THATCamp Florence 2011

March 25, 2011 - 18:19 Please evaluate THATCamp Florence

We would appreciate it if you would take a few moments to fill out our survey, to tell us what you thought of THATCamp Florence and whether it was useful to you. This will help us know how to improve. Thank you!

The link is correct now. –AF

Evaluate THATCamp

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March 25, 2011 - 16:43 Mapping – what, how, where

Issues

Geocoding partial addresses or more importantly, non-existing or destroyed buildings/addresses.
Choosing a mapping approach: scientifically accurate or obviously vague
Choosing a display style: point data or area based (area based emplies manually drawing/plotting the points)
Understanding the content you have and the needs of the users

Tools

Best tool to plot data and especially other peoples data: www.geocommons.org

Free geocoding service (uni): https://webgis.usc.edu/

Wikipedia project:
(Work in Progress): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates

http://www.geonames.org/

http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack.php?params=40_8_33_N_76_43_10_W

https://webgis.usc.edu/Default.aspx

http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placefinder/

http://www.ehow.com/how_5798916_add-data-google-maps.html

(Draw regions and export to XML using scribblemaps)
http://www.scribblemaps.com/

Factual (http://t.co/9IQE5XY) offers datasets accessible through an API or can be downloaded. Any data relevant to humanities?

StreetMuseum project (very interesting youtube demo of an iphone app)

Tags: mapping
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March 25, 2011 - 15:51 Notes from Finding Primary Sources

THATCamp Florence 2011 – Finding & filtering primary sources

See the Google doc here, anyone can add comments!

This session discusses the various ways in which humanities scholars can locate primary sources on the internet. The goal of the session will be to collect ideas and search strategies and, ideally, to create a basic HOW TO guide.

We could also discuss differences between using physical and online primary sources and the caveats of using e-sources.

Questions:

search strategies: is there a basic systematic way of finding online sources or does it depend on topics (or both)?
types of online resources
tools
useful information: manuals, articles, etc.
differences between using physical and online primary sources

Search strategies

‘Normal’ search engines:

Google, etc.

Searching the deep web: OAI-MHP compliant search engines:

(Open Archives Initiative – Metadata Harvesting Protocol)

Custom search engines:

Create a search engine with websites that are relevant to your own research:

European History Primary Sources CSE (but no deep web).

Useful online resources

Indexes:

World:

European portals:

Paid websites/ subscription resources:
(and how to find them?)

Footnote.com
Gale Cengage – Primary Source Media (British Library)

Tools

Firefox add-ons: see William Turkel: Going Digital
DEVONAgent (Mac): see William Turkel: Spider to Collect Sources
other useful tools?

Useful articles/manuals

William Turkel: Going Digital
Best of History websites: Internet Search Tools
Daniel Cohen, D-Lib 2006: From Babel to Knowledge. Data Mining Large Digital Collections.
World Wide Virtual Library: History.

Using e-sources

querying e-sources:
metadata determine what you can find
keyword versus full-text search (think for example languages that cannot be OCR’ed yet).
context; example Historical Jewish Press, see also this advanced search. Physical sources: from general to specific. Many digital sources (especially full text): start with specific. Where does awareness of context go?
infinite archives/libraries: awareness of selection!

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March 25, 2011 - 13:07 Pictures from THATCamp Florence!

Enrico Natale of infoclio.ch, a portal for historical sciences in Switzerland, has posted some pictures from THATCamp Florence on Picasa. All the pictures from Day 1 can be seen at https://picasaweb.google.com/infoclio.ch/THATCampFlorenceDay1#, and the pictures from Day 2 can be seen at https://picasaweb.google.com/infoclio.ch/THATCampFlorenceDay2#. Below is a picture from Day 1 from the session “What are cyber-infrastructures in the Digital Humanities? France and other countries as case-studies,” led by Pierre Mounier of the Centre pour l’édition électronique ouverte (CLEO); and a picture from Day 2 of the organizational meeting, during which participants proposed sessions which were assigned to the programme. Grazie et merci to Enrico for these pictures!