Week 12

Writing History in the Digital Age

Fred Gibbs and Trevor Owens, “The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing”

• What is the difference between data and evidence?
• Why don’t historians talk more about their methodologies?
• 162: what kind of experience with “negative results” do you have?
• What steps/tools are needed to make data available?

Ansley T. Erickson, “Historical Research and the Problem of Categories: Reflections on 10,000 Digital Note Cards”

• What solutions do you use for notetaking? For organizing your ideas?
• How do purposeful systems affect what you can think about your topic? How you can find a specific piece of information in your notes?
• What role does the writing process itself play in the organization and clarity of your ideas?
• Is a relational database more than just a shortcut to proper footnotes?
• 142: what if finding aids were constantly updated? Unit recently most have not even been collectively searchable?
• How have you used keywords and tags in your own research?

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “Africa and Africans in the African Diaspora: The Uses of Relational Databases,” American Historical Review 115 (1) (February 2010): 136-150.

• Are you comfortable with the idea of using data that you did not gather?
• Why is ethnicity important to Hall’s critique?
• How does data get into a databse? How does one access it?
• What is “unquantifiable data”?
• What can you tell about the original article without having been assigned to read it? What does Hall think the problem with it was?
• http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces