Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope

The real strengths of this book are in their straightforward explanations of what can at first seem like fairly daunting topics, as well as the excellent background information on the development of the field of digital history. The book would be valuable for a postgraduate or academic looking to get up to speed on several approaches to textual analysis ... I would heartily recommend it for anyone designing a course on digital textual analysis, and students can expect a solid background in a range of useful concepts, including distant reading, topic modeling, and network analysis, as well as data visualisation. - Reviews in History This primer offers a fine introduction to big data for the next generation of humanities researchers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. - Choice 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 http://www.themacroscope.org/. On this site you will find code, a discussion forum, essays, and datafiles that accompany this book.