1. Miscellaneous things to know about
The Digital Past, Present, and Future
Lee Ann Cafferata, Notes, HIST390, George Mason University, Spring 2014

2. What’s New?
• Digital technologies don’t change the past;
they do change how we look at it and what we
can know.

3. Big data and Open data
• Open data is accessible, public data that let us
make decisions, analyze patterns and solve
complex problems—make data-drive decisions.
• It must be publicly available and licensed in a way
that allows anyone to use it. And, it should be
free.
• Big data is that huge corpus of datasets—historic
or current, government or private—from diverse
disciplinary fields.

4. Compare and contrast
• Open data can be small, medium, or large
• Where to find it? Data.gov
• Who uses it (for example): Open data compass
• Who advocates it? http://opengovdata.org/
• Open data, linked open data, and historical
datasets. What does the Smithsonian say?
“Making Sense of Data That’s Linked and
Open”

5. Who’s got your data?
• Ted Talks: Curly Fries
• Secret Searching: Molly Brown, New York
Times

6. Take the Honey Badger
• History and going viral
• “Uncovering Reprinting Networks in American
Newspapers”
• seeks to develop theoretical models that will help scholars better understand what
qualities--both textual and thematic--helped particular news stories, short
fiction, and poetry "go viral" in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines.
Prior to copyright legislation and enforcement, literary texts as well as other non-
fiction prose texts circulated promiscuously among newspapers as editors freely
reprinted materials borrowed from other venues. What texts were reprinted and
why? How did ideas--literary, political, scientific, economic, religious--circulate in
the public sphere and achieve critical force among audiences

7. Expectations and Patterns
• Network graphs begin to illustrate which
newspapers shaped the network: which
papers printed texts that many other
newspapers also printed. We're already
finding some surprising results. Newspapers
that haven't been well studied by scholars—in
cities such as Nashville, Tennessee and
Glasgow, Missouri—are proving more central
to the network than we expected going into
this project.

8. Going viral today
• The medium is different. Is the process the
same?
• Ted Talks: “Why Videos go Viral.” Kevin
Allocca is YouTube's trends manager, and he
has deep thoughts about silly web video. In
this talk from TEDYouth, he shares the 4
reasons a video goes

9. Working in digital humanities
• Is it a gendered technical field?
• Do you have to code?
• What skills are needed?
• Organizations? HASTAC, THATCamps, DCHDC
• Centers (listing on HASTAC)

10. Do try this at home
• Prezi
• Storify
• Open Street Map
• codeacademy