Every day, more and more kinds of historical data become available,
opening exciting new avenues of inquiry but also new challenges. This
updated and expanded book describes and demonstrates the ways these data
can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for research
and in teaching and learning. It helps humanities scholars to grasp Big
Data in order to do their work, whether that means understanding the
underlying algorithms at work in search engines or designing and using
their own tools to process large amounts of information.
Demonstrating what digital tools have to offer and also what 'digital'
does to how we understand the past, the authors introduce the many
different tools and developing approaches in Big Data for historical and
humanistic scholarship, show how to use them, what to be wary of, and
discuss the kinds of questions and new perspectives this new macroscopic
perspective opens up. Originally authored 'live' online with ongoing
feedback from the wider digital history community, Exploring Big
Historical Data breaks new ground and sets the direction for the
conversation into the future.
Exploring Big Historical Data should be the go-to resource for
undergraduate and graduate students confronted by a vast corpus of data,
and researchers encountering these methods for the first time. It will
also offer a helping hand to the interested individual seeking to make
sense of genealogical data or digitized newspapers, and even the local
historical society who are trying to see the value in digitizing their
holdings.
