All posts by jwbaker

James Baker is Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Southampton. James is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and holds degrees from the University of Southampton and latterly the University of Kent, where in 2010 he completed his doctoral research on the late-Georgian artist-engraver Isaac Cruikshank. James works at the intersection of history, cultural heritage, and digital technologies. He is currently working on a history of knowledge organisation in twentieth century Britain. In 2021, I begin a major new Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project 'Beyond Notability: Re-evaluating Women’s Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage, 1870 – 1950'. Previous externally funded research projects have focused on legacy descriptions of art objects ('Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship', Arts and Humanities Research Council), the preservation of intangible cultural heritage ('Coptic Culture Conservation Collective', British Council, and 'Heritage Repertoires for inclusive and sustainable development', British Academy), the born digital archival record ('Digital Forensics in the Historical Humanities', European Commission), and decolonial futures for museum collections ('Making African Connections: Decolonial Futures for Colonial Collections', Arts and Humanities Research Council). Prior to joining Southampton, James held positions of Senior Lecturer in Digital History and Archives at the University of Sussex and Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab, Digital Curator at the British Library, and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College, a convenor of the Institute of Historical Research Digital History seminar, a member of The Programming Historian Editorial Board and a Director of ProgHist Ltd (Company Number 12192946), and an International Advisory Board Member of British Art Studies.
DHums, History

Programming Historian Live

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On 19 October curious historians descended on the British Library for Programming Historian Live. The Programming Historian is a suite of open access, peer reviewed lessons that provide practical instruction to historians thinking about using data, code, and software in their research. It is co-edited by 2013 Software Sustainability Institute Fellow Adam Crymble and it does an amazing job at bringing the methods and motivations of the (small but growing) Digital History community to the wider historical profession. This ‘Live’ spin-off, funded by my 2015 Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship, was designed to take into account the fact that whilst some of us learn just fine through self-directed tutorials, others need the mental space, in person support, and peer pressure of seminar style learning.

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The programme of events was ambitious, some would say foolhardy (including me at the outset!). Across the day six trainers covered hands-on, practical introductions to Extensible Markup Language (XML), XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations), Regular Expressions (regex), AntConc, Shell, and wget – a range of standards, software environments, and commands that intersected and cross-pollinated in pleasing, unexpected ways.

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The schedule ran to budget and to time. The attendees were well fed and watered. And core values of the Software Sustainability Institute – that we sustain software together, that we must critique our interactions with software, that we must get stuck in and cannot rely on ‘tech support’ to get our research done – were communicated. All markers of a successful event. But what did we learn? What did we gain from a day of breakneck pace software skills training humanities style? From the lively Twitter backchannel it seems we learnt a great deal:

We learnt that digital practices, such as encoding texts using TEI-XML, help us reflect on everyday editorial practices, even on the choices we make when we approach texts and take meaning from them.

We learnt that investing effort upfront can enable us to re-imagine the texts we produce, even in the case of texts as simple as our notes, through transformation process such as XSLT.

We learnt that even the most simple looking lines of code can be powerful not only when applied to our data, but also – such as in the case of regex – with respect to their interoperability, their proclivity to pop up in all sorts of computational environments and software.

We learnt that unassuming software tools such as AntConc can tell us more than we imagined about the texts that we read and can introduce us to a world where communities love, support, and sustain software.

We learnt the command line, a vision of computing that sometimes we’d prefer to forget, have their virtues and a clear place in any historical research that uses data.

We learnt that software tools available on command lines can make us all archivists of the contemporary world.

And we learnt that we wouldn’t be able to learn all about this without the goodwill, hard work, and openness of people, people we should always remember to acknowledge. And so I’d like to take this opportunity to reiterate my thanks to Melodee Beals, Jonathan Blaney, Adam Crymble, Anouk Lang, Nora McGregor, Cornelis Schilt, Peter Webster, and all the attendees of Programming Historian Live for making the event such a rich learning experience.

Notes, slides, and details of Programming Historian Live sessions available on GitHub for you to reuse.

Finally, though conceived as a one-off, I’d be interested to hear from folks who think there is value in taking the concept further.