The iron entrance gate to Dachau concentration camp, near Munich, Germany. Photo courtesy Kaitlin Phucas.

Short introduction

Not all digital tools available to historians are intuitive and easy to use. In this unit we move up the complexity scale to see some high-order tools that historians are beginning to wield in their quest to understand the past.

What you must do in this unit

• Read this week's note on Data/Text Mining.
• Watch the video for this unit of the course on YouTube.
• Read: Cohen, “From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections”
• Explore: Time [Magazine] Corpus and then read Nil Volentibus Arduum, The Legality of the Time Magazine Corpus
• Explore Mining the Dispatch

SUBMIT

• Submit one of these final assignment options. Since the final assignment is technically worth 100 points, you will see that some of the options have built-in extra credit.
  • the Historical transcription assignment (100 points)
  • the Website creation assignment (150 points)
  • the Data visualization assignment (150 points)
• Post the URL, title and short description of your final assignment on the discussion board in Canvas.

Extra credit options

• Please suggest any materials relevant to this unit of the course.

Unit learning objectives

• Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to (1) use a digital tool to interpret the historical past and (2) explain how data and text mining are digital tools that can be used by historians in their research.