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.
Conferences, DHums, History

Positivist(ish) Digital History

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Early this month I spent two days at ‘Beyond Methods of Mining: a workshop on doing historical research using digital data‘. It was a splendid event and my first outing as a member of the Sussex Humanities Lab! My sincere thanks to the organisers (especially Tessa and Maarten) for both their choice of theme and for their hospitality.

Max’s tweet sums up the conference for me: it was an anxious affair, fraught – at least in the backchannel and during the over coffee conversations I had – with concern around the somewhat structuralist use of language employed in many presentations (including my own). And yet if you judged the conference on the titles of each talk alone (see my notes from the event) you probably wouldn’t spot this. For unlike many DHy events, this one was rather special as it – refreshingly – saw historians first and foremost present historical research into historical phenomena based on their use of data. Which is not to say that the research presented had been undertaken without consideration of theory and method, rather that we agonised about theory and method after getting stuck into the past.

Now if your positivism alarm bells are ringing, you’ll be pleased to hear that when I got home, I stumbled across Structuralist Methods in a Post-Structuralist Humanities, Seth Long‘s musings from afar on our twitter musings ‘in’ the room. Here Seth asks some vital questions, including:

Is it too much of an unnatural vivisection to insert structural, quantitative methods into a post-structuralist humanities?

Thinking through problems of this nature is vital to writing good history, whether or not it happens to be supported by computational work with data. But as Seth picked up on, I’m not ashamed of being positivist first, of beginning by throwing the digital kitchen sink at a problem to see what sticks, and then – through sustained criticism of my own work – uncovering the problems later. Sometimes this process leaves me with nothing. Other times it leaves me with something, only for a collaborator or audience member to pick up on an issue, leaving me again with nothing. But sometimes, after all the checks and balances have been thrown at an initially positivist endeavour, I am left with something. And something is better – to my mind at least – than agonising so much over theory and method first that you end up with nothing.

Code, data, deck, and viz from my talk ‘Acts of being in proxies for prints. People in the British Museum catalogue of Political and Personal Satire, 1770-1830’ is available on GitHub under an admittedly slight confusing array of Creative Commons licences (thanks British Museum for throwing an NC spanner in the works! Though I respect your decision…). The talk builds on research I have blogged about here before, most recently as ‘Code, Control, and the Humanities‘. The Q&A after the talk made me realise that I really need to tease the part of speech data from the descriptions. If you are interested in collaborating to tackle this problem and co-publishing subsequent results, please get in touch.