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This week, we discussed networks and crowds. As someone who has been interested in the utilization of crowds for the purpose of the historical record and memory (currently for my project, I am very interested in creating a memory archive of photographs, videos, and written memories from video gamers throughout the years), I felt like this week was right up my alley. 

Beyond the creation of a repository for the memories, it is also important to create something that is both interesting and useful to the public as well. My experience working with the Center for History and New Media has helped me to further understand more how to work with the public while also creating something that is fun and useful for the members of the public. (My background is originally in Public History, as my MA is in the topic from the University of Central Florida.)

Another aspect that is interesting to me is the idea of social networking for these projects. As we know, social networking immediately makes whatever visible that you post to them. For my Clio 2 project, I utilized social networking to gather memories. I feel that a greater reach through Twitter, Facebook, and even blogs will be important to get a wider range of responses. My project was a way of testing the waters, and I did get many more responses than expected. I will try to continue this line of thought for the dissertation.

I’ve learned a lot this semester, and I will continue to think along the lines of digital history and the field for the exam in the fall. I feel like i further understand the field in which I work, and that experience is so useful for my future as a historian.

I realized as I was writing my last blog post that I never explained fully what was going on with me and my blog. Currently, I am taking my readings course for my Digital History Minor Field. Every week, with my classmates, I read several theory works written regarding a topic in the field of digital history. 

If you’re interested in the readings that we discussed, the order of these topics, and some of the things that have been said, I have inserted a pdf of that information here. 

DigitalHistoryMinorField804

Every other week, I have been blogging about my thoughts on the topic, how i feel I could utilize some of these ideas, and where I think digital history and historians stand in the field. I’m almost at the end of the semester, and I have both discovered more regarding the field that I previously knew and thought about how this would apply to my future dissertation. (Which is important) Please feel free to go through the previous posts to see my thoughts.

Unlike some of the weeks of this course, text mining was something that we had actually done before. (For those interested, the results and process are here through several blog posts.) However, When we did that work in February, we (or at least me) were really new to text mining. Through Programming Historian, we were able to work our way through a version of text mining that gave us some sort of results. The problem with this process was that since we were new to the process, we 1.) missed a few technical steps and 2.) did not really get to read into some of the practicalities of text mining.

This week’s readings help to flesh out some of the missing pieces from the project, as well as understanding the complications, such as the double meanings of words and how words can be entirely different to work with than numbers. Historians, by nature, are very comfortable with working with words and discovering their underlying meanings throughout the context. However, there can be complications, such as dealing with figurative language. Traditionally, we read within the context to understand what these things mean. With a large corpus of texts, it can be useful, and sometimes even insightful, to see what types of patterns exist.

One of the issues that I ran into with topic modeling and the process is how to coax out silences that  historians are used to dealing with in historical texts. I am, however, unsure of how to represent those silences or predict where they would occur. 

Further, a common theme that has occurred in the readings for digital history is the need for legitimacy– to explain how these things work so non-digital historians might understand what we did. Ted Underwood states that we need to understand the black box behind text mining, such as the algorithms. However, we discussed in the class how monographs and historical work tends to cut out the methodology now. Why is it important for digital historians to explain their work, whereas traditional historians do not? I do feel that is important to understand the concepts and ideas behind topic modeling, but I feel that the constant need for explanation and legitimacy could potentially limit the projects that could emerge from digital history.