project and Web Archiving Engagement and Liaison Officer at the BL. Alongside scholarly interests in Web Archiving and Digital Humanities, Peter researches on the history of religion, the Anglican Church and the relation between church, law and state in 19th and 20th century Britain.

The emergence of the WWW has been one of the most profound and influential phenomena of the last twenty years. One of the dominant features of the WWW is its changing nature both in terms of content and its technological underpinnings. The content of the WWW is an immense resource full of potential for academic researchers both in its current state and in its previous constantly changing forms. Over the last decade, in particular, archives of WWW materials have been emerging. These archives are still very much in a nascent form but are beginning to be made available and to be utiltised by a range of scholars. The UK Web Archive hosted by the British Library is at the forefront of trawling and making available for researchers archived versions of the UK WWW dating back to the 1990s. It is currently engaged jointly with the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) in the ‘Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities Project’ (BUDDAH) where a new research interface is being developed in conjunction with a number of humanities scholars who are at the same time exploring the UK Web Archive to identify its strengths and weaknesses for academic research. Peter Webster will introduce Web Archiving, the BUDDAH project and the new research interface, while Gareth Millward and Richard Deswarte will relate their experiences in using the resource to research respectively the history of disabled people and accessibility on the WWW, and Euroscepticism.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Interrogating the archived UK web: Historians and Social Scientists Research Experiences

Dr Gareth Millward is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for History in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has research interests in disability and government policy, and more recently notions of the ‘public’ in British vaccination programmes. For the BUDDAH project he is researching disabled people and the Web.

Richard Deswarte is a Lecturer in Modern European History at UEA with research interests in the European idea and integration, as well as Digital Humanities. On the BUDDAH project he is examining the presence and rise of Euroscepticism.

Dr Peter Webster is currently the British Library lead on the BUDDAH project and Web Archiving Engagement and Liaison Officer at the BL. Alongside scholarly interests in Web Archiving and Digital Humanities, Peter researches on the history of religion, the Anglican Church and the relation between church, law and state in 19th and 20th century Britain.

The emergence of the WWW has been one of the most profound and influential phenomena of the last twenty years. One of the dominant features of the WWW is its changing nature both in terms of content and its technological underpinnings. The content of the WWW is an immense resource full of potential for academic researchers both in its current state and in its previous constantly changing forms. Over the last decade, in particular, archives of WWW materials have been emerging. These archives are still very much in a nascent form but are beginning to be made available and to be utiltised by a range of scholars. The UK Web Archive hosted by the British Library is at the forefront of trawling and making available for researchers archived versions of the UK WWW dating back to the 1990s. It is currently engaged jointly with the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) in the ‘Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities Project’ (BUDDAH) where a new research interface is being developed in conjunction with a number of humanities scholars who are at the same time exploring the UK Web Archive to identify its strengths and weaknesses for academic research. Peter Webster will introduce Web Archiving, the BUDDAH project and the new research interface, while Gareth Millward and Richard Deswarte will relate their experiences in using the resource to research respectively the history of disabled people and accessibility on the WWW, and Euroscepticism.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Introducing Paper Machines

Jo Guldi

(Brown University)

Historians of the twentieth century have to contend with a technological problem, the issue of archives too large to process by traditional methods. While textual encoding, tagging, and n-grams can reveal certain patterns in digital archives, topic modeling and topic frequency, applied to hand-tailored archives, can help the historian make informed decisions about where in an archive to start looking. Digital methods, in this way, are driving historians to longer and longer time scales, making it possible for even younger scholars to perform a 'distant reading' on big questions that range over nations and centuries. The talk will follow parts of the argument of The History Manifesto (2014), comparing how a historian's search for periodization, agency, and causality in the data compare with use and abuse of digital data in other digital fields.

Jo Guldi is author of Roads to Power (2012), What is the Spatial Turn? (2012), The History Manifesto (2014), and the digital toolkit Paper Machines (2012). She is Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of Modern Britain and its Empire at Brown University. Her next project, The Long Land War, examines a century and a half of movements for land and water around the globe.

Digital History Seminar Series

Institute of Historical Research

Introducing Paper Machines

Jo Guldi

(Brown University)

Historians of the twentieth century have to contend with a technological problem, the issue of archives too large to process by traditional methods. While textual encoding, tagging, and n-grams can reveal certain patterns in digital archives, topic modeling and topic frequency, applied to hand-tailored archives, can help the historian make informed decisions about where in an archive to start looking. Digital methods, in this way, are driving historians to longer and longer time scales, making it possible for even younger scholars to perform a 'distant reading' on big questions that range over nations and centuries. The talk will follow parts of the argument of The History Manifesto (2014), comparing how a historian's search for periodization, agency, and causality in the data compare with use and abuse of digital data in other digital fields.

Jo Guldi is author of Roads to Power (2012), What is the Spatial Turn? (2012), The History Manifesto (2014), and the digital toolkit Paper Machines (2012). She is Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of Modern Britain and its Empire at Brown University. Her next project, The Long Land War, examines a century and a half of movements for land and water around the globe.

Digital History Seminar Series