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.

Hashing out the work I’ve been doing in Digital History over sushi with my coding extraordinaire theoretical physicist boyfriend, he suggested that I make a point to be highly visual and use graphics in my final project because that was what he used to learn how to code in physics. This all made sense and followed nicely with what we’ve been doing in class and how Shawn has been encouraging us to learn.

We talked about what I might like to focus on and I attempted to explain to him how historians can use things like topic modeling to pick up on patterns in their research. I was particularly interested in topic modeling because I thought it might be something useful for my thesis project if I was interested in seeing how the way that Nova Scotia was described changed over time. This may or may not be true but as a tool it intrigued me. It could turn out that I will never have a corpus of data that is large enough to do good topic modeling. This also goes to show that the tool you imagine to be useful may never be so solely because of the nature of the data you have.

So something that may be of use to me, but that’s not really the point of the final project. Everyone is going to find that some digital tools have more promising potential for them over others. Everyone has different types of data that may favor one tool over another. As a newcomer to Digital History, I find that understanding the ideas is not the hardest part. Rather, understanding when to use them is much more challenging.

Thinking of the project as a game, I think it would be fun and helpful to visualize different examples of data and have the player guess which digital tool or tools would work at all and which would be the best option. Answers could range from what needs to be done, what wasn’t done properly with the data etc in any given example. These examples could include some simple problems encountered in class but also more complicated data sets/examples that we have not worked directly with, but could be engaged with using some of the tools we have learned. How can we bring together what we’ve learned into a more seamless process?

My most asked question has been: how could I ever replicate/use/recognize these tools in a new context outside of the Programming Historian tutorial screens?

More to come on how I will actually acquire new examples of data to work with our class topics…