Panel on the future of digital humanities @ 2013 Southern History (SHA) conference (Nov. 2, 2013)
Presenters:
Slides: CLICK HERE
Jennifer Guiliano (UMD/MITH), chair
- Historical Question: “How do we use legal records to reconstruct the lived experiences of slaves in the DC region?”
- Digital Intervention: “Using network analysis to chart family and legal relationships”
Rob Nelson (U. Richmond)
- Historical Question: “What is the strength of Confederate Nationalism”
- Digital Intervention: “Using topic modeling to explore the rhetoric of nationalism as it appeared in Confederate newspapers”
Simon Appleford (Clemson U.)
- Historical Question: “How do current users of social media remember the Civil War?”
- Digital Intervention: “Using social network analysis to understand memory”
Richard Marciano (UNC Chapel Hill)
- Historical Question: “How can citizen histories and public history be used to uncover historical erasure of neighborhoods and communities?”
- Digital Intervention: “How can macro/’big’ data inform historical and public scholarship?”
Discussion topics:
- Big data:
- Jennifer: potential for 100,000’s of images
- Rob: approximately 100 million of words
- Simon: millions of tweets on a recurring basis
- Richard: billions of records
- Upsides and downsides of using digital data
- Technology neutrality: It’s simply not and an interpretive scholarly intervention is needed
- Transformative nature of scale
- Advice on getting started
big humanities 