Serge Ter Braake

Digital History: Towards New Methodologies

The field of Digital Humanities is changing the way historians do their research. Historians use tools to query larger data sets and they apply a different methodology to tackle certain research questions. In this paper we will discuss two propositions on the necessity of adapting to and taking advantage of the technological changes: (1) Digital Humanities tools are not the enemy of the historian, but they need to be used in a proper way. This requires historians to make ‘tool criticism’ part of their methodological toolkit; (2) Digital Humanities tools allow for a more data-driven and bottom-up approach to historical research. This eliminates some of the historian’s preconceptions that are inevitably part of more traditional historical research.

Storyteller: Visualizing Perspectives in Digital Humanities Projects

Humanities scholars agree that the visualization of their data should bring order and insight, reveal patterns and provide leads for new research questions. However, simple two-dimensional visualizations are often too static and too generic to meet these needs. Visualization tools for the humanities should be able to deal with the observer dependency, heterogeneity, uncertainty and provenance of data and the complexity of humanities research questions. They should furthermore offer scholars the opportunity to interactively manipulate their data sets and queries. In this paper, we introduce Storyteller, an open source visualization tool designed to interactively explore complex data sets for the humanities. We present the tool, and demonstrate its applicability in three very different humanities projects.

Mining Ministers (1572–1815). Using Semi-structured Data for Historical Research

There is a long tradition of categorizing and storing historical data in databases. However, these databases cannot always be used readily for computational approaches. In this paper, we use a twentieth century dataset on Dutch ministers (1572–1815) for modern quantitative analyses. We describe our methodology, provide results on the mobility of ministers and make further suggestions for the questions that can be answered now that could not before.