My trivia Twine game can be found here

I would imagine that creating a tutorial on social network analysis would be very difficult. The nature of the tool makes it so that giving sample data and asking someone to do network analysis would be highly unrealistic. Social Network Analysis seems like the sort of tool that fuels an entire research project as its central focus rather than a helpful tool to make life easier. It is a project in and of itself.

Finally a skill I already possess! Back in 2013, I fought my way through many Google Earth overlays for an Archaeology course, specifically the archaeology of Halifax. Archaeology always seems to be ahead of the game on digital tools. I was using the overlay tool around the same time that this Programming Historian tutorial was written and at the time it was a new cool thing that my professor had been using. Maybe historians are now using Google Earth and Maps to visualize the geography of their topic. I know for myself, knowing the geography of a topic, especially if historians are studying connections (trade or other) between geographic locations. Sometimes the key to understanding their arguments can be a good understanding of how the locations of the places they study relate to one another. In Archaeology, this connection between points on a map is undeniably important, but could be used to better study history as well.

Topic modeling reminds me of a lot pre-field work in archaeology. An archaeological team can’t look everywhere on a site. The weeks and months before any ground is broken or test pits created are spent mining archives, doing geophysical surveys and anything else that can lead archaeologists in the right direction. Depending on who you ask, this portion of archaeology may be the most important. Digging is great but if you have no educated guesses as to where you’ll find artifacts or significant archaeological features, you may as well be searching for a needle in a haystack.

Last week I decided that my final project would be a trivia game to test and review the class tutorial and mistakes we may have all made. Some questions will be very simple spot the difference type questions (markdown mistake, command line mistake, Zotero input mistake) with a sceenshot of the common error.

This week’s first tutorial “Cleaning Data with OpenRefine” has a subheading titled “getting to know your data”. This particular phrase resonated with me, especially thinking about last week’s tutorials. The health records that we organized into tabulated data last week were not metadata like the data that we downloaded online for this week’s tutorial. In the case of the health records, we truly did need to ‘know’ the data because we had to create the structures ourselves, whereas OpenRefine has more utility to allow us to worry less about smaller details (like tabs, paragraph markers etc) that we were concerned about last week.

While I was home for February break, I had the best of intentions to get a lot of early(ish) work done on my final project. I thought about what I might like to focus on here and there but it wasn’t until the Saturday night before I left that I started thinking more about it. Going to prove that, like shower thoughts, ideas often pop into our heads when we are not consciously trying to summon them, I came up with an idea while I was eating sushi last Saturday night. Let’s call it sushi thoughts.

Before completing the tutorials on introduction to using the command line and data mining, I had been hesitant to use GitBash as my primary command line. At first, I was using PowerShell until the Internet Archive and WGET tutorials would not work with PowerShell, particularly at the first command of the Internet Archive tutorial “python -m pip install”.

First we need to download libZotero, a Python module that allows you to interact with Zotero API, withpip install libZotero

We’ve been spending a lot of class time discussing the complete uncharted territory of the preservation of digital records. In my pre-5007 ignorance, I assumed that writing a document in Microsoft Word was fool-proof. We can, of course, take the attitude that our files will be around long enough for when we will need it. At this point in my academic career, it seems unfathomable that some day someone may desperately need to read papers/notes etc that I wrote. I seems to me that thinking of sustainable authorship needs to be done on a higher level beyond our individual needs. It’s not just one person writing their files in plain text Markdown, it’s making people aware that there are other options. Microsoft Word is only popular because everyone uses it.