Historians appear to be quite happy with tables. Tables are neat, orderly repositories of information. Rank and file, we input our names, dates, and other titbits of historical data. Rank and file, we organise our world into an unending supply of lists — lists providing the relevant percentages, absolute enumerations or qualitative descriptions of anything […]
Author: M. H. Beals
Anatomy of a Newspaper: The Caledonian Mercury, 20 June 1825
After nearly a year of cleaning, processing, refining, reprocessing and analysing data, I felt cautiously optimistic about my results. Derived from the British Library 19th Century Newspapers collection, I had compiled a list of reprinting—perhaps better characterised as duplication—between 1800 and 1865. After initial filtering, I was the happy owner of 780 individual monthly manifests […]
Trello as a Reading Diary: Repurposing Productivity Tools in History Teaching
My newest module, Go West: North America 1785-1914, was an experiment in many ways. First, it attempted to provide a survey of North American history—of Canada, the US, Mexico as well as the Iroquois, Creek, Cherokee, Cree, Sioux, Nez Perce, Apache, Navajo, Comanche and Yaqui. In 11 weeks. No problem. I had hoped focus these […]
The Platonic Ideal of a Newspaper Article
In 2014, I began to convert my newspapers transcriptions–stored haphazardly in a variety of plain text and Word documents, as well as Access, OneNote and Evernote databases–into XML. The value of structured data was immediately apparent, but the means for structuring it were not. My first attempts were as haphazard as my previous storage solutions. […]
Figshare and Share Alike
Stepping outside an echo chamber is always a bit unnerving. When I speak to academics about social media, open access and other forms of public engagement, I am usually speaking to the converted, or those who very much want to be converted. Many of the conferences and workshops I attend are advertised and organised to […]
Georgian Pingbacks Project
In the wild west of the World Wide Web, if you compose a hilarious joke, provide a simple solution to a complex problem or break a major new story, it is almost certain that your work will be copied. Although intellectual property laws exist, they are inconsistently enforced because of the sheer number of sites […]
Imagining Communities: The Glasgow Advertiser and the Kentucky Frontier, 1790-1800
Paper: 45th Annual Conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Date: 8 January 2016
Boutique Big Data: Reintegrating Close and Distant Reading of 19th-Century Newspapers
Paper: Digital History Seminar Series. Date: 27 October 2015
Transformational Data: XSL and You
Workshop: The Programming Historian Live. Date: 19 October 2015
The Psychology of Seating
Last Monday, I gave a brief presentation on Promoting Peer-to-Peer Teaching at the Royal Historical Society-sponsored History: New to Teaching workshop, hosted by the Institute of Historical Research. The session covered a range of topics, from power-dynamics to online collaboration, but the one that appeared to resonate most strongly was the psychology of seating. Lasting between one and […]