Miscellaneous things to know about The Digital Past, Present, and Future

Lee Ann Cafferata, Notes, HIST390, George Mason University, Spring 2014

What’s New?

• Digital technologies don’t change the past; they do change how we look at it and what we can know.

Big data and Open data

• Open data is accessible, public data that let us make decisions, analyze patterns and solve complex problems—make data-drive decisions.

• It must be publicly available and licensed in a way that allows anyone to use it. And, it should be free.

• Big data is that huge corpus of datasets—historic or current, government or private—from diverse disciplinary fields.

Compare and contrast

• Open data can be small, medium, or large• Where to find it? Data.gov• Who uses it (for example): Open data compass• Who advocates it? http://opengovdata.org/• Open data, linked open data, and historical

datasets. What does the Smithsonian say? “Making Sense of Data That’s Linked and Open”

Who’s got your data?

• Ted Talks: Curly Fries• Secret Searching:

Molly Brown, New York Times

Take the Honey Badger

• History and going viral• “Uncovering Reprinting Networks in American

Newspapers”• seeks to develop theoretical models that will help scholars better understand what

qualities--both textual and thematic--helped particular news stories, short fiction, and poetry "go viral" in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. Prior to copyright legislation and enforcement, literary texts as well as other non-fiction prose texts circulated promiscuously among newspapers as editors freely reprinted materials borrowed from other venues. What texts were reprinted and why? How did ideas--literary, political, scientific, economic, religious--circulate in the public sphere and achieve critical force among audiences

Expectations and Patterns

• Network graphs begin to illustrate which newspapers shaped the network: which papers printed texts that many other newspapers also printed. We're already finding some surprising results. Newspapers that haven't been well studied by scholars—in cities such as Nashville, Tennessee and Glasgow, Missouri—are proving more central to the network than we expected going into this project.

Going viral today

• The medium is different. Is the process the same?

• Ted Talks: “Why Videos go Viral.” Kevin Allocca is YouTube's trends manager, and he has deep thoughts about silly web video. In this talk from TEDYouth, he shares the 4 reasons a video goes

Working in digital humanities

• Is it a gendered technical field?• Do you have to code?• What skills are needed?• Organizations? HASTAC, THATCamps, DCHDC• Centers (listing on HASTAC)

Do try this at home

• Prezi• Storify• Open Street Map• codeacademy