Resources for Getting Started in Digital History
These links do not constitute endorsements by the AHA. Some links may have changed since the page was built (2014 Dec).
Getting Started in Digital History Workshops
To get an idea of the range of digital history methodologies, check out the workshop offerings from the past several meetings and Virtual AHA.
- Getting Started in Digital History: Pedagogy in the Time of COVID
- Getting Started in Digital History 2019: Schedule
- Getting Started in Digital History 2018: Schedule
- Getting Started in Digital History 2017: Schedule
- Getting Started in Digital History 2016: Schedule
- Getting Started in Digital History 2015: Resources and Schedule
General Resources
If you're new to digital history, the overview session of AHA's 2014 Getting Started in Digital History workshop is available on YouTube. You can also refer to the resources from the 2015 annual meeting below for more useful materials. We will be adding more resources, as well, so check back periodically.
What is Digital History?
This question is a matter of debate, so some of the resources that appeared early in the debate appear here, along with an editorial that addresses history practiced in public.
- "The Promise of Digital History" featuring Daniel J. Cohen, Michael Frisch, Patrick Gallagher, Steven Mintz, Kirsten Sword, Amy Murrell Taylor, William G. Thomas III, William J. Turkel, in Interchange 95.2 (Sept. 2008)
- Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas, III, "What is Digital History? A Look at Some Exemplar Projects" in Perspectives on History(May 2009)
- William Cronon, "The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age" in Perspectives on History (January 2012)
How Can I Benefit from Digital History?
Personal Interaction
Social Media
- Twitter
- Hashtags: #twitterstorians and #DH (digital humanities)
- Lists:
- AHA’s network of history hashtags on Twitter
- Twitter users following @AHAHistorians
- Digital historians (curator: Jason Kelly, IUPUI)
- Public historians (curator: Tom Scheinfeldt, UConn)
- Digital humanities scholars (curator: Dan Cohen, DPLA)
- The DH academic community
- History-specific organizations & communities
- AHA Communities
- National Council on Public History (NCPH)
- Digital History Project , including a directory of digital historians ( UNL )
- Broad digital-humanities organizations & communities
- Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)
- centerNet: An international network of digital humanities centers.
- Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH)
- Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaborative (HASTAC)
- DHCommons: A hub for DH projects, collaborators and resources
- Digital Humanities Summer Institute & Digital Humanities Winter Institute
Digital Publishing
- William Thomas, III, “Writing A Digital History Journal Article from Scratch: An Account ”
- Journal of Digital Humanities: An online peer-reviewed journal from PressForward
- Digital Humanities Now: An edited aggregation of online digital-humanities scholarship.
- Debates in the Digital Humanities , University of Minnesota Press
- Common-Place , American Antiquarian Society
Funding Organizations & Sources
- National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Office of Digital Humanities
- ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships
- Alfred P. Sloan Digital Information Technology Program
- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Scholarly Communications and Information Technology Program
- Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)
- MacArthur Foundation, Digital Media & Learning
Pedagogy
There are a host of "teaching digital history" posts online. Those listed here represent commonly referenced major resources, or their formats reflect the online ever-changing nature of digital history, or both.
- Teaching History
- Writing History in the Digital Age , eds. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki. A born-digital, open-review volume about writing and teaching digital history.
- Mills Kelly, Teaching History in the Digital Age
- Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web
- Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan & Scott Weingart, The Historian's Macroscope: Big Digital History: A how-to book, also available through Imperial College Press, that outlines several digital-history techniques. Aimed at advanced undergraduates
Project Building Blocks
Many of the projects in this section overlap. University of Nebraska-Lincoln's History Harvest is a particularly good example.
Public History
Curation and Exhibition
Public Outreach & Crowdsourcing
- History Harvest
- Menu transcription , New York Public Library
- historypin
Online Datastores
- Document collection & digitization
- Selected digitized documents from the New York Public Library
- Cathy Moran Hajo, "Digitizing Historical Documents - Links and References" in Archives and Public History Digital
- Document-access interfaces
Personal Research Bibliographies
Problem Solving
The DH community is constantly adding and revising resources for the following categories, so search engines and Twitter are your best bet for keeping up to date. A few select tutorials and links to popular tools are included below to get you started:
General Resources
- Bamboo DiRT: A searchable list of digital research tools, with very useful filters based on tool type, cost and platform.
- The Programming Historian 2: An online open-access textbook with tutorials on a number of topics including GIS, topic modeling, Omeka, Zotero, and several programming languages
- Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
Overviews of Data Mining & Data Visualization
- Google’s Ngram Viewer
- Ted Underwood, “Where to start with text mining”
- Topic modeling
- Corpus linguistics: Michelle Moravec, "Corpus Linguistics for Historians"
- Network theory: Scott Weingart, Demystifying Networks
- hGIS: What is GIS and when should I use it? A very basic tutorial on what GIS is, how its components work, and why it's useful. Part of the Community Tool Box at University of Kansas
Intro to Digital History Google Hangout
Are you registered for or thinking about registering for the Getting Started in Digital History workshop at this year's annual meeting? The digital-history workshop folks kicked off the 2016 meeting with an online Intro To Digital History workshop held via Google Hangout. Check out the archived Hangout on YouTube, and then join us in January!