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Digital Tools & Resources for History Faculty

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Digital Tools & Resources for History Faculty Digital Tools & Resources for History Faculty Anna Newman and Vika Zafrin BU Libraries — Digital Scholarship Services April 2017 Introduction This is an annotated list of some resources we think you will find useful as you work to re-consider existing courses — and create new ones — in light of the work of the BU Task Force on General Education. These are just some starting points; a list like this is always incomplete. Would you like to sit down together and brainstorm digital sources, tools, and methodologies as you revise an existing course or create a new one? Please email us at [email protected]. We also invite you to visit our website and sign up for our mailing list using the short form in the sidebar. A note on the availability of technological help and infrastructure: services around digital scholarship and pedagogy at BU are young. Tech infrastructure is often built in response to an existing need. Some things you will need, we do not yet have to offer; but we would like to work with you to find solutions, up to and including building new infrastructure. Digital history resources for research and teaching Digital Public Library of America Aggregates over 15 million digital items from the nation’s libraries, archives, and museums. Everything from world maps to Americana photographs to slavery abolishing ordinances. Multiple ways of exploring the collections, including search, Explore by Place, Explore by Date, and curated digital exhibitions. Has an API, encourages app development, and offers a list of over 30 third-party apps that draw on DPLA materials. Texas Slavery Project By University of Virginia. “Examines the spread of American slavery into the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in the decades between 1820 and 1850.” Has a map with a timeline and a customizable graph that draws on an underlying database; the population database is browse-able and searchable. Separate primary sources section offers full text of the slavery-relevant sections of five different publications from legislation to diplomatic correspondence to newspapers. The HistoryMakers “The Nation’s Largest African American Video Oral History Collection.” A treasure trove of interviews created by the nonprofit behind it. “By recording, preserving and sharing the life stories of thousands of African Americans, from President Barack Obama to the oldest living black cowboy, The HistoryMakers is a leader in helping to educate and enlighten millions worldwide through refashioning a more inclusive record of American history.” N.B.: the interviews themselves are available via BU’s institutional subscription, linked above. The interface for those is not our favorite, but the content is worth it. The public site is a much better experience aesthetically; the Makers menu item in particular gives a full listing of those interviewed for the project, with photos and brief bios. Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution By the nonprofit Clio: Visualizing History. This digital exhibit “highlights the collective action and individual achievements of women from the 1940s to the present, exploring the power and complexity of gender consciousness in modern American life.” Data sets There are many. A comprehensive list of humanities data sets does not exist, though here’s an extensive one (DH Toy Chest) curated by Alan Liu of UCSB. If you’d like more, please get in touch to talk about what you’d like to teach, and we can research available data sets together. Digital Islamic Humanities Project By Brown University. Research initiative “host[ing] a series of frequent gatherings, workshops, symposia, and other kinds of research projects, all oriented around the digital study of the Islamic world.” The Resources section has links to textual databases, manuscript and image collections, online dictionaries, and other useful resources. Europeana Extensive pan-European digital cultural heritage resource. Materials from GLAM — galleries, libraries, archives, and museums — from all over Europe. SHARE Consortial higher ed initiative seeking to “maximize research impact by making research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable.” They do this by aggregating metadata about what they call “research events” — which can be anything from the publication of an article to the deposit of research data into a digital repository, and also grant proposals, preprints, presentations, etc. OER Commons Database of over 50,000 open educational resources (OERs), including syllabi, online courses, class assignments, open textbooks, and primary sources. Users can search by subject area and material type, and all resources are free to use and reuse. OER Commons also has subject collections of OERs curated by educators. Created and maintained by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. Tools Relevant to Digital History DiRT — Digital Research Tools Directory “Registry of digital research tools for scholarly use.” Users can browse lists of tools categorized by function and find a short description and basic technical information for each tool. The directory is open to contributions from anyone, and is monitored by an editorial board. The directory does not contain reviews of the tools it collects, but it is a good starting point for further exploration and assessment of digital research tools. Programming Historian Collection of “novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate their research.” Lessons cover topics such as data management, data manipulation, mapping and GIS, and digital exhibits. Good resource for discovering and exploring digital history tools. Mapping and Timelines TimelineJS Easy-to-use interactive timeline creation tool, which integrates media from a variety of sources, including Flickr, Google Maps, Wikipedia, YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud. Each timeline is based on a Google spreadsheet and can be displayed on a website or blog. Free and open source, it is created and maintained by the Knight Lab at Northwestern University. You’ll need: Google Apps account; website for hosting, such as Wordpress (contact DiSc at [email protected]) Sample projects: Collection of example timelines StoryMapJS Storytelling and mapping tool, which highlights the locations of a series of events and integrates media from a variety of sources, including Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud. Can be displayed on a custom website, Wordpress, Squarespace, or Wix. Free and open source, it is created and maintained by the Knight Lab at Northwestern University. You’ll need: Google Apps account; website for hosting, such as Wordpress (contact DiSc at [email protected]) Sample projects: Collection of example StoryMaps Historypin Crowdsourced archive of historical photos, videos, audio recordings, and personal recollections that are “pinned” to Google Maps. Users can create collections and tours composed of their pins. You’ll need: free Historypin account Sample projects: Mapping San Francisco’s 1915 World Fair, Explore Chicago: The Lincoln Park Neighborhoods’s Collection Neatline Add-on to Omeka (see Digital Collections/Exhibits below) that allows users to create interactive maps and timelines using items collected and curated in Omeka. Neatline is developed by the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia. You’ll need: hosted Omeka site (contact DiSc at [email protected]) Sample projects: Collection of Neatline demos Google Maps For basic mapping projects, enables users to create maps with markers and annotations. You’ll need: Google Apps account Sample projects: U.S. Civil War, Lewis and Clark’s expedition QGIS Free and open source Geographic Information System (GIS) tool, which supports more advanced mapping and spatial analysis projects. You’ll need: Download QGIS (Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix supported) General Resources: DH GIS Projects: Annotated list of GIS projects, created using a variety of tools Digital Timelines: Overview of why and how to use a timelines-based assignment Data Visualization Palladio Web-based tool that allows users to upload structured data and visual data in a variety of ways, including mapping and network graphs. Free and open source, Palladio is developed at Humanities + Design, Stanford University. You’ll need: Web browser Sample projects: Digital History Methods at Rice Gephi Free and open source visualization tool, which supports more advanced graph and network visualizations. You’ll need: Download Gephi (Mac, Windows, Linux supported) Sample projects: Viral Texts, Mapping the Republic of Letters D3.js JavaScript library for producing data visualizations in web browsers that builds on existing SVG, HTML5, and CSS standards. Knowledge of these standards and the JavaScript programming language are necessary, so this is best for more advanced data visualization projects. You’ll need: Contact [email protected] Sample projects: D3 Gallery Text Mining/Analysis Voyant Tools Web-based tool for analyzing digital texts. Users can input or upload a textual work and then analyze and visualize the text in a variety of ways. You’ll need: Web browser Sample projects: Lincoln Logarithms: Finding Meaning in Sermons, Digital History Methods at Rice Juxta Tool for comparing and visualizing different versions of a text. Free and open source, Juxta is available as both a download or as a beta web-based tool, Juxta Commons. You’ll need: Web browser or download Juxta Sample projects: Blake, or, The Huts of America, The Declaration of Independence, Wikipedia’s Climate Change pages Bookworm
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