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Digital Humanities Research Institute: Binghamton 2019 Main Menu Welcome to the DHRI Schedule and Curriculum Instructors and Graduate Assistants Participants Logistics and Practicalities Co-Sponsors and Advisory Board Outcomes Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and GC Digital Initiatives at The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Data and the Humanities

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This session discusses some of the basics of data-driven research in the humanities. It includes a discussion of methodology and approaches to data and then moves through the steps of discovering, structuring, cleaning, and spatializing data. It will include a hands-on workshop component using the data analysis and visualization software Tableau.

Sample Project

Navigate to Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-61. For more information about this project, see Vincent Brown, "Mapping a Slave Revolt: Visualizaing Spatial History through the Archives of Slavery," Social Text 125 (December 2015): 134-141.

Click on "View the Map" in the upper left corner. Run the animation. Consider the following questions.

What kind of data does the project draw on?
How was that data organized and structured to become legible through an interactive map?
What kinds of questions does this project inspire?
How can the researcher (who might come from any field) use this project?

Data Driven Methods
This session explores the process of data visualization through five key steps:

Data Discovery
Data Structuring
Data Cleaning
Spatialization and Geo-coding
Data Visualization

Sample Dataset
salem_GC.csv (download)
Derived from the Salem Witch Database

Geocoding Tools

Latlong.net
Batch Geocoder for Journalists
Getty Thesaurus for Geographic Names
Geocode by Awesome Table (free add-on through Google Sheets)

Public Presentation on Tableau Public
Star Wars Sentiment Analysis

Challenge Dataset
olympics.csv (download)

Further Study and Training

Doing Digital Scholarship, SSRC labs, self-guided tutorials
- Thinking about Data
- Doing Basic Visualizations
Programming Historian Lessons (in English, Spanish, and French)

This page references:

Screenshot from Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative