Digitalizing History: Research and Exploration of History in a Evolving Field

Week 11: Interactive Visualization: Insight Through Inquiry / Bill Ferster's ASSERT Model Insight and Visualization       Bill Ferster gives the understanding of his work by defining interactive visualization as a user's ability to dynamically interact with data and create insight for expansion upon what the designer originally intended (8). Through the breakdown of visual experience and understanding how people interact with data, we're can be aware as to how we need to prepare material to not only educate, but also to invoke new perspective and dynamically evolve our question asking. Ferster ultimately is writing to educators, detailing how a next level mode of personal interaction with data can spawn and create new discussion, new questions, and new insights to topics that have been explored from a surface point of view. The model he uses to break down his thoughts is created by Jesse James Garrett in 2003, titled Elements of User Experience, employs a methodology...

 Week 10: Focus on Digital Methods @ UCF's Florida Historical Society Symposium This week UCF had the honor of hosting the Florida Historical Society Symposium where numerous panels and dialogues were created to promote discussion of digital and non-digital projects pertaining to Florida History. I had the honor of attending two separate events, one regarding a digital history project pertaining to central Florida's Hungerford school and another regarding central Florida's historic Greenwood Cemetery.  M.A. Student Michael Richardson. Central Florida's Hungerford school: Historical Significance. Eatonville's historically black Hungerford School has a rough history in the fact that it's digital and material recollection is practically nonexistent. When the school was demolished, a communal uproar for the protection of their history emerged sparking students from UCF to collect materials and cumulate a database of artifacts to preserve the history of the community...

Week 9: Digital History Reviews II - Mapping Early American Elections Introduction      In order for elections to Congress during the First Party System to be mapped in a systematic way, it was necessary to gather the scattered election returns and then transform them into a dataset. Creating that dataset and maps is the aim of the Mapping Early American Elections (MEAE) project. Philip Lampi, leader of the parent project, A New Nation Votes, gathered election returns from across the country for over fifty years before it's digitization in the NNV project. Those election returns were then transcribed into XML files at AAS and Tufts and are hosted by the MEAE project. From their introduction, they draw the line showing how their project is not just a continuation of the work done by NNV, but how it gives new meaning to the data collected; Turning it from just transcripts, the main purpose of the MEAE project is to create data from digital transcripts and organize...

Week 8: Digital History Reviews I - Guidelines & Models Evaluation of Digital Scholarship: Guidelines and Genres The evaluation and methodology surrounding the analysis of historical scholarship has seen numerous changes over the past century with different focuses and approaches being appreciated to their time. With the creation and rise of digital history, a new approach must be taken in to understand and better appreciate the unique nature of the digital medium; The Organization of American Historians described the digital medium as "unique in their character", stating that every source must be evaluated in the appreciation of their diversity (OAH, 2023). They note that whilst genres like games, blogs, archives, and hard data sets all relate to each other in their digital format, their induvial, unique perspective adds to the overall contribution and understanding of historical thought. (OAH, 2023).In a harder critique, however, the American Historical Association poin...

Week 7: The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History Text Mining for the Researcher: The Main Point The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History is a book published in September 2023 by Jo Guldi that explores the usage and understanding of text mining as it pertains to the field of historical researcher and analysis; Jo Guldi sets out to view how text mining, counting words themselves, helps us understand the frequency of language and the dangers still present within analysis by digital tools. The main theme of her work is creating a map to understand how researchers can take a digital, quantitative approach to history that creates unique interpretation, and instead provides a robustly accurate, original, and profound dimension to this complex discipline. The Distinctiveness of Certain Eras One of the chapters that I found most interesting was Guldi's chapter 8 in Part II: The Distinctiveness of Certain Eras. Within the chapter, Guldi w...