OAH Panel on Digital History and the State

In April 2018, I had the pleasure of being on a panel on “Reinterpreting the American State: Digital History’s Intervention” at the Organization of American Historians annual conference. Cameron Blevins organized the session and presented some of his work on the postal service, and our other two presenters were Jamie Pietruska, working on meteorological data collection, and Benjamin Hoy, working on the Canadian presence at the border with the United States. Our commentators were Susan Schulten and Gregory Downs.

My presentation included praise for the process of iterative mapping, as I showed some of the maps I have made for previous presentations.

On the subject of the state, I concluded:

I haven’t yet made up my mind if the lack of knowledge at the center was a help or a hindrance to the daily operation of the US Consular Service. Certainly, some might see it as evidence of a “weak” state. I lean toward the idea that the vacuum at the center allowed for officials to adapt to what was most effective in their local circumstances, thus more effectively projecting US sovereignty abroad.

AHA 2017: Making Digital History Work

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value of failure in constructing digital history projects and the importance of individuals understanding not only the historical content of their projects, but the technical aspects as well.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.

Digital Humanities at UVM

My colleague Melanie Gustafson and I presented some of our work as part of the series of events at UVM organized by our Humanities Center Collaborative Faculty Fellowship Group on the Digital Humanities. Thanks to all who attended!

I showed some of the maps and visualizations I have made as part of my research on the Consular Service. (You can see them as part of my 2015 SHAFR presentation.)

Prof. Gustafson and I both stressed the time commitment involved in digital humanities projects, the need to work collaboratively to bring all the essential skills to the table, and the intellectual work of categorization and organization. We agreed that, not only do digital humanities exhibits/projects need to be considered as part of departmental promotion and tenure guidelines, but properly curated datasets made available to the public should be counted as well.