Digital Scholarship Guide: Historical Disciplines
Essential Skills and Tools
Writing and Organization
Digital tools can be useful for managing projects, particularly by organizing your notes, outlines, and drafts while also making them easily searchable using keywords, providing multiple options to ease the process of writing and revising drafts, and facilitating the creation of customized citation organization systems.
Dissemination
- Consider how different audiences could benefit from hearing about your work. Digital dissemination platforms like StoryMaps can help you reframe your research for a public audience. These websites are also effective ways to showcase your career and research.
- Showcase your career and research online with a custom website.
- Visualize how different ideas and doctrines spread through time or space. Useful for your publications, or for your classroom.
Digital Surveys
Historians can utilize surveys in a variety of ways: creating a custom collection form for use in an archive, ethnographic research, recording essential data from your oral history subjects. There are a number of platforms, many of which can support collection, storage, and analysis of responses.
Text Analysis
- Historians’ methods and theories improve daily; vocabularies shift in turn. Unpack the impact of word choices.
- Use analytical tools to measure the occurrence of key words and phrases, as well as authors’ tone.
- Analyze how scholarly interest in specific topics changed over time. JSTOR and Scopus have embedded visualization tools and you can use them to model the number of publications per year. Consider a comparative analysis between the two, and examine how JSTOR’s Humanities and Social Sciences-focused content different from SCOPUS.
- Learn how to train your computer to read handwritten documents
Spatial Analysis
- GIS (Geographic Information Systems) is a critical tool for historians. Learn how to record locations of people, places, and objects and analyze spatial relationships.
- Even if your project isn’t about landscapes, you will need to situate readers in space. Make your own map for your publication or conference presentation.
- 3D modeling is a useful tool for analyzing and visualizing objects, buildings, landscapes, and environments.
Data Management and Visualizations
- Think about all of the lists historians make – names, dates, places, etc. Learn how to effectively store these in a spreadsheet and how you can format your entries to support future analyses.
- Turn your images into a functional database, just like your Zotero.
Should I learn how to code?
If you’re interested, coding languages can be hugely useful for historical analyses. Python and R are a good place to start, and can be used for: analyzing patterns/detecting sentiment in textual sources, automatically editing digital spreadsheets, and making graphs and visualizations. Can you accomplish these tasks without coding? Yes, and the preceding sections show you how. That said, coding makes it possible to customize and speed up the process. Contact the Data Services team to find out which coding language is best for your needs, and find out about upcoming free workshops.
Digital Historians at Brandeis
Are you a Brandeis staff/faculty member and would like to be listed? Contact Dr. Natalie Susmann
Digital History Training Resources
Coming Soon!
The Programming Historian provides a variety of lessons that teach humanists how to utilize digital tools and techniques to facilitate their research and teaching.
Digital History Publications
This Zotero library is regularly updated with publications discussing digital scholarship’s impact on Archaeology.
Many thanks to Brandeis PhD student Elizabeth Simms for contributing to this page. This page was last updated on August 20, 2024. If you would like to contribute, please contact Dr. Natalie Susmann.