Alex Kelly Sept. 25 Text Analysis

The first article discusses data mining and how it is still a field of study that has a lot of room for development. One tool that is talked about is a called Syllabus Finder that can be used to find information about over 600,000 courses that have been taught. This is a very useful tool if you are trying to learn a lot about a specific subject. Essentially digitizing written material is the essential prerequisite to having an effective data-mining medium. I believe we should make an effort to digitize as much written material as we can because if it were available online then those works would be available to many more people.

The second article explains what the steps in setting up the data mining process should be. It talks about how a large number of texts are needed and how they need to be properly categorized. It is useful to do much of what the article suggests because organization is necessary in setting up a proper data mining entity. I believe that the use of charts and graphs to properly categorize data is also a useful way to go because they help add a visual component to people doing research on a particular subject. There are numerous possibilities with how information can be displayed using data mining technologies and the number of these technologies grows everyday. These technologies should be a high priority in the future of academia.

The third article helps to give credence to my argument that visualization is a useful tool in teaching. The applications of a picture are numerous because they can help explain difficult concepts in a single image that could take pages of a book to do. It is much more interesting to many people to look at data in a chart or graph form because we live in a digitized society. On the whole increasing digitization of texts and sometimes converting the information in them into graph form is an excellent set of developments that I hope will continue well into the future.

Alex Kelly Sept. 18 GIS

The first website which contains the US history Google earth tours was easy to use and fun to play around with. It is exciting to me as a history major to see maps containing data about things such as the Lewis and Clark expedition and Civil War battles. I think that these are very useful tools in teaching history because they allow the person looking at them to visualize a geographic location in combination with the historic event that took place there. Students should benefit from having this geographical context given to them through these Google earth maps.

The second article, which is titled “How Maps Lie”, describes how maps can do just that. The fact that the person making the map has the freedom to add or omit what they wish to their production is an issue that the person looking at the map must take into account. An example of this selectivity given is toxic waste dumps not appearing on maps where they actually do exist. This is done because certain organizations such as governments or corporations do not wish to publicize the fact that pollution is going on in these areas. Another example of selective map making would be the Nazi Germans showing their territory as only a fraction of that of the British Empire. This map was made as a propaganda tool in an attempt to portray Great Britain as a greedy power hungry nation while making Germany look like a poor innocent victim. These maps illustrate the point of the article that maps can be made with bias in mind. I believe that maps should objectively assist historians and geographers to enhance knowledge. They shouldn’t lie.

The third article speaks to my last point that maps should be tools used by historians and geographers to increase people’s understanding about these subjects. History is the study of events in time while geography is the study of events in space. These two can frequently be combined into one because events occur at a specific time AND place. GIS assist greatly in the teaching of these two disciplines because they helped to visualize events that would otherwise have to be described in words. Many people prefer learning visually and these people are better suited to learning about history and geography through a GIS. HGIS (the H stands for historical) in particular can be extremely useful when attempting to identify shifts in demographic and social statuses of groups of people. I think that in the future HGIS should be an integral part of any institution that teaches history and/or geography.

The “Storytelling with Maps” website is very similar to the first website except for the fact that it does not run off Google earth. It is very useful in the same ways as that because it provides historical information and does so in a geographical context. Some examples shown are fracking in the United States and birthplaces of NFL Hall of Fame inductees by decade.  These are useful tools in studying history and I would love to set something like this up as my final project in Intro to Digital History.

Reaction to Readings 9/11/13

The first article does an excellent job of illustrating how graphical representations are a useful tool for the modern historian. Technologies today allow for pictures of historical information to be simplistically represented in ways that would previously have been impossible. Modern GIS systems like Google Earth and its competitors allow historical geologists the means to explore areas of the world from their desks. This is in sharp contrast to a time prior to the development of these systems when they would have had to physically take themselves to these locations if they wanted to get a first hand look at them. The ways in which these systems can organize and store data is also a crucial component of what makes them so useful to modern historians. The article does conclude in a point that I find myself tending to agree with; even with all of this technology the human element is still and will always be a key component of history.

The second article discusses the concept of spatial history. To me it represents the changing dynamics of how the world documents and interprets history in relation to geography. The way in which areas of land are changed over time by human action is one of the most interesting fields of historical study to me. I think that people are only slightly conscious of the history that surrounds them every day. Many places throughout this country and indeed the world have had numerous life changing events occur at them but most people never take the time to try to uncover what those events were and what they ultimately led to. Again GIS play an important role in the way that modern geographical historians pursue their work of uncovering the past.

The third article brings up the concept of HyperCities, which to me seems like a very usable technology. Essentially these would be computer representations of a city’s changing dynamics throughout its evolutionary history. I would be interested to see a HyperCity rendering of Clemson because to me that would help demonstrate the way buildings and geographical features have changed and shifted over time. Much of the developments would undoubtedly be manmade but there will also most likely be natural forces that changed the city of Clemson. I think that such a technology has many uses to the historian and to many other professions as well.

On the whole, spatial history is an exciting and transformational field of study. Its applications reach far beyond the classroom and it should be given the means to allow its development to fully prosper. The interactivity component of it is one of the most intriguing aspects of the spatial history projects discussed in the aforementioned articles. In todays age of constant human technology interaction these types of learning methods are exactly what people want to enrich their historical knowledge base.

To me the way in which data is interpreted is a judgement call made by the person who is looking at it. The fact that one person can use numbers to attempt to justify an argument they're making while another person can use the same numbers to justify a completely opposing argument shows that the analysis of data is a fluid thing. I believe that understanding the different tools used to chronicle and analyze data is important because knowing the pros and cons of these tools helps to demonstrate the different ways in which digital history can be presented. An example of this would be contrasting a  digital camera with a traditional one because the speed with which digital photos can be published is much greater than the speed with which traditional photos can be. To me the technology available to us today is an immense aid in spreading and increasing historical knowledge.