THE PAST’S DIGITAL PRESENCE
4:15-5:45pm
Saturday, February 20
Whitney Humanities Center
How-To Digital Humanities
Room 120
- Shane Landrum, Brandeis University, “Camera, laptop, and what else?: Hacking Better Tools for the Short Archival Research Trip”
This talk examines the finer points of doing archival research with the aid of a digital camera, drawing on my experience with these methods at about 15 archival repositories across the US. Here, I focus on my work with the papers of the US Children’s Bureau, a large (1400 cubic foot) collection held by the National Archives, which holds important primary sources about American women’s history. First, I discuss some practical details of hardware and procedure for shooting research-quality photos of archival materials. Second, I describe the techniques and tools I’ve found useful for organizing my research images, both at the library and away from it, and I explore some of the challenges I think historians face in using commercially-available software tools to organize our research. Finally, I propose some ideas for future software–desktop, cloud-based, and social— that could make this style of work less frustrating and open new avenues for creative, collaborative research.
- April Merleaux, Yale University, “Reimagining Ethnic Studies in the Era of Digital Research” [abstract not available]
- Sharon Teague, University of Toronto, “Accessing Wills: MS Access as a Tool for
Historians”
My paper is divided into four sections. First I describe why I chose Access as my research tool and how I developed my Wills’ Format. Second, I illustrate, through a tour of my data base, how I used Access’ data-crunching ability to generate the raw material I needed to answer questions posed by my dissertation. Third, I discuss how Access, in general, or the S/T format developed to analyze wills, in particular, might be adapted for use by other scholars. And finally, I touch upon the issue of bias, posing a series of questions that I hope will spark a discussion: does the very act of placing data in searchable “boxes” of our own creation, in fact, bias our results?
