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, Research

Distance Reading the History of History writing

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Over the next few months I’ll be working on a dataset of metadata for journal articles categorised under the category ‘History’ from the last 50 years (or so). Having conducted some tests over the summer (including some work with Paleontology articles), the aim of this research is to ascertain what trends emerge when we read from a distance, to use Franco Moretti’s parlance, a large corpus of this kind.

My plan is to extract from the article titles a set of the highest occurring words (perhaps 50) over the total period, and then to construct bimodal networks looking at the occurrence of those words per journal title over time in decadal chunks. I will then compare these networks with networks derived from decadal lists of the highest occurring words.

From this I expect to find the rise of cultural history and gender studies. If these obvious trends emerge I’ll be happy that my data can be of some use, and so from there I hope to dig a little deepper: for example, to say something about how, if at all, journal titles have changed as a result of needing to be discoverable using web searches.

As I write, Open Refine is munching through the RDFs. Once that is complete I’ll periodically post updates on my progress here and on the Digital Scholarship blog.

In the meantime, if you want to dig through the data yourself, it can be found in the Shared Open Research Resources tab on the right. Though not hosted publicly by my employer, the data is shared under CC0. So in short you can do with it whatever you want.

Happy hunting!