At the American Historical Association conference held in Denver in January 2017, I participated in a panel on “Making Digital History Work,” which dealt with challenges of digital projects, especially outside of large-scale, well-funded collaborative projects. Our chair and commentator was Dr. Seth Denbo, the director of scholarly communication and digital initiatives for the AHA, and the other panelists were Dr. Konstantin Dierks of Indiana University, who spoke about the challenges for mid-career historians in learning the myriad skills required for digital projects, and Dr. Fred Gibbs of the University of New Mexico, who stressed the value of failure in constructing digital history projects and the importance of individuals understanding not only the historical content of their projects, but the technical aspects as well.
I showed this website as a form of digital history emphasizing process, small steps, and the value of iterative mapping. I also passed along six tips about building a dataset, based on my experiences to date:
Be prepared to start over. It’s probably better to use Excel than a database program, at least as first, as it is more flexible.
Keep a log or journal that reflects where your information has come from, the notes about the organization of your database (such as what your column headings mean), and where you have saved relevant files.
Use “save as” liberally so you can go back to earlier versions if you make a mistake or otherwise go down the wrong path.
Atomize your data and then concatenate as needed. It’s easier to put pieces of data together than it is to separate it.
If you’re using Excel and you’re unfamiliar with the “vertical lookup” function (VLOOKUP), you should learn that function.
Practice in other venues, like Zotero, iTunes, your grade book, or other administrative tasks. Doing so will help you get a sense of how data needs to be organized to achieve the desired ends.