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…
Category: Digital History
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…