"History and ethnography are used instead to show the readers what it is like to live in a particular way, to provide those of us who belong to very different societies with a vantage point from which to think about ourselves and our own arrangements. Their purpose, to borrow an old concept, is a kind of understanding that derives from imaginative identification."

Today, I'd like to write about some of my ideas for the Black Freedom Movement course, particularly my idea to structure the course according to historiographical debates rather than primarily chronologically. There are so many historiographical choices I need to make, in addition to pedagogical ones. When do I start the course? If it is a Civil Rights Course, then maybe WWII (or if it is the Long Civil Rights Movement, 1930s-1970s). If it is a true Black Freedom Movement course, then I could start way back with abolitionists, slave revolts, the Haitian Revolution, or on-ship rebellions. The newly adopted course description helps me make some of these decisions (This year represents the first year that it will be called the Black Freedom Movement rather than the Civil Rights Movement).

This site defines a collection of schemas (applied in the form of HTML tags) that webmasters can use to markup their historical and genealogical information in a consistent way.

This specification defines features to be supported in a date/time string, features considered useful for a wide variety of applications. It takes the form of a profile of / extension to ISO 8601, the International Standard for the representation of dates and times. ISO 8601 describes a large number of date/time formats. On one hand some of these formats are redundant and/or not very useful; to reduce the scope for error and the complexity of software, it seems worthwhile to restrict the supported formats to a smaller set. On the other hand, there are a number of date and time format conventions in common use that are not included in ISO 8601; it seems worthwhile to normalize these.

This leads in to one of the most beautiful pieces Cherry ever wrote - and one of his late-period, signature works: “Hope” (later recorded for Relativity Suite under the name “Desireless” with sax replacing the voice). A golden flurry of rippling piano chords (ala Alice Coltrane and, also, Magma’s own John Coltrane ode’ “Coltrane Sundia” from Kohntarkoz), and a yearning, wordless wail issues from Cherry. He sounds like he is bearing all the troubles of the world single-handedly, and, yet, is still willing to humble himself before us all. Spell-bindingly beautiful in its soul-baring simplicity, the tune develops into a steady-paced piano & vocal chant - a hymn to an earlier ‘age of the Ancients.’ 10 minutes of free-bliss - the flutes, and sun-drenched cymbal strokes, adjoining the groove to create pure musical manna from heaven.

For Peirce... the scientific method involves three phases or stages: abduction (making conjectures or creating hypotheses), deduction (inferring what should be the case if the hypotheses are the case), and induction (the testing of hypotheses). The process of going through the stages should also be carried out with concern for the economy of research. Peirce's understanding of scientific method, then, is not very different from the standard idea of scientific method (which, indeed, perhaps itself derived historically from the ideas of William Whewell and Peirce) as being the method of constructing hypotheses, deriving consequences from these hypotheses, and then experimentally testing these hypotheses (guided always by the economics of research). Also, as was said above, Peirce increasingly came to understand his three types of logical inference as being phases or stages of the scientific method. For example, as Peirce came to extend and generalize his notion of abduction, abduction became defined as inference to and provisional acceptance of an explanatory hypothesis for the purpose of testing it. Abduction is not always inference to the best explanation, but it is always inference to some explanation or at least to something that clarifies or makes routine some information that has previously been “surprising,” in the sense that we would not have routinely expected it, given our then-current state of knowledge.

Ian Hickson's post in which he announces (kind of) the formation of the WHATWG and the break from the "out of touch" W3C.

"Grammar," in Wittgenstein's sense of the term, suggests that in making the transition from the present to the past we can fall into a disagreement with ourselves. That kind of disagreement threatens our humanity with speechlessness, impotence, and madness, both in the sense of rage and of insanity. We can resolve the threat by making the experience of time. But we can also defy the threat by making a break in time.

We make a break in time by drawing an imaginary line between the present and the past. In drawing such a line we turn the past into an imaginary object that seems to be gone from the present or even completely non-existent, and our selves into imaginary subjects that seem to be absolutely present or to have no identity at all. We may thus seem to have solved our disagreements with ourselves. In fact, however, we have split our past and our humanity in two by giving them imaginary doubles. So far from having mastered fate, we have taken a longer, more exciting, more violent, and more exhausting road to making the experience of time.

A break in time is therefore real in one sense and unreal in another. It is unreal in that it rests on an illusion: the illusion that there really is a line dividing the present from the past. It is real in that the illusion leads us down a path that we would otherwise not take. That changes the course of history. As long as the illusion stays intact, it seems to set us free from time. But once the exercise of freedom confronts us with change over time again, the illusion changes into a curse. The curse compels us to sharpen our disagreements with each other and re-enact the past we have imagined for ourselves until the illusion is destroyed and we must face our disagreement with ourselves. A break in time thus marks the beginning of a development that ends by reproducing the condition we had intended to avoid. Modern European history can serve as an example of such a development. It leads from a break in time made at the beginning of modern history in Renaissance and Reformation, via the completion of that break in the French Revolution and the establishment of European dominance in the world, to the violence that Europe inflicted on itself and everybody else in the last century.

Today, the break between medieval and modern history has lost much of its meaning. But it continues to conceal the past we have from sight. More research into the history of Europe can therefore only deepen the predicament faced by historians who wish to undo the conventional division of European history. That periodisation will scarcely lose its grip until historians learn to do something completely different from historical research, namely, to ask themselves just what it means to claim the past is gone.

We too often insist on a single, correct understanding of an event, or of the past. Instead, a richer history would included a heterogeneity of interpretations, the diversity of practices, the contestations, and the processes and negotiations by which people have dealt with such differences–turbulence. Digital media presents us with an opportunity to use tools that facilitate more complex, not complicated, narratives and stories of the past and how they continue to operate in our present. By bringing out such variability, we can show more of the operations of history, the stories embedded in primary data and the negotiations and decisions that lead to the structures, ideas, and social forms of our narratives.

My aim in this article is to provide a critical-productive appreciation of witness testimony that avoids the false and crooked dichotomies that pervade contemporary philosophy of history and historical theory. My specific, pragmatist approach combines the recent accounts of Hayden White about “witness literature” with the “generative-performative” consideration of testimony by Martin Kusch. The purpose is to appreciate, in a non-foundationalist way, the epistemic and moral role of testimony in the constitution of the representation of the recent past. To achieve this I examine the assumed epistemic and political privilege of the testimonies of survivors of state terrorism from the recent past, and I draw on insights of three of the most relevant survivor witnesses: Primo Levi, Victor Klemperer, and Pilar Calveiro. The essay tries to avoid both an epistemic and a moral posture based on something like “the privileged victim's perspective,” and instead approaches the specific analysis of production and circulation of witness discourse in terms of its contribution to the constitution of the past. That is, it recommends that one look at witness testimony not as an attempt to return to the past but as an action in the present. The result in so doing is to follow some recent results discussed in the new epistemology of witness testimony, which insist that: first, trust in testimony is an irreducible function of the acceptance of knowledge (this means that testimonies should not be treated as secondary sources of knowledge or as parasitical on experience and reason); and second, the production-circulation of testimonies does not function only in the context of justification but is also legitimately constitutive of knowledge.

We present TimeNets, a new visualization technique for genealogical data. Most genealogical diagrams prioritize the display of generational relations. To enable analysis of families over time, TimeNets prioritize temporal relationships in addition to family structure. Individuals are represented using timelines that converge and diverge to indicate marriage and divorce; directional edges connect parents and children. This representation both facilitates perception of temporal trends and provides a substrate for communicating non-hierarchical patterns such as divorce, remarriage, and plural marriage. We also apply degree-of-interest techniques to enable scalable, interactive exploration. We present our design decisions, layout algorithm, and a study finding that TimeNets accelerate analysis tasks involving temporal data.

Email archives silently record our actions and thoughts over the years, forming a passively acquired and detailed life-log that contains rich material for reminiscing on our lives. However, exploratory browsing of archives containing thousands of messages is tedious without effective ways to guide the user towards interesting events and messages. We present MUSE (Memories USing Email), a system that combines data mining techniques and an interactive interface to help users browse a long-term email archive. MUSE analyzes the contents of the archive and generates a set of cues that help to spark users' memories: communication activity with inferred social groups, a summary of recurring named entities, occurrence of sentimental words, and image attachments. These cues serve as salient entry points into a browsing interface that enables faceted navigation and rapid skimming of email messages. In our user studies, we found that users generally enjoyed browsing their archives with MUSE, and extracted a range of benefits, from summarizing work progress to renewing friendships and making serendipitous discoveries.

Inspired by Vygotsky (1978, 1986) and Luria (1976), Wertsch (2002, 2008, 2009) claims that textual resources (e.g. narratives in textbooks about a collective past) function as mediators between the historical events and our understanding of those events. These narrative resources are schematic templates deeply embedded in socio-cultural frameworks. These schematic templates function to organize specific narratives according to abstract categories. Hence, abstract structures can underlie an entire set of specific narratives, each of which has a particular setting, cast of characters, dates, and so forth (Wertsch, 2009:129). The schematic narrative templates are specific to particular narrative traditions which can be expected to differ from one socio-cultural setting to another (Wertsch, 2009: 129). For this perspective, human action implies a tension between actors and cultural tools such as language and narrative texts. Therefore, cultural tools do not mechanically determine people’s behavior, although it is crucial to acknowledge the strong influence that they have.

Instead of going to the library or the archive, we increasingly access history, the past, through the web. But what kind of history or histories, past or pasts are we accessing online? And what does this accessing entail? Following Leong et al., we approach temporality on the web “as a multiplicity of times derived from relations between different elements (2009, 1279)." This project is specifically focused on contentious historical moments, pasts that have had and potentially still have a major emotional impact, and which have been subject of struggle. Moreover, we not interested in sites specifically devoted to history, but in the major platforms on the web.

Confronting the historical events on the various platforms and opening up to a multiplicity of time we immediately realized that the traditional linear conception of time does not work online. First, most platforms do no not work in a chronological fashion, but with a reverse chronology. Second, because the platforms order sources according to ‘relevance’, the chronology of the sources as they are presented to us is radically mixed up. Third, sources do their own trick with time as well. Some focus on the historical event itself, while other rework the event. This reworking happens in a wide variety of ways, for example, by metaphorically invoking the event, by turning it into a historiographic debate, or by incorporating the event in a personal account (reading a history book, visiting a historical site, listening to a song). Crucially, in some of these reworkings, the event is actualized as controversial. These temporal complications directly informed our research, analysis, and visualization.

The above considerations translate in the following research questions:

Source time: Do we primarily find contemporary sources or historical sources in the various spheres? Does this vary across controversies?

Historical time: Do the sources on a platform focus on the historical moment itself, or a contemporary reworking of the moment? Does this vary across controversies?

Heat of the controversy: Is the controversy treated as settled, or is it actualized as still controversial? Does this vary across platforms and controversies?

In 1849 he resumed his project of providing a paper ‘in which literary men could answer one another's questions.’ Dilke encouraged him, with the result that the first number of ‘Notes and Queries’ appeared on 3 Nov. 1849. The name was chosen by Thoms, and he selected for a motto Captain Cuttle's phrase, ‘When found, make a note of.’ In form the journal was modelled on the ‘Somerset House Gazette.’

Founded under the editorship of the antiquary W J Thoms, the primary intention of Notes and Queries was, and still remains, the asking and answering of readers' questions. It is devoted principally to English language and literature, lexicography, history, and scholarly antiquarianism.

Notes and Queries (originally subtitled "a medium of inter-communication for literary men, artists, antiquaries, genealogists, etc") is a London-based, quarterly publication, part academic journal, part correspondence magazine, in which scholars and interested amateurs can exchange knowledge on literature and history.

Every lawsuit is a potential drama: a story of conflict, often with victims and villains, leading to justice done or denied. Yet a great deal, if not all, that we learn about the most noteworthy of lawsuits — the truly great cases — comes from reading the opinion of an appellate court, written by a judge who never saw the parties of the case, who worked at a time and a place far removed from the events that gave rise to litigation. We focus on “the facts of the case,” as described in a judge’s opinion, and then we describe the way the court applied the law to such facts as doctrine, hardly pausing to note the irony of this ex cathedra image, smacking of infallibility. Rarely do we admit that the official factual account contained in an appellate opinion may have only the most tenuous relationship to the events that actually led the parties to court. The complex stories — turning on small facts, seemingly trivial circumstances, and inter-contingent events — fade away as the “case” takes on a life of its own as it leaves the court of appeals.

Developments in legal scholarship pose a challenge to our continued near-exclusive reliance on a court’s version of the “facts.” The last 20 years have seen a trend toward increased emphasis on “stories” as a feature of legal teaching and scholarship.

I can see that another thing I often do in my courses, particularly thematic classes, is provide a “spine” narrative that supports the discussion. For all that I think “coverage” is an uninteresting objective for a class, I clearly recognize that without some core storyline or knowledge base, a class would be nothing but 14 weeks of “another interesting reading”: fun and diverting, but not giving students any sense of cumulative ownership over the subject, a sense that they know something that can be brought to bear in unexpected and creative ways on later readings (and on later experiences once the class is over).

Vannevar Bush's famous paper "As We May Think" (1945) described an imaginary information retrieval machine, the Memex. The Memex is usually viewed, unhistorically, in relation to subsequent developments using digital computers. This paper attempts to reconstruct the little-known background of information retrieval in and before 1939 when "As We May Think" was originally written. The Memex was based on Bush's work during 1938-1940 developing an improved photoelectric microfilm selector, an electronic retrieval technology pioneered by Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon, Dresden, in the 1920s. Visionary statements by Paul Otlet (1934) and Walter Schuermeyer (1935) and the development of electronic document retrieval technology before Bush are examined.

Michael Buckland's notes on Wilhelm Ostwald.

"Ostwald discussed problems of information management with Paul Otlet, co-founder of the International Institute for Bibliography in Brussels, in 1910. He used most of his Nobel Prize money to finance a similar organization, Die Bruecke ('The Bridge'), an 'international institute for the organizing of intellectual work,' which he founded in Munich with Karl Wilhelm Buehrer and Adolf Saager in June 1911.   The manifesto of the The Bridge, entitled, the 'The Organizing of Intellectual Work' was published in German and in Esperanto ('everybody's second language') in 1911."

"They advocated 'the monographic principle' (hypertext), technical standards, the use of the Universal Decimal Classification, and the idea of a World Brain. The Bridge ended in 1913 after publishing numerous pamphlets. Ostwald died in 1932. One lasting legacy of his work is the international standard for paper sizes (A4 etc.)."

Kevin Kelly's notes on _The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World_, a French documentary on Paul Otlet.

NYT article on Paul Otlet, with an excellent graphic explaining the Mundaneum system, and a video excerpt from the documentary on him.

Michael Buckland's notes on Emanuel Goldberg, with links to other resources.

"Emanuel Goldberg (Portrait) was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1881, a chemist, inventor, and industrialist who contributed to almost all aspects of imaging technology in the first half of the twentieth century: photographic sensitometry, reprographics, standardized film speeds, color printing (moiré effect), aerial photography, extreme microphotography (microdots), optics, camera design (the Contax), the important, early hand-held Kinamo movie camera, and early television technology. He received his doctorate from Wilhelm Ostwald's institute in Leipzig in 1906."

Michael Buckland's notes on Paul Otlet, with links to other Otlet resources.

"Paul Otlet (portrait) was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1868. His monumental book Traité de documentation. (Brussels, 1934) was both central and symbolic in the development of information science - then called 'Documentation' - in the first half of this century. In addition, it reminds us of something that has been too widely forgotten: That this field did have a lively existence in the early decades of this century and a sophistication concerning theory and information technology that now commonly surprises people."

Metaphor is a poetically or rhetorically ambitious use of words, a figurative as opposed to literal use. It has attracted more philosophical interest and provoked more philosophical controversy than any of the other traditionally recognized figures of speech.

This book features a collection of essays by Donald Davidson that explore the relations between language and the world, speaker intention and linguistic meaning, language and mind, mind and body, mind and world, and mind and other minds. Davidson’s underlying thesis is that we are acquainted directly with the world, that thought emerges through interpersonal communication in a shared material world, and that language depends on communication. He also finds interconnections between his views and those of major philosophers of the past.

This is the graphic from the imagemap version of the poster Tom Elliott and I put together for the Digital Humanities conference at Stanford University. It's a Frankenstein's monster of a diagram, showing relationships on different planes between Pleiades resources and code and other resources and communities.

I feel it's important for users and watchers in the humanities, which is going gang-busters for GIS technology, to understand the differences between Pleiades and a ESRI geodatabase, an OGC-style feature/map service, or a conventional digital gazetteer. I don't think it's useful to try to precisely define "Un-GIS", but here are a few qualities that I think distinguish Pleiades from a typical geographic information system or spatial data infrastructure.

This article investigated whether students' ability to reason with and about documentary evidence is influenced by the composition of the document set they study. Two groups of college students read sets of history documents containing a variety of document types (e.g., historian essays, participant accounts). One group was also given primary documents, and the other group received additional historian essays that cited the primary documents. The students' task was to read the documents, rate their usefulness and trustworthiness, and write a short opinion essay on the controversy described in the documents. Results revealed that the presence of primary documents influenced how students rated the documents and on which criteria they based this interpretation. These results suggest that exposing students to a variety of document types, especially primary documents, within a reasoning task changes how students represent and reason about documents and historical problems.

In 2 experiments, understanding of historical subject matter was enhanced when students acted as historians and constructed their own models of an historical event. Providing students with information in a web site with multiple sources instead of a textbook chapter, and instructing them to write arguments instead of narratives, summaries, or explanations, produced the most integrated and causal essays with the most transformation from the original sources. Better performance on inference and analogy tasks provided converging evidence that students who wrote arguments from the web sources gained a better understanding than other students. A second experiment replicated the advantage of argument writing even when information was presented as an argument.

A tool for document-supported history instruction.

Extensive training in history results in generalized knowledge of the methods and information sources typical of history problems, that is, discipline expertise. We investigated the influence of discipline expertise on students' reading, evaluation, and use of multiple documents about a historical controversy. Eleven graduate students in psychology (history novices) and 8 graduate students in history (history specialists) studied 2 controversies about the history of the Panama Canal. For each controversy, the students studied a set of documents, wrote an opinion essay, and evaluated the documents for usefulness and trustworthiness. Study strategies did not differ significantly across groups. However, the evaluation of usefulness varied as a function of document type and students' expertise. Furthermore, novice and expert students differed in the way they expressed and supported an opinion in their essay. We suggest that discipline expertise helps history students connect information sources and interpretations to their representation of the situation or problem.

How Students Learn: History in the Classroom builds on the discoveries detailed in the best-selling How People Learn. Now these findings are presented in a way that teachers can use immediately, to revitalize their work in the classroom for even greater effectiveness.
The book explores the importance of balancing students' knowledge of historical fact against their understanding of concepts, such as change and cause, and their skills in assessing historical accounts. It also features illustrated suggestion for classroom activities.

As we work on DocumentCloud, we're constantly building pieces of infrastructure that could be useful for other organizations that work with similar kinds of data. We're releasing as we go by extracting useful components as standalone open source projects. Please follow our work if you're interested in what lies under the hood.

How can the development of ideas in a scientific field be studied over time? We apply unsupervised topic modeling to the ACL Anthology to analyze historical trends in the field of Computational Linguistics from 1978 to 2006. We induce topic clusters using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and examine the strength of each topic over time. Our methods find trends in the field including the rise of probabilistic methods starting in 1988, a steady increase in applications, and a sharp decline of research in semantics and understanding between 1978 and 2001, possibly rising again after 2001. We also introduce a model of the diversity of ideas, topic entropy , using it to show that COLING is a more diverse conference than ACL, but that both conferences as well as EMNLP are becoming broader over time. Finally, we apply Jensen-Shannon divergence of topic distributions to show that all three conferences are converging in the topics they cover.

Linked Data is Storytelling 101 for computers. It doesn’t have the full richness, complexity and nuance that we invest in our narratives, but it does at least help computers to fit all the bits together in meaningful ways. And if we talk nice to them, then they can apply their newly-acquired interpretative skills to the things that they’re already good at — like searching, aggregating, or generating the sorts of big pictures that enable us to explore the contexts of our stories.

This paper provides a summary of 35 years of data model proposals, grouped into 9
different eras. We discuss the proposals of each era, and show that there are only a few
basic data modeling ideas, and most have been around a long time. Later proposals
inevitably bear a strong resemblance to certain earlier proposals. Hence, it is a
worthwhile exercise to study previous proposals.

This web-based curriculum has two major elements: 1) A logical conceptual framework of guiding ideas, objectives, rationales, themes, and historical periods, and 2) a rich selection of units, lessons, activities, primary documents, and resources that are linked to this overarching conceptual structure.

This chapter studies the use of textual features based on systemic functional linguistics, for genre-based text categorization. We describe feature sets that represent different types of conjunctions and modal assessment, which together can partially indicate how different genres structure text and may prefer certain classes of attitudes towards propositions in the text. This enables analysis of large-scale rhetorical differences between genres by examining which features are important for classification. The specific domain we studied comprises scientific articles in historical and experimental sciences (paleontology and physical chemistry, respectively). We applied the SMO learning algorithm, which with our feature set achieved over 83% accuracy for classifying articles according to field, though no field-specific terms were used as features. The most highly-weighted features for each were consistent with hypothesized methodological differences between historical and experimental sciences, thus lending empirical evidence to the recent philosophical claim of multiple scientific methods.

How do we go about remembering 7/7? Which aspects of the tragedy – at once an attack on a capital city, on the UK, on ‘the West’– are remembered, and why? What practices and forms are employed as means of commemorating the bombings? And what can all this tell us about the nature of contemporary remembrance? This special issue of Memory Studies seeks to explore these issues by focusing on the mediated commemoration of the 2005 London bombings.

This paper covers two topics: The first part discusses new methods in historical
research using semantic networking models. After a theoretical approach (graph
and network theory), general semantic networks are introduced. This leads to
the second topic, the semantic historical database, which can hold any historical
information and relate these to one another. Examples are given from a work-inprogress on merchant networks in Portuguese European–Asian trade. The paper
finishes by conveying some preliminary findings

Historical, semantic networks are a computer-based method for working with historical data. Objects (e.g., people, places, events) can be entered into a database and connected to each other relationally. Both qualitative and quantitative research could profit from such an approach. Moreover, data can easily be shared among researchers. histcross is a project in progress that implements historical semantic networks.

Historic Crossroads (histcross) is a semantic database designed for the research needs of historians. Essentially, it enables researchers to enter information into the database and link pieces of this information sematically to each other.

This site is about the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We are veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement, and this is where we can tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement, in our own words, as we lived it.

Temporal information is one of the essential components in many domains, especially those related to history. Up until the twentieth century, the Chinese used a lunisolar calendar with the title of an Emperor and a reign period to express temporal information. When describing a historical event in Chinese history, it is inadequate to use existing time ontologies as presented in the traditional Chinese way of thinking to capture and encode time. To date, no attention in the field has been given to modelling ancient Chinese time. In this paper, we identify the problems encountered when modelling Chinese time resulting from the distinctive nature of a non-western time scale. We design a new model of temporal information with combined approaches, which are more appropriate for Chinese dynasties, emperors, and reign periods, and apply the OWL-Time ontology onto the ancient Chinese lunisolar calendar. This approach can also be applied to other ancient time-keeping methods in non-western time scales.

This website offers access to the Parliamentary Debates of the devolved government of Northern Ireland from June 7 1921 to the dissolution of Parliament in March 28 1972.

These papers cast a unique and valuable light on the development of the Province. The 92,000 printed pages of Parliamentary Debates are held by few institutions and they have no comprehensive subject index. Hence they have been inaccessible and difficult to use. This project, with the support of academics, archivists and politicians, has taken the Papers and fully digitised them. The resource has been available online since October 2006.

We generalise the notion of a bubble beyond the financial domain, by showing how a single social mechanism, based on an information feedback-loop, explains both financial bubbles and other seemingly disparate social phenomena, such as the recognition of academic articles, website popularity, and the spread of rumours.
We discuss examples of phenomena explained by this bubble mechanism, as well as other phenomena that exhibit certain bubble characteristics, yet are not bubbles according to our model. Finally, we present mathematical mechanisms for two phenomena that conform with our model, and show by computer simulation how they exhibit bubble behaviour.

William Brundage, distinguished history professor, has written about lynching and utopian socialism. He has also researched Southern historical memory after the Civil War. He plans to write a book exploring torture in the United States.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the southern region of the United States. Previous research on lynching has been based largely on existing inventories of the victims of this form of extralegal punishment. While extremely valuable, these inventories suffer from important limitations in how much they can tell us about those victims, about the local conditions that affected the risk of an individual becoming the victim of a lynch mob, or about how the relationship between individual characteristics and the likelihood of being lynched may have varied across time and place. We are creating a new source of data that will introduce the individual victim into research on lynching, and provide information about the social relations and environment within which each victim was embedded. Our procedure merges information from an inventory of nearly 2,800 individuals who were lynched between 1882 and 1930 (Beck and Tolnay 2005 – See Table 1) with: 1) the original enumerators’ manuscripts for the Census immediately preceding the lynching (e.g., the 1880 Census for an 1885 lynching); and 2) geocode information on the county of lynching and county of residence for identified victims. The main contribution of this work is twofold: we develop new spatially-oriented methods of matching individuals to their census records; and, we create an historical data source that will allow researchers studying lynching, hate crimes, and ethnic conflict to link information for individuals and households to characteristics of the local context within which the victim resided or was lynched.

The goal is to accumulate a database of lynchings that took place at any date within the present borders of the United States.  We hope to make the lynching database analogous to the comprehensive list of legal executions compiled by M. Watt Espy of the Capital Punishment Research Project, Headland, Alabama.  We will collect information for individual lynching incidents on an ongoing basis.  

This listing is but an initial step in portraying the history of the visualization of data. We started with the developments listed by Beniger and Robyn (BenigerRobyn:1978) and incorporated additional listings from Hankins (Hankins:1999), Tufte (Tufte:1983, Tufte:1990, Tufte:1997), Heiser (Heiser:2000), and others (now too numerous to cite individually). In most cases, we cite original sources (where known) for the record; occasional secondary sources are included as well, where they appear to contribute to telling the story.

To convey a real sense of the accomplishments requires much more context- words, images, and, most usefully, interpretation. In this chronological listing, it has proved convenient to make divisions by epochs, and we provide some more detailed commentaries for each of these. The careful reader will be able to discern other themes, relations, and connections, not stated explicitly.

Welcome to the Time Explorer, an application designed for analyzing how news changes over time. Time Explorer extends upon current time-based systems in many important ways. First, Time Explorer is designed to help users discover how entities such as people and locations associated with a query change over time. Second, by searching on time expressions extracted automatically from text, the application allows the user to explore not only how topics evolved the past, but also how they will continue to evolve in the future.

Distorting space to better visualize travel time / itineraries.

The Tabula Peutingeriana is the only known surviving map of the Roman cursus publicus; it was made by a monk in Colmar in the thirteenth century. It is a parchment scroll, 0.34 m high and 6.75 m long, assembled from eleven sections, a medieval reproduction of the original scroll. It is a very schematic map: the land masses are distorted, especially in the east-west direction. The map shows many Roman settlements, the roads connecting them, rivers, mountains, forests and seas. The distances between the settlements are also given.

The table appears to be based on "itineraries", or lists of destinations along Roman roads, as the distances between points along the routes are indicated.[5] Travelers would not have possessed anything so sophisticated as a map, but they needed to know what lay ahead of them on the road and how far. The Peutinger table represents these roads as a series of roughly parallel lines along which destinations have been marked in order of travel.

In Bloodlands, a brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century, Snyder argues that we still lack any real knowledge of what happened in the eastern half of Europe in the twentieth century. And he is right: if we are American, we think “the war” was something that started with Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ended with the atomic bomb in 1945. If we are British, we remember the Blitz of 1940 (and indeed are commemorating it energetically this year) and the liberation of Belsen. If we are French, we remember Vichy and the Resistance. If we are Dutch we think of Anne Frank. Even if we are German we know only a part of the story.

Snyder’s ambition is to persuade the West—and the rest of the world—to see the war in a broader perspective. He does so by disputing popular assumptions about victims, death tolls, and killing methods—of which more in a moment—but above all about dates and geography.

Yes, it's true that the accepted date of 7 September 1940 as the start of the London Blitz is a bit misleading, since there was a non-trivial amount of bombing before that date (e.g. see here). Judging from contemporary press accounts, 7 September certainly seemed to mark an important change in German bombing strategy, but more one of quantity than quality -- almost more an inflection point than a turning point. In retrospect we tend not to see it that way, which is fine. But we could recognise that -- leaving aside the eventual reification involved in the name 'the Blitz' itself -- the 'start of the Blitz' was less clearly defined then than it seems now.
But this is not what the Wikipedia article is talking about. Instead it chooses an equally precise date for the start of the Blitz, 6 September, and says that this is more accurate than 7 September.

Periodization standards for World History for Grades 5-12.

Periodization standards for history for Grades 5-12.

As in United States History, arranging the study of the past into distinct periods of time is one way of imposing a degree of order and coherence on the incessant, fragmented flow of events. Historians have devised a variety of periodization designs for World History to make it intelligible. Students should understand that every one of these designs is a creative construction reflecting the historian’s particular aims, preferences, and cultural or social values. 

We have tried to overcome, in part, the difficulties inherent in periodizing history by overlapping eras to demonstrate that there really is no such thing as an era’s beginning or ending, and that all such schemes are simply the historian’s way of trying to give some structure to the course of history.

The development of the History Standards was administered by the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles under the guidance of the National Council for History Standards. The standards were developed with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education.

Help your students think through primary source documents for contextual understanding and to glean information to make informed judgments.

Celebrated jazz artists come to life in photographs by William P. Gottlieb. His images document the jazz scene in New York City and Washington, D.C., from 1938 to 1948, a time recognized by many as the "Golden Age of Jazz".

The purpose of the Model Editions Partnership is to explore ways of creating editions of historical documents which meet the standards scholars traditionally use in preparing printed editions. Equally important is our goal of making these materials more widely available via the Web. Nine of the experimental mini-editions are based on full-text searchable document transcriptions; two are based on document images; and one is based on both images and text.

The primary goal of this class is to teach students about the culture of "print media" in an era when that culture is being joined (and in some cases, overtaken) by a culture that we might variously call digital culture, online culture, or the culture of the web.

"One of the very few things that I know I believe strongly is that we must learn how to make a better world out of usable pasts rather than dreaming of infinite futures. It’s a very late-Enlightenment view that says that the only way to make a better future is to believe that the future will be better. Smarter people than me used to believe very differently and I think it is time to listen to them once again."

Jessica Pritchard has conducted interviews with historians in a variety fields for AHA Today’s “Jobs and Careers in History” series. She is now currently working on a pamphlet for the AHA called What to Do with a History Major. The content for this blog post is based on some of the research she has done for that soon to be released pamphlet.

Whilst we have the luxury of open APIs to services, it’s rarely rich enough data for interesting stories to be told. APIs tend to be locked in the present – as the present is what a lot of services are fixated on. Use, not stories. Some element of time is normally needed to pull out data that tells interesting stories, often long periods of time.

People like LaForge don’t want altitude information on their coffee because they prefer 1700m coffee to 1400m coffee. Instead, Intelligentsia is supplying something much more important and valuable: a unique narrative.

"Over the last year, I have been reading loads of books in and on Information Science, paying special attention to key texts in the (pre)history of the discipline."

This essay forum strives to build an integrative discussion for what is a fragmented interdisciplinary field of study on the public sphere. It is meant to accompany a mapping project we are calling the Public Sphere Guide and is co-sponsored by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. The forum provides a platform for discussions around current or emerging projects in this area and serves as a gateway to ongoing conversations around sub-themes that have resulted in other stand-alone forums or blogs at the SSRC.

"...the statistical insights, however informative, do not have the solidity of an archaeological fact."

What does history look like? How do you draw time?

"Over Thanksgiving weekend, I had a great search experience that I think is worth laying out here, because it captures three of the key dimensions of digital search."

There has been a lot of confusion from a wide varying uses use of this term for various different historical reasons, leading to uses which are sometimes ambiguous and in places inconsistent. This article attempts to shed light on the issue.

Assured Date-Period: 5/5/1,789 - 11/9/1,799

These databases integrate information from various projects at the Library and Information Center at Dharma Drum Buddhist College. By providing information on Chinese calendar dates, as well as an onomasticon of person and place names from Buddhist sources they help with disambiguation and geo-spatial referencing of names and dates. The data is openly available through various web-services.

BarCharts began in 1991, with Bobbie Ford’s handwritten flow chart of Constitutional Law. Today, we produce 400+ QuickStudy laminated quick-reference guides.

"History" subheading lists major events in country's history.