Digital History seminar

Institute of Historical Research

Doing History in Real Time

Professor William J. Turkel

(University of Western Ontario)

A workshop sponsored by the IHR Seminar in Digital History

In A New Culture of Learning (2011), Thomas and Seely Brown argue that the traditional view of teaching and learning ‘presumes the existence of knowledge that is both worth communicating and doesn’t tend to change very much over time’. In this workshop we explore the degree to which either assumption is valid now. We also discuss some of the new kinds of computational tools or instruments which historians may want to construct and use. These have the potential to make us better navigators of our contemporary (digital) world, and will allow us to continue to assert that a nuanced knowledge of the past is the best guide to present conduct.

Bill Turkel is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario and Project Director, Digital Infrastructure for the SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Cluster NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment. He does computational history, Big History, STS, physical computing, desktop fabrication and electronics. He programs whenever he gets the chance, and is experimenting regularly with analog electronics. There is more information about his work on his personal website.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Doing History in Real Time

Professor William J. Turkel

(University of Western Ontario)

A workshop sponsored by the IHR Seminar in Digital History

In A New Culture of Learning (2011), Thomas and Seely Brown argue that the traditional view of teaching and learning ‘presumes the existence of knowledge that is both worth communicating and doesn’t tend to change very much over time’. In this workshop we explore the degree to which either assumption is valid now. We also discuss some of the new kinds of computational tools or instruments which historians may want to construct and use. These have the potential to make us better navigators of our contemporary (digital) world, and will allow us to continue to assert that a nuanced knowledge of the past is the best guide to present conduct.

Bill Turkel is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario and Project Director, Digital Infrastructure for the SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Cluster NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment. He does computational history, Big History, STS, physical computing, desktop fabrication and electronics. He programs whenever he gets the chance, and is experimenting regularly with analog electronics. There is more information about his work on his personal website.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

From Cradle to Antipodean Grave: Reconstructing 19th Century Criminal Lives

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart

(Tasmania)

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

From Cradle to Antipodean Grave: Reconstructing 19th Century Criminal Lives

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart

(Tasmania)

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

The Future of the Past roundtable

Melissa Terras (UCL); Adam Farquhar (British Library); Torsten Reimer (JISC), also featuring Tim Hitchcock (Hertfordshire) reading for Andrew Prescott (KCL); chaired by Richard Deswarte (History Data Service); and first response by Lorna Hughes (Wales).

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

The Future of the Past roundtable

Melissa Terras (UCL); Adam Farquhar (British Library); Torsten Reimer (JISC), also featuring Tim Hitchcock (Hertfordshire) reading for Andrew Prescott (KCL); chaired by Richard Deswarte (History Data Service); and first response by Lorna Hughes (Wales).

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Finding Meaning in a Million Victorian Books

Dan Cohen

(George Mason)

This event was steamed live from Washington, USA to the Institue of Historical Research (London) and online on 6 March 2012.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Finding Meaning in a Million Victorian Books

Dan Cohen

(George Mason)

This event was steamed live from Washington, USA to the Institue of Historical Research (London) and online on 6 March 2012.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

The Old Bailey Corpus: spoken English in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Magnus Huber

(Giessen)

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online is a heavily used resource by historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who want to look at social and cultural history, particularly of the ordinary people. The ‘from below’ perspective that the proceedings can provide especially due to its mark-up online has truly moved the discussion forward. However, as the project was originally underway at least one person saw another possibility for the resource.

Magnus Huber is an historical-linguist and he viewed the Old Bailey corpus as a largely untapped resource for rediscovering spoken English in a period before audio or visual recordings. Huber has analysed the texts for long variations and change in spoken English as expressed in the court trials. He has asked and attempted to answer how accurate such a study can be. Does the written record accurately record spoken English? Even where the scribe has noted down direct speech, can we be sure that this is correct? What about the problem of summarising or changes in word-forms such as “can’t” rather than “cannot”? From an historians point of view some of this is not important to gaining an historical sense of what the resource is telling us. However, from a linguists point of view there are important differences and the records cannot entirely be trusted to tell us everything that we would like to be able to assume. A lack of internal consistency in the text is a problem and even comparing to other parallel documents cannot necessarily tell us the entire story.

Nevertheless, Huber’s study of the Old Bailey records has enabled him to reconstruct much more than would otherwise be possible. The quantity of material of the same form over a lengthy period of time that the Old Bailey records provide is a gold mine of information. Now marked-up with the latest digital technology and using digital tools to analyse and ‘mine’ the evidence, the Old Bailey proceedings are continuing to provide almost endless possibilities for research.

Digital History seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Digital Landscapes and Archaeology

Peter Rauxloh

(Museum of London Archaeology)

The talk centres on several case studies including Spitalfields Medieval Augustinian Cemetery in London. The central question that he poses for this paper is what could not be done without digital technologies in archaeology? Looking at tools ranging from Geo-referencing to three-dimensional modelling and more basic digital assets such as databases for recording large amounts of data (such as 11,000 skeletons at Spitalfields) it becomes immediately obvious just how important digital is to our understandings of archaeological remains and landscapes. Take for instance the desire to know the orientation of all 11,000 skeletons and partial skeletons. In the case of Spitalfield this information was not recorded for all finds but using GIS and other digital tools it was possible to work out the orientations from geo-referenced skulls and bone fragments. It was also possible to map these against other landscape features such as to show how the burials related to the church or a line of wall. From that data it was possible to show how people moved around the churchyard.

Digital History seminar series