The Digital Humanities

Since last week was our final seminar, there are no class readings and no wiki discussion to reflect on so I will jump right into talking about Wednesday’s class discussion on collaborating.  It was a good seminar led by Melanie and Heidi. We talked about collaboration between authorities and the general public, particularly in public spaces like museums, or via online tagging.  Class members had differing views on the benefits of public tagging. Ryan was concerned about the quality of public contributions. And in her blog, Stacey seems to doubt the benefits of public tagging.  We also spent some time discussing what it means to be an authority, specifically in relation to Gee’s article. Overall the discussion was insightful and engaging, and was an excellent way to end a successful semester.

On twitter aboutfemhistory has posted links to general info about Catharine the Great and Elizabeth I, _Womens_History tweeted about a new exhibit related to women’s labour, Boston1775 asks about Guy Fawkes’ place in the historical memory, and womenshistory continues to tweet snippets about different women in history. This time: Karen Silkwood. Sadly, as this is my last blog post, the Women’s History Network has nothing new to offer me this week nor does the Writing Women’s History blog. Oh well, they’ve offered enough interesting information and links in the past for me to forgive this week’s oversights.

As for the [Digital] Method, well I’ve blogged quite proficiently about it today already and have little to add here. This week I’ve used Zotero, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Evernote, and Dropbox rather regularly, as usual. They appear to be the tools I’ve benefitted most from throughout the semester. That being said, perhaps as I mentioned in an earlier post, I may find use for the other tools in the near future.

On the blogosphere, I’ve noticed that Melanie seems to have had little use for a number of the same tools as me (see blog posts below). This may be because we are both PC users, and have limited knowledge of things like HTML. Dave too has been using Evernote proficiently it appears as he spends a considerable amount of time praising it in his blog. Robert on the other hand appears to dislike Evernote! He doesn’t know what he’s missing…And I agree with Ryan, Adobe Acrobat Pro is great! Sean has asked in his blog whether DH itself is a tool. He seems to think so, but perhaps it is more than that…

The title I’ve assigned to this blog post probably isn’t the most appropriate since I wouldn’t necessarily say that the [Digital] Method has both pros and cons, but more that it offered tools that worked for me and tools that didn’t. The class Wiki for instance helped me to reflect on the class readings before the seminar discussion, and I’m glad to have some measure of knowledge about how Wikis work, but I don’t necessarily see myself creating a Wiki at any time in the near future.  The same goes for RSS, Google Reader, My Info (which I tested instead of DevonThink because I don’t have a mac), Google Advanced Search, practicing html mark-up and ngrams.  For many of these tools I wasn’t sure at first whether they would be useful or not but as the semester has progressed I’ve used them very little. RSS and Google Reader have been useful for staying informed about the blogs of my colleagues and others that I’m presently following but I haven’t used it any other purpose.  MyInfo proved to be less than satisfactory as time went on and I for the most part forgot about it.  And while I may certainly use Google Advanced Search in the future, I at this point haven’t been prone to using it. As for html mark-up and ngrams, I certainly had hope for the potential of ngrams and for gaining skills in html but this would take more time than I’m willing to commit, and ngrams has provided me with very little insight whenever I’ve taken the time to test it out.

Unfortunately as a PC user I haven’t had the opportunity to spend much time working with Scrivener, DevenThink (I used MyInfo instead), and DevonAgent (that week I simply focused on Google Advanced Search). But the limited experience I’ve had with Scrivner has generally been positive and I think that if I were to purchase a mac sometime in the future I’d be willing to give up Word.  Now I’ve included blogging and twitter in my “cons” section because I don’t see myself continuing to have a presence on the blogging and twitter scene after this course, and I knew that from the start of this course and continue to feel that way. That being said, I found one of my most important sources for my MRP via twitter and have benefitted from following twitter feeds and outside blogs in a lot of ways.

Overall however the [Digital] Method had been good to me and I’ve enjoyed learning about these tools, even though I may not find use for them any time soon. It’s helpful to know about the Method and the tools and perhaps I’ll return to them at some point.

Along with my fellow classmates in the Digital Humanities, I tested out a number of tools over the course of the semester as part of trying out and working with William Turkel’s [Digital] Method. The tools were many and varied and included learning to make backups, and how to use Wikis, Zotero, Dropbox, Blogs, Twitter, RSS, Google Reader, HTML, basic textual analysis (ngrams), Adobe Acrobat Pro (OCR), Evernote, Scrivener, DevonThink (MyInfo for me), Devon Agent, Google Advanced Search, and Google Tasks (my own choice).  Most of these tools were useful, or at the very least had some measure of value for me, although some more than others and for different reasons.

To begin, Zotero in particular helped me to organize my research not only for my upcoming major research paper proposal but also for class papers. Over the course of the semester I’ve used Zotero to build different bibliographies tailored to specific courses and research questions.  As the semester is quickly winding down, the bibliographies I’ve put together in Zotero have proved vital for me in terms of my ability to complete all upcoming papers successfully and on time.  I’ve also been pleased with Dropbox and currently have stored a large number of items in my Dropbox account as one form of backup for my documents. I always had Adobe Acrobat Pro but it was only a few weeks ago that I realized how valuable it has been for me to be able to search inside PDFs and manipulate documents the way Acrobat Pro allows you to.  In a lot of ways, Acrobat Pro helps with, and even improves, my readings of assigned texts— which has been particularly useful during those weekends when I have hundreds of pages to get through for upcoming seminars and want to do a good job understanding them.  Lately, I’ve found myself turning almost everything I can into PDFs. Finally, Evernote is another tool that I’ve grown quite fond of. At first, I wasn’t really sure how Evernote would fit into my workflow but now I use it almost everyday to sort assigned readings found online but also to make note of important or interesting articles I may come across. I also downloaded the Evernote App on my phone so I can access my notes at any time.

So for the most part, I’ve enjoyed trying out the [Digital] Method over the course of the semester. While not all of the tools were particularly helpful for me, I certainly found some like Zotero, Dropbox, Acrobat Pro, and Evernote to be useful and of value.  For some of the tools like Zotero is was more evident from the beginning how I could use it and benefit, but tools like Acrobat Pro and Evernote came into use for me slowly but ultimately made a large impact on my work and skills as a student.

Okay so after trying really hard to either come up with a useful software tool I’m already comfortable with, or searching for a new one to try out, and not really coming up with anything good, I decided to talk about Google Tasks which is something I started using this summer at my internship site (Becky’s Fund), which is also where I began using GoogleDocs. So first of all, you need a gmail account (obviously) to use Google Tasks, and since at my office this summer we were all assigned gmail work accounts, Google Tasks, like Google Docs, was particularly useful for us. In addition to this I also have Google Tasks app for my droid. Because I’m no longer at my internship, I no longer use my work gmail account and therefore no longer use Google Tasks and Google Docs, but I’ve kept the app and use it quite regularly to make “todo” lists. All I have to do is name a task, give it a due date, a time for when the phone will “remind” me about it  (either hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, ect) and I can also make notes about particular tasks. I can make multiple lists and order them based on importance. So that’s the app, which I currently use. Google Tasks is pretty much the same thing but what’s cool is that you can take things directly out of an email and either include it into a previously created task list or form a new one from it. So when I received emails at work, from let’s say someone needing to schedule a skype call with my boss, I simply had to click “add to tasks” and it would be included in an already existing list of one million things I had to schedule for my boss.  You can also click “email task list” and share it with others, making the process more… wait for it…collaborative! I guess this helped really with remembering those little things in emails that often get lost in the pile up of emails we get weekly. In a lot of ways, I wish I could do a similar thing with my brocku email because I’m sure it could help me to account for all those things advisors and profs email about in a more organized way. Well that is all I have to say about Google Tasks. I hope that was useful for anyone interested in the tool!

I think Terry and Robert did a great job facilitating last week’s class discussion on teaching.  Their group activity allowed us to explore the benefits and setbacks of using digital tools and projects in the classroom, and made me think a lot about the future of academia and the value of universities in general. The discussion touched a little bit on the idea of collaboration as well when Robert asked whether digital projects were more conducive to collaboration than the traditional a paper. The notion that the digital humanities are better suited for collaboration is something we will be discussing this Wednesday.

Already our class wiki is filled with insightful comments on the subject.  The discussion focuses somewhat on the question of whether collaboration can or should include the general public.  This questions stems from the fact that the digital humanities make it much easier for your average joe to be involved in knowledge production, either in collaboration with, or separate from academics.

This idea was very central to the readings and videos assigned for us to reflect on this week.  James Gee and Patricia Cohen got me thinking about what it means to be an “authority” in today’s digital environment. In Wyman and Simon’s articles we saw practical applications, or proposals for applications, of inviting the general public to participate in the design of museums, particularly through online tagging. Dan Cohen offered refreshing alternatives to traditional spaces for scholarly discourse (aka the journal) and demonstrated how academics could benefit from the interactions in the blogosphere.

Speaking of blogs, I enjoyed reading Dave‘s blog this week. He very clearly explains Dan Cohen’s main point. And I was happy to see that Robert is now an official DHer. I look forward to seeing how the digital humanities shape his project. Sean devoted an entire blog post to discussing a digital tool of his choice: GoogleDocs. Sean, GoogleDocs is fabulous when it comes to collaborative brainstorming and makes it so much easier to share information among co-workers. We used it every day at my office during my internship this past summer and it made life so much easier.

The Women’s History Network blog has a really fascinating post about teenage girls living under Nazi occupation in France. The Writing Women’s History blog I’m following discusses the Olive Schreiner Letters Online project. Which is a digitized collection of the letters of South African feminist and writer Olive Schreiner. It’s always interesting to read the blog posts of historians like in the Women’s History Network, but finding out about digitization projects through the Writing Women’s History blog is even better! On twitter Boston1775, aboutfemhistory, womenshistory, and Womens_History have been particularly active, offering links to articles and blogs on rioting female scottish highlanders of the 18th and 19th centuries, 18th century books promoting beauty products, and the Dagenham women’s strike of 1968, and short tweets on women like Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Constance Rourke.

I promise to come back and blog about the digital method as soon as I’m done reflecting on which software tool I’d like to discuss. However, I would like to mention that I too, like Dave, use Evernote daily. It just works with my online browsing flow as Dave also mentioned. And I religiously turn everything into PDFs using Adobe Acrobat Pro, drop all my work in my dropbox regularly, am forever in debt to Zotero for the simplification it has brought to my research, and find google reader extremely useful for keeping track of the blogs I’m following. Thank you digital method!

According to Michael Wesch, contributor to the January 2009 edition of Academic Commons, in the current digitally-focused world, it’s more important for students to be able to “find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information,” than for them to “know, memorize, and recall information.”  This ability he calls being “knowledge-able.” The authors of this week’s assigned readings, for our discussion on “teaching,” like Wesch, explored methods and tools for precisely this purpose.  University professors like T. Mills Kelly, Sean Gouglas, Stéfan Sinclair, and Aimée Morrison, Kevin Kee and Nicki Darbyson suggest ways for incorporating digital tools in the classroom in ways meant to improve learning in universities.  This also means addressing at a more basic level the inadequacies of our current post-secondary teaching and learning culture.

Similarly, we as a group discussed the issue of “playfulness” last week and it’s relationship to education.  Like many of this week’s assigned authors we contributed to an on-going discussion related to how post-secondary education should, and perhaps already is, changing by exploring the possibilities of “play” in learning in general, and in our own research as well.  The games we had the opportunity to read about and discuss as a group offer exciting examples of the possibilities for changing, and even improving, how students learn and engage with disciplines like history.  This week, we read about an example of “play” in the classroom in a chapter by T. Mills Kelly, who used new digital avenues to revitalize a historical methods course.

In reaction to our class discussions, including the one mentioned above, my classmates have made some interesting and insightful comments in their blogs over the course of the semester. This week I would simply like to comment on Spencer’s post who seems to have identified an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude among several of us towards the digital tools we’ve been exploring.  This may be somewhat accurate but I have a slightly different view of our efforts to come to terms with this “new” (if only new to us) field.  I don’t think our discussions have been focused on whether we should use these tools or not. I think they have focused exactly on what Spencer has suggested we should be focusing on: the question of HOW can we use them, and perhaps even the question of HOW will they benefit us individually. What has perhaps been perceived as a reluctance to accept DH scholarship methods, I see more as an eagerness to  understand precisely, by asking a lot of questions and making a number of criticisms (ah hem..Robert…. ; ) ) so we can be best equipped to move forward with DH methods in the future should we chose to. I agree with Spencer, new tools offer new methods and thus avenues for new questions and answers. And I guess that is precisely my point: we agree Spencer, now let us learn how!

As for the blogs I am following outside of out class, the Women’s History Network has published a post by historian Jo Stanely exploring the representation of black women in early films, and sadly Writing Women’s History offers nothing new.  On Twitter Boston1775 offers a link to a really cool digital archive of manuals on drugs, medicines, and self help from the early american colonies (Drugs from the colonies). The18thCentury keeps up its tradition of tweeting 18th century quotes, this week from the Marquis de Sade. AboutFemHistory and TheHistoryWoman continue to post interesting links to history blogs and job postings for historians.

I’ve been trying out Google Advance Search since as a PC user I can’t download DevonAgent. There are a lot of search options including search by file type, search for an exact phrase, search within a specific site, search by images, and much more. At first this seemed to me to hinder my search process as I couldn’t decide where to start. But I can see this as being a very useful tool when 1) you are looking for something specific 2) you don’t have time to browse through google using a regular search query method. I’m happy to know about this feature of google. On a side note, I very much wanted to take a book out of the library today, but couldn’t because it was on reserve… I then proceeded by photographing specific useful passages with my phone and using the OCR function on Adobe Pro. I had tried out OCR a few weeks ago for this class, but using it for a purpose specifically related to my own work was way more exciting.

Now I will try to gather my thoughts so I may make a contribution to out class Wiki. It seems that so far the discussion has rested on the question of whether digital or media projects can legitimately replace traditional assignments.  This particular debate stems from a larger, and perhaps more complex debate related to learning and education and their relationship to digital tools and methods. This has been discussed primarily by Dave and Sean.  So far I’ve enjoyed reading through the comments in the Wiki, and as usual, look forward to hearing about these ideas further in class on Wednesday.

I think everyone enjoyed our fieldtrip to nGen last Wednesday. (At least Melanie did, as she makes clear in her blog post!). We had an interesting discussion on modelling and simulation and I think we highlighted some important and exciting uses for modeling and simulation in the humanities. Dave’s DH project on Rome Reborn was particularly illuminating.

This week we had some interesting assigned readings on playing and gaming. At first I seemed to agree with Peters that games can’t and should not be for educational purposes. Certainly when I decide to commit some of my time to playing a game, often as a reward for completing work, I don’t expect to be bombarded with educational lessons. But having read these articles I think I am now convinced of the of the idea of incorporating “play” into education. Whil my wiki post may seem to contradict what I’m saying here I don’t see this as being the case.  I’m simply interested in hearing how others define play and how they understand play in education. And as Dave eloquently stated in his blog, he approaches every game “seriously,” so I guess we can approach any serious educational topic “playfully” as well.

As for blogs and twitter: The Women’s History Network Blog continues to post interesting snippets related to black history month and unfortunately there’s nothing new to comment on from the Writing Women’s History Blog. As usual on twitter I’ve followed a number of interesting tweets to different things including an article on a Salem witch trial judge from Boston1775, a job listing for a historian of modern gender from theHistoryWoman, a list of female rulers of England and Great Britain from AboutFemHistory, and a link to a new book on women’s social history from Womens_History. If only I had more time to browse through all the interesting links these twitter feeds have to offer!

As a PC user, I won’t be able to try out Devon Think but AcademicLife Hacker proposes alternatives including Evernote (which I’m already using quite often), MyInfo, AskSam, and Nota Bene. I decided to try MyInfo. The site offers a 28 day free trial. So far I see it as being somewhat similar to Evernote. But it has “reminder” feature that I’m trying out. I particularly like the task manager. In this sense, MyInfo is better for me than Evernote because it allows me to make clear “to do” lists which I can’t seem to figure out how to do with Evernote. I’m still working on figuring out Scrivener. I haven’t downloaded it on my computer yet because I’m not sure I want the beta version on there, but I tried it out on a mac and made some headway reorganizing and revising my book review of John H. Arnold’s History on there. It helped me to reorganize my thoughts is ways that made more sense than previously. But I’m not sure if this was Scrivner’s doing or just the process of revision in general….

Simulating and modelling in the digital humanities is a fascinating field to read about.  I was truly excited to read about the research being done by historians like Shawn Graham using agent-based modeling and certainly enjoyed thinking about the
potential of simulation research done by individuals like Epstein, Hammond and Axtell. I particularly enjoyed reading Aarseth’s “Genre Trouble” and his criticisms of academics and their imposition of narrative-style interpretations to gaming. Reading Sherry Turkel’s “Simulation and its Discontents” certainly dampened my spirits about this field however—I think the “downer” title speaks for itself—but she’s right about the need to doubt simulation research in order to get the most we can from it.

That being said, I do have a few doubts about what simulation and ABM can offer us. I highlighted a few of my concerns in the class wiki and was challenged by the always vigilant Ryan. I look forward to pursuing this debate further in class on Wednesday—which I’m sure will be very informative and passion-filled as our class discussion always seem to be! Last week for instance, I led seminar on “building.” We had a good discussion about the relationship between digital humanists and “building,” but I particularly enjoyed the criticisms of material fabrication by Robert and the counter arguments posed by others like Grant.

Looks like both Robert and Sean have, like myself, been bombarded with work this weekend. But as good digital humanists in the making we’ve had the courage to sit down and blog about our troubles! Having just gone through some of my colleagues’ blogs however, it seems that the overall theme is related to Wednesday’s discussion about building. In other words, Ramsay, and those brave humanists engaged in material fabrication have truly challenged us as students to think more clearly about the digital humanities.

Every week I get the chance to explore small tidbits of historical information related to women’s history by relating in my blog insights from the Writing Women’s History blog, the Women’s History Network blog and from a number of historically minded twitter feeds. The Writing Women’s History Blog included a guest post from historian Sue Wilkes on canal boat women in the 1870s.  Her contribution is part of a larger collaboration of an online community devoted to women’s history. The Women’s History Network blog continues its theme of celebrating black history month with a post by historian Beverley Duguid on an enslaved woman, Mary Prince whose life story plays out within the larger context of emancipation movements of the nineteenth century. Finally I’ve been checking in on Boston1775, AboutFemHistory, The18thCentury, and MsGeneologist on twitter every now and then and have followed a few tweets to some neat stuff including a post on the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley of whom I’ve recently come across in some the primary documents I’m reading through for my MRP.  It’s always fun to find connections like these!

This week’s digital tool is Scrivener but before I comment on it I would like to mention that I’ve been using Evernote quite frequently since I first acquired it last week and I’m pleased with its abilities and usefulness! I may in fact be over using it…. But ultimately I like that I can easily store websites I find interesting and may want to refer to in the future.  I’ve also created tags for different people I know may be interested in certain articles. I’m not sure whether they appreciate me bombarding them with links however. Okay Scrivener….Well since I do not have a mac I can’t really use scrivener. What are my options? I’m reluctant to download the windows beta version offered online because I don’t really know what that means… What should I do? I will update on my progress in the near future…

This week’s reading:

This Wednesday I will be leading our seminar on “Building.” The assigned readings got me thinking about what it means to be a digital humanist (DH). Ramsay argued that DHers should always be involved in making, building or creating, and I agree with him. The DHers and their projects featured in this weeks readings all contributed to original research through this process of building and I think they clearly demonstrated how and where the digital humanities break with, or diverge from, traditional humanistic study.

The in-class discussion:

The same goes for those mapping projects we discussed in class last Wednesday. What’s interesting about the projects we looked at is that they all involved building maps in addition to studying, and interpreting documents and other sources. The act of creation is in a lot of ways vital to DHers. I think what was most interesting about our class discussion however was related to the challenges mapping may pose to research, like for instance, the difficulties of mapping uncertainties that Knowles had mentioned. While some of us proved willing to give DHers time to confront these challenges, others were not too convinced about what maps and their uncertainties can bring to the table.

The wiki discussion:

I posted a wiki article on building for the upcoming seminar and it seems that so far there’s a similar energetic acceptance (from Robert) as well as a critical questioning (from Dave) that reflects the debate on the previous discussion about mapping. Dave’s not too sure whether building in the DH sense is that much different from how traditional historians build historical narratives from sources and the gaps in sources that need filling. I look forward to hearing more about this is class.

Class Blogs:

Sean poses a neat question in his blog. I’m not sure whether an improved design for digital resources would necessarily improve our understanding of the documents, for instance those discussed by Terry in her presentation.  But perhaps, an improved design would result in a different way of engaging with the texts and thus produce different results.

Outside Blogs and Twitter:

I read another interesting blog today from the Women’s History Network Blog about a recently published historical fiction. What’s interesting about the blog is that it refers to fictions written on black female slavery drawn from the Orlando project, a DH project we’ve run across a few times in our readings. There’s nothing new to report on in the Writing Women’s History Blog, but on Twitter AboutFemHistory has tweeted a neat link to an article on suffrage and anti-slavery movements. Even neater however is a tweet by Boston1775 on a recently published version of a book written by a woman, Hannah Mather Crocker, in the 1820s. I may want to get my hand on this source in the near future! TheHistoryWoman has tweeted that an ancient paint factory has been discovered in South Africa. While this is not related to my own research I enjoy being connected to a larger historically minded community.

The Digital Method:

As the course moves along I am slowly becoming more comfortable with the “Digital Method.” Today I downloaded Evernote on my computer and on my phone. I think this will be a useful tool for me because I rely heavily on notes and lists for organizing my life. Up until now however I’ve been entirely dependent on paper and post-its. This particular method hasn’t always worked out for me because my notes often get lost or crumpled up in my purse and then long forgotten. I’ve already started to make some notes for the coming week in Evernote and hope that it will help me to stay on track.

Now I need to prepare for my seminar leadership on Wednesday…

What I love about My DH class is that every week I read about something I previously had absolutely no knowledge of, and this week was no exception. The readings on mapping were yes, difficult to grasp at first, but also I must admit, exciting and interesting in terms of the suggestions made for new research in the humanities. Okay, having little interest in the English lake district and what poets had to say about it, I must admit that the Cooper and Gregory article was not my favourite. That being said, I think the use of GIS in history as was done by Novak and Gilliland in their study of the flooding of the Thames River in London, Canada in 1883 is truly exciting stuff. I think their research opens up a host of new avenues and, like Knowles argued in her piece on GIS and History, this type of research does not simply give us answers but forces readers to engage with the evidence and make the final analysis themselves. In Ayers, you get an interesting comparison between history, with a focus on time, and geography, and its focus on space, and how these two disciplines can be combined (time and space), specifically using GIS in history, to create a host of new questions and perhaps new directions for humanities research. I even considered looking into mapping of physical space for my own future research. Interesting stuff, but I need to stop talking about the readings if I want to cover all the other topics that need mentioning, such as last weeks class discussion:

We discussed “distant reading” last Wednesday. I think Dr. Kee expressed it very well when he suggested that what we were discussing, and ultimately involved in as future historians, was really a shift in paradigm in humanities research. I think what we were all seeking to express was our desire to make use of these new tools like ngrams and culturonomics now at our disposal, but were ultimately reluctant to accept them, and yes critical of their potential. Ultimately we need to be critical, ask the tough questions, and express our concerns if we are to make effective use of these new tools.

Robert admits in his blog that he’s warming up to these new digital tools, and suggests that he may not be the clear-cut traditionalist he used to be. But I say Robert, and the rest of us, are right to question these methods and to make sure of their soundness before jumping on the bandwagon. I don’t think that means that we’re all traditionalist adverse to change. In reality, I think we’re all excited about the potential of tools like GIS, ngrams, old bailey, cultronomics, wordle, but we want to be able to use them in the best and most sound way possible. I believe that’s probably why, as Terry mentioned in class, when Sean and Stacey asked us to look up words in ngrams, we all went that one step further and sought to analyze the results. I agree with Terry and her insistence in her blog that we must learn how to use the computer as a tool and not just how to use the computer. She’s 100% correct. As is Grant, who blogged about the need to use quantitative research as a starting point for humanistic interpretation. These are all great points and truly reflect the exciting nature of the discussions we’ve been having as a class.

Speaking about digital tools, I have a few comments to make about blogs and twitter feeds I’ve been following (perhaps they are not analytical tools like ngrams, GIS, etc, but I certainly see these blogs and twitter feeds as tools for spreading humanities research, thought, and interest). Once again the Writing Women’s History blog I’m following hasn’t been updated, but if you’re interested in checking out the History to Herstory database you can find it via the Writing Women’s History blog or at least read a little bit about what this blogger has to say about it. The Women’s History Network Blog has an interesting blog post from historian Jo Stanley who looks at the travels of Indian Ayahs in the nineteenth century. Interestingly she discusses the “gendered mobility” of these Ayahs (similar to present day live-in nannies). It made me think about the ways her research could be informed by mapping possibly by using GIS to map the spatial mobility of these women.

Aboutfemhistory tweeted an interesting quote from Rousseau about female education. The quote is particularly revealing, particularly with concern to what Zagarri has identified as a desire to equate women’s rights with duties in this period. I’m following four other twitter feeds: Boston1775, the18thCentury, MsGeneologist, and theHistoryWoman. They offer some interesting links, quotes, facts etc. Following these twitter feeds has been rather enjoyable thus far and seems to suggest to me that historical inquiry can and is being engaged in outside of academia, and forums like twitter are actually enabling us to engage in this kind of sharing of knowledge in an effective and manageable way.

This week I also I went through some of the step by step guides on the Spatial Humanities website. While somewhat beyond my present capabilities, it was interesting to explore. I look forward to hearing and learning about this project from either Melanie or Terry this week. Our present task in terms of developing our ability to function using the “digital method” is to explore Adobe Acrobat Pro. Turkel has a few suggestions on his blog related to Pro and what we can use it for. I’ve been using Acrobat Pro for a while but had limited knowledge of its scope and range. As Turkel suggest, Pro is a necessary tool for anyone involved in digitization. I’m now working on navigating Adobe Acrobat Pro so I can have a better understanding of what it can do for me.

I can’t seem to find our class wiki discussion so I will wait before I blog about it.

I’m looking forward to another stimulating discussion on Wednesday!