The Digital Humanities have arrived at a moment when digital Big Data is
becoming more readily available, opening exciting new avenues of inquiry
but also new challenges. This pioneering 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. 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. It represents the current state-of-the-art
thinking in the field and exemplifies the way that digital work can
enhance public engagement in the humanities.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.The
companion website to Exploring Big Historical Data can be found at
www.themacroscope.org/. On this site you will find code, a discussion
forum, essays, and datafiles that accompany this book.
