Digital History – dr. erin n. bush

In Brief: The Digital Past – Fall 2014

This semester, I’ve adjusted my H390 – Digital Past syllabus to focus student projects on Gilded Age/Progressive Era Chicago. My last two classes, which consisted of mostly non-majors, struggled with the breadth of my “pick a topic in history” final project instructions. I also found that since I am not an expert on all possible […]

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

I gave a presentation at the inaugural Women’s History in the Digital World conference at Bryn Mawr a couple of weeks ago. In the spirit of openness, they posted it to their online repository. It’s available here.

How I Learned to Read Class Materials on my iPad

I’ve always been a paper person. I like to print articles and mark them up in multi-colored highlighters. I write notes in the margins. I employ a complicated symbol system of stars, boxes, brackets and arrows to help me keep track of my thoughts. The process of writing it down helps me to clarify my […]

Using JavaScript Libraries: Download or Link?

There are numerous open-source JavaScript libraries floating around the web that can be of particular use to historians. Google hosts quite a few of these, including the very popular jQuery and jQueryUI. For data visualization, some good options for historians include: Stanford University’s D3, or MIT’s SIMILE Widgets such as Timeline, Exhibit andTimePlot. TimeMap combines the functionality of Timeline with popular mapping APIs to provide an easy way to […]

Great Expectations

I had partial success with my mapping project this weekend. I had originally planned to map each state with little popup boxes showing details on the numbers for each state. It turns out that I greatly underestimated both my skills with JSON files and the Google APIv3 for maps. But let me back up. I […]

Getting Ready to Map

I started the evening ready to tutorialize myself in Google APIs and mapping examples. I read two paragraphs and realized that I’d better do some prep work on my own data before I continue. I also realized that I can organize myself better if I set some goals for my coding work. I have one […]