Digital History

Illusionary Order: Cautionary Notes for Online Newspapers

March 26, 2012

By Ian Milligan Online digitized newspapers are great. If you have access (either through a free database or via a personal or library subscription), you can quickly find the information you need: a specific search for a last name might help you find ancestors, a search for a specific event can find historical context for [...]

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Revisiting Past Places: Google’s ‘Memories for the Future’ Project in Japan

February 2, 2012

Next month will mark one year since the people of Japan experienced a devastating series of natural disasters. The earthquake and tsunami that hit parts of Japan on March 11, 2011, resulted in tremendous loss for the Japanese people. Many Japanese lost their lives while survivors lost homes, a sense of stability, and sense of [...]

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Too Much Information: The Case for the Programming Historian

January 9, 2012

Depending on your vantage point, we have a looming opportunity – or a looming problem. Historical digital sources have reached a scale where they defy conventional analysis and now call out for computational analysis. The Internet Archive alone has 2.9 million texts, there are 2.6 million pages of historical newspapers archived at the Chronicling America [...]

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Connecting Past, Present and Future: A Website Review of Stacey Zembrycki’s “Sharing Authority With Baba”

October 31, 2011

Internet sources can present challenges in the university classroom, but they also offer many new, exciting, creative learning opportunities. Rather than barring internet sources altogether, we should be teaching our students to engage critically with a range of sources, including the many great digital projects available online. One such example is Stacey Zembrycki’s website, “Sharing [...]

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“Universal Access to All Knowledge”: The Internet Archive, Google Books, and the Haithi Trust.

July 4, 2011

In this post, Ian Milligan introduces people to the Internet Archive, the Haithi Trust, and Google Books. Why should we have to travel to archival repositories, especially if they’re in an already convenient form like microfilm? Shouldn’t everybody have access to information, not just the select few who happen to have institutional affiliations? When it comes to access to information, we should be on an even playing field. Lay people interested in history, undergraduates, cash-strapped professional researchers, and all can benefit from several internet resources that put an incredible amount of information at your finger tips.

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A Journey Through Inuit Oral Traditions: Website Review of Listening to Our Past

June 9, 2011

Listening to Our Past explores the rich cultural heritage of the people of Nunavut. The website was created by Nunavut Arctic College and l’Association des francophones du Nunavut. The site aims to present history recorded though oral traditions and oral histories told by Nunavut elders. The site is tri-lingual and material is available in English, [...]

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The Rise and Fall of Ideas: Having fun with Google N-Grams

May 23, 2011

We need to make sense of large quantities of information in order to do ‘big history’ and provide a context into which we can write our smaller studies. In this post, I’ll tell you what an ngram is, show some cool pictures, and hopefully drive you to have some fun with this.

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Twitter in the Classroom

March 3, 2011

This post discusses the potential uses of Twitter in the classroom, from the position of somebody who was once a skeptic.

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Step by Step: Zotero

February 22, 2011

In this post, I’ll explain to students how to install Zotero on their home computers. As a teaching assistant, I’ve found this to be the most useful technological skill that I’ve taught undergraduates – many have confirmed this by noting how they now use it.

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