Lecture

Digitized and Born-Digital Sources in History

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Description

This lecture explores the ways historians practice history using digitized and born-digital sources, such as large unclassified collections, subject-specific collections, and born-digital sources. It delves into the heuristics, critique, and synthesis methods used in historical research, as well as the application of big data for historical analysis. The lecture also discusses the epistemological and anthropological perspectives through which history is viewed, emphasizing the importance of primary sources, archives, and writing in historical research.

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Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

History

Fields of history: Historiography

Related concepts (32)

Primary source

In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called an original source) is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under study. It serves as an original source of information about the topic. Similar definitions can be used in library science and other areas of scholarship, although different fields have somewhat different definitions.

Writing

Writing is a cognitive and social activity involving neuropsychological and physical processes and the use of writing systems to structure and translate human thoughts into persistent representations of human language. A system of writing relies on many of the same semantic structures as the language it represents, such as lexicon and syntax, with the added dependency of a system of symbols representing that language's phonology and morphology. Nevertheless, written language may take on characteristics distinctive from any available in spoken language.

Archive

An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of that person or organization. Professional archivists and historians generally understand archives to be records that have been naturally and necessarily generated as a product of regular legal, commercial, administrative, or social activities.

Born-digital

The term born-digital refers to materials that originate in a digital form. This is in contrast to digital reformatting, through which analog materials become digital, as in the case of files created by scanning physical paper records. It is most often used in relation to digital libraries and the issues that go along with said organizations, such as digital preservation and intellectual property. However, as technologies have advanced and spread, the concept of being born-digital has also been discussed in relation to personal consumer-based sectors, with the rise of e-books and evolving digital music.

Digitization

Digitization is the process of converting information into a digital (i.e. computer-readable) format. The result is the representation of an object, , sound, document, or signal (usually an analog signal) obtained by generating a series of numbers that describe a discrete set of points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a , for the object, and digital form, for the signal.

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Primary source

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