New Course in Digital Humanities!
Inspired by my fellowship at the Scholars’ Lab last year, I am teaching a course in the History Department this coming spring called, HIST 4501 “From Vellum to Very Large Databases: Historical Sources Past, Present, and Future.” The course will examine how information about the past has been (and is being) preserved.
Historians rely on primary sources to inform and defend their arguments about the past, but digital technology is altering the form and the content of available records and, in the process, raising fundamental questions about the nature of historical analysis. I have designed the course to be “hands on,” so students will have the chance to
- examine illuminated manuscripts
- operate an early printing press
- geo-reference historical maps
as they explore familiar and unfamiliar ways of recording information and reflect on how these formats affect the study of history.
The course is for undergraduates and will meet on Wednesdays from 3:30-6:00pm. For more information, check out the course page at http://www.jeanbauer.com/vellum_to_vldb.html.
“From Vellum to Very Large Databases” is a 4501 (Major Seminar), so students will sign up via a waitlist and then be added once they have received the instructor’s permission to enroll.
About the Author
Jean Bauer
Jean is an advanced graduate student in Early American history and was a Scholars' Lab Digital Humanities Fellows for 2008-2009. She is now a NINES Graduate Fellow for 2009-2010.
Read more about Jean and access her other posts here.
Bamboo Grows Quickly
In July I attended the fourth Bamboo Planning Workshop, held at Princeton University. For those of you unfamiliar with Project Bamboo (as distinct from the feeding of pandas), Bamboo is a series of workshops on the future of digital humanities designed by UC Berkeley and my alma mater, the University of Chicago. The workshops are bringing together humanities scholars, content providers, administrators, and central IT personnel from universities to design an organization that will serve the needs of the digital humanities community.
Typically, only high ranking faculty and administrators get to go, but after juggling the summer schedules of a small staff, my boss at Documents Compass, Holly Shulman, was kind enough to take me with her.
In the first general session it quickly dawned on me that I was close to the only non-conference-staff graduate student in the room. So, as they were passing around the cordless mic, I took a deep breath and raised my hand. Read more…
About the Author
Jean Bauer
Jean is an advanced graduate student in Early American history and was a Scholars' Lab Digital Humanities Fellows for 2008-2009. She is now a NINES Graduate Fellow for 2009-2010.
Read more about Jean and access her other posts here.
Normality: For or Against?
I’m a historian who is currently designing and/or building four databases. As I work through the complexities of each project, I’m struck by two thoughts.
First: I’m overworked.
Second: I like the way relational algebra makes me think.
Good database design involves breaking a data set into the smallest viable components and then linking those components back together to facilitate complex analysis. This process, known as normalization, helps keep the data set free of duplicates and protects the data from being unintentionally deleted or unevenly updated.
As I research merchants in the eighteenth century and how they connected people and empires with far-flung locations and transfered goods and ideas across oceans, I find it helpful to break those multivalent connections into discrete units. Read more…
About the Author
Jean Bauer
Jean is an advanced graduate student in Early American history and was a Scholars' Lab Digital Humanities Fellows for 2008-2009. She is now a NINES Graduate Fellow for 2009-2010.
Read more about Jean and access her other posts here.
