Digital in the Undergraduate History Curriculum Adam Crymble

Digital in the Undergraduate History Curriculum Adam Crymble Digital History Research Centre University of Hertfordshire • First Year: • Second Year: • Third Year: finding the tough stuff stop quoting! adding value

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble First Year: Find the Tough Stuff • • • Britain and Africa, c. 1750 -2000 80 students Do not know a pre-Internet world Assume the search box knows Looking for the answer, not an understanding

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Problem: Keyword over-dependence

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Black Experience in 18 th c. London Intended Learning Outcome 1: awareness that the first thing you find isn’t necessarily representative of what you could find. Beyond lazy search. Intended Learning Outcome 2: Datasets are a thing.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Find 50 relevant entries Needles in Haystacks: ‘the black dog’, ‘the Black Boy public house’.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble What we need • Keyword searchable digital archive • Reliable transcription • Something tricky to find (‘the black’) • We used: Old Bailey Online

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Outcome • Better understanding of digital archives • Found ‘tough’ entries. • Introduced to ‘dataset’. • In many cases translated into better essays • Challenge: I had to find all of the answers beforehand. Most of my colleagues couldn’t have done that. Requires programming skills. (Found 517 results; students found 16 I didn’t).

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Second Year: Stop Quoting! A) Weather B) Maps Intended Learning Outcome 1: awareness that quotes are not the only way of knowing in history. Intended Learning Outcome 2: You can do digital analyses.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Problem: Students never before exposed to ‘analysis’ in history • • • 17 students Digital social science Working with data Looking for trends (big picture) Linking datasets • But still doing history through essays.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble A) Weather Table London, Gentleman’s Magazine (1786)

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Step 1: Making Data Ryan Cordell’s Class Weather Table London, Gentleman’s Magazine (1786) • 3 years of transcriptions each • 16/17 students completed their share • 182, 630 points of data in 3 hours • Data for every day from 1786 -1836 • Results made available to whole class for assignment

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Step 2: Interpreting Data Are these interesting? Finding Extreme Weather Also for snow, rain, wind, etc.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Step 3: Linking Data • Compare bad/good weather to pauper admissions to the workhouse. • Is there a correlation? ‘Pauper Lives’ data, by Jeremy Boulton and Leonard Schwarz

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Step 4: Writing Results Conclusion: Paupers enter the workhouse in greater numbers on the days immediately following a few days of poor weather. During the poor weather itself, they tend to wait it out. (no one knew that before).

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble What we need • Something to transcribe • Something to link to (csv dataset) • We used: Gentleman’s Magazine (digitised by Google), ‘Pauper Lives’ data by Jeremy Boulton and Leonard Schwarz.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Outcome • Understanding of ‘analysing’ rather than ‘quoting’ • Teamwork skills • Basic numeracy skills • New findings about paupers in the 18 th century • Challenge: There was no backup plan if the students refused to transcribe.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble B) Maps

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble 1) Getting Data to Map Alumni Oxonienses, British History Online • Mini-biographies of 60, 000 Oxford students, 1500 -1714. • Contains place of origin in most instances • But impossible to ‘see’ distribution in textual form

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble 2) Reformat • Done by me beforehand • Taken out of the website, and into a spreadsheet so it can be manipulated • Extracted structured information (which college they attended, when, etc).

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble 3) Extracting Keywords • Students use ‘Python’ programming language to extract all county names from entries • Students create distinct ‘datasets’ of 3 sets of students (from different colleges, same college from different years, etc)

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble 4) Mapping Results 1649 -59 1660 -75 Origin of students who attended Lincoln College

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble 5) Writing Results Conclusions: Oxford’s position as a royalist stronghold during the Civil War had a significant impact on the origin of students attending certain colleges.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble What we need • Well-transcribed data with a spatial element • Mapping software • We used: Alumni Oxonienses (digitised by British History Online), Google Fusion Tables, Python.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Outcome • Understanding of Spatial Analysis • Visual interpretation skills • Exploratory approach to data • New findings about 16 th century students • Challenge: This only works with openly downloadable text. Not page scans.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Third Year: Adding Value • • 8 students Focus in digital archive building Think about the needs of users Think about what a digital environment can add to history • Problem: Students are users, not creators.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble 1) Something to work with WO 116 - TNA • Examinations of British soldiers at the Chelsea Hospital, 19 th century • Ledgers photographed and PDF’d by the National Archives • Poorly transcribed in India (by people I hired)

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble 2) Students challenged to ‘Add value’ Top student added 16 additional columns of information to each entry: Corrected transcriptions Body part affected by injury Geo-coordinates of parish of origin Occupational definition (quality control) (limited vocabulary tagging) (calculated value) (linked data) Emphasis on reusability, quality control, sustainability, audience needs. Facilitating new research.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble What we need • Something messily transcribed that we have the right to alter and share • Patience • We used: Chelsea Pensioner Admission Books (WO 116, TNA).

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Outcome • Understanding of standards and good practice • Thinking about audience needs • Understanding of linking data • Publishable quality datasets that could facilitate new knowledge in a number of fields • Challenge: Need data with an appropriate license for repurposing and re-sharing outputs.

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble The Digital Curriculum First Year: finding the tough stuff Second Year: stop quoting! Third Year: adding value

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble The Programming Historian Integrating Resource Peer Reviewed, Open Access Open to Submissions 40 Tutorials by 30 Authors @proghist ISSN 2397 -2068

Adam Crymble - @adam_crymble Digital History in England • • • • Adam Crymble, University of Hertfordshire Pieter Francois, University of Hertfordshire Jane Winters, University of London James Baker, University of Sussex Tim Hitchcock, University of Sussex Sharon Webb, University of Sussex Melodee Beals, Loughborough University Justin Colson, University of Essex James Freeman, University of Bristol Leif Isaksen, Lancaster University Ian Gregory, Lancaster University Bob Nicholson, Edge Hill University Alexander von Lunen, University of Huddersfield