Date/Time
Date(s) - 27/02/2020
3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location
Virtual meeting via Zoom
Categories
Source Criticism in the Era of the Digital Archive
Kaspar von Beelen (The Alan Turing Institute)
Source criticism is central to the historian’s interpretation of the past: it applies common-sense scepticism to the sources, not only seeking forms of deliberate deception, but also the subtle biases playing out in the corpus. Historians explain by critically contextualising their information, close reading their sources, mostly a limited number of documents. The question then arises: how to critically read and investigate digital archives, sometimes containing millions of documents? How to combine “distant reading” with source criticism? In this presentation we introduce the idea of the “environmental scan”, a method for contextualising digital collections, and facilitating source criticism at scale by providing methods that simultaneously exposes the limits, biases and gaps of an archive.
Teaching History in the Era of the Digital archive
Claartje Rasterhoff (Boekmanstichting; UvA)
Claartje Rasterhoff will talk about how she used historical data and digital mapping in her teaching at UvA. She will share some thoughts on how to (not) teach digital methods in a history program and showcase several student projects.