November 2016 – Digital History at UMass Amherst

http://www.sscommons.org/openlibrary/ExternalIV.jsp?objectId=4jEkdDAtKj41RkY6fjZ6Tn9DOHckd1d1eQ%3D%3D&fs=true — *City plan of Rio de janeiro by José Correia Rangel de Bulhões, 1796.*

As digital technology advanced towards establishing high resolution images of the cities a new generation of digital maps encouraged the creation of a multidisciplinary academic field known as spatial humanities. In this field historians, geographers, web designers, programmers gathered into one research using a Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a software that displays and analyzes information related to a physical location to re-examine real and fictional places (Cohen, 2011). Today’s thoughts are coming towards an analysis of an online history project that makes use of digital mapping. The project analyzed here is imagineRio: Illustrated Diachronic Atlas of Rio de Janeiro’s Urban and Social Evolution.

Continue reading “Digital Mapping: imagineRio”

This week’s post is focused on the contribution of digital scholarship for historians and the society. In order to understand how research was affected by the development of technological tools, one needs to observe and talk with researchers and learners (most of the time they are the same). Throughout these last decades, many have used digital scholarship in several different ways. The American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences affirms that digital scholarship may mean

building a digital collection of information for further study and analysis, creating appropriate tools for collection-building, using digital collections and analytical tools to generate new intellectual products, or even creating authoring tools for these new intellectual products, either in traditional forms or in digital form.

In this sense, if you observe the historical scholarly production lately, you can find the creation of apps, interactive timelines and maps, collaborative multidisciplinary projects of digitizing newspapers, collecting and archiving photographs and exploring historical questions at the same time. The possibilities are endless and all it takes is creativity, research and some tech skills.

Continue reading “The Digital Turn”