Research Guides: Digital History: Find Books, Articles, & Online Lessons/Tutorials

Librarian

Kristina Claunch

Contact:

936-294-1520
kclaunch@shsu.edu
Library (NGL) Room 223G

Some Key Books from the Library

Free Online Textbooks / Lessons!

Tooling Up for the Digital Humanities
For scholars interested in beginning to explore the possibilities for digital tools, programs, and methods to empower and enhance their scholarship in the humanities, from Stanford University.
How Did They Make That?
Shows samples of common types of digital humanities projects (e.g., a gallery of primary sources, a mapping project, etc.), then explains what technical skills are needed and links to tutorials for getting started with those skills.
A DIY Digital Maps Primer
A primer on working with various free web mapping tools. (New York Public Library)
The Geospatial Historian
The Geospatial Historian is a tutorial-based open access textbook, modeled on the Programming Historian, for historical scholars and digital humanists. It is designed to teach practical digital mapping and GIS skills that are immediately useful to real research needs.
The Programming Historian
The Programming Historian 2 (PH2) is a tutorial-based open access textbook designed to teach humanists practical computer programming skills that are immediately useful to real reasearch needs.
Text Capture and Optical Character Recognition 101
"This blog will introduce text capture by describing the different methods with a focus upon historical documents. I will introduce the basics of OCR and rekeying with discussion of handwriting and voice recognition." From Simon Tanner of King's College London
How to Create a Map and Timeline Mashup
Tutorial on how to use myHistro, a free multimedia timeline creation tool, to create a timeline and then display events on a map. (Free Technology for Teachers)
Python Programming for the Humanities
Python works with textual data. See the language and learn to program basic algorithmic procedures.

Essays and Articles

AHA Council Approves "Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians" (Sept 2015) Set of guidelines that departments could use to evaluate the work of scholars using digital media for research, publication, and teaching.
Essays in History and New Media, from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University An excellent list of "essays devoted to the theoretical and practical aspects of taking history into a digital format—many of them by people associated with the Center for History and New Media."
"Textual Artifacts and their Digital Representations: Teaching Graduate Students to Build Online Archives" - by Deena Engel and Marion Thane, in Digital Humanities Quarterly From Introduction: "This article reflects on the practice of designing and implementing a course that aimed to teach graduate students in English the skills to build a scholarly online digital archive from primary source materials. A founding principle of our pedagogical practice is the integration of CS and DH methods. As a still fairly young pedagogical field, discussion and sharing on this topic might, we hope, be timely and useful to others."
New Forms of History: Critiquing Data and Its Representations - by Frederick W. Gibbs, in The American Historian, (Feb 2016) Quote: "I want to emphasize that data criticism, which includes both critical analysis of data and its representations, is not a digital history problem; it is a history problem. And it is one that we must take seriously if we want to continue to be effective evaluators of our colleagues' work. ...A stronger discourse around visualizations can help creators in the same way that textual review and critique does now."