Click here for the full session notes/discussion from the Digital History-Tools and Techniques Session.

Most of the resources discussed in this session are available in Byron’s Google Drive folder.  Notes from this session build on and discuss tools from the list he’s created in the GD.

Important Caveats/Advice for Using Digital Tools

• Be sure to reference and try out the tools from the Google Drive.
• Don’t let digital tools overwhelm you. Instead of focusing on a tool’s content, think instead about the context in which you’re using it and why it’s the appropriate approach to take.
• Within the DH, there’s no need for isolation anymore and although we often feel we don’t have time to build different tools on our own, they are out there already and we can gain a lot by working collaboratively with people across disciplines and backgrounds.
• You don’t have to be creator of content, you can be a curator.
• Consider the 3Cs: Content, context, community.

Twitter is a digital salon, a global party line, offering a window to real-time information and sentiment on a tremendous scale. There have been many compelling projects to analyze and monitor twitter activity as well as automate communication for entertainment, journalism, and scholarship.

Let’s meet to discuss possibilities for analyzing, reporting, or remixing content from Twitter.

Examples:

@congressedits is a twitter bot that was created to monitor and report changes to Wikipedia entries made from IP addresses assigned to the United States Congress. The script is open source and has been used by others to monitor changes made by other organizations, many civic and government. – inkdroid.org/journal/2014/07/10/why-congressedits/

The New Yorker has an interesting article from 2013 about Twitter bots and their use, from compelling to crude – www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-rise-of-twitter-bots