NEH Digital Methods for Military History Workshop Links

This list has grown since the original NEH workshop as additional resources have been identified.

NEH Workshop Home

Tutorials

  • The Programming Historian - offers novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate their research.

Data Cleaning Software Installation & Reading


Gephi Network Analysis Software

Palladio Historical Data Visualization Software
Allows for mapping, graphing, listing, and displaying of historical data. This is Stanford's attempt at an all-in-one tool.

Tropy
Tropy to transform impenetrable folders of nameless photos into an adaptable organization system where it’s easy to find any photo. Photos can be grouped into individual research documents or objects; documents can be grouped into collections or tagged. You can take notes to describe or transcribe your photos. Full-text search covers all of these levels to help you find what you need.
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Readings on Social Network Analysis

Readings on GIS/Spatial History
  • David Bodenhamer, “The Potential of Spatial Humanities,” in The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship, ed. David Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
  • David Rumsey and Meredith Williams, "Historical Maps in GIS," in Anne Knowles, ed., Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History. Redlands, CA: Esri Press, 2002.

Mapping Resources
  • Latitude and Longitude of a Point - generates the latitude and longitude coordinates for any designated point on a Google Map.
  • Lat Long Map - generates latitude and longitude coordinates on a Google Map based on place names (buildings, cities, counties, etc.)
  • ArcGIS for Home Use - 12-month license ($100) for personal, noncommercial projects. Includes full versions of multiple software components.
  • QGIS - QGIS is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System. It runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, Windows and Android and supports numerous vector, raster, and database formats and functionalities.
  • Neatline - Neatline works best when you’re using it to tell a story or create an interpretive lens through which a collection of artifacts, documents, or richly-described concepts could be understood.
  • Map Warper - Tool for georectifying maps without GIS software.
  • ExportToEarth Gephi Plugin - This plugin exports Gephi graphs with geocoordinates to KMZ files for Google Earth or other GIS software.
  • Geographically Integrated History: GIS for Historians and Historical Social Scientists - Includes a detailed training manual for MapWindow GIS, a free, Windows-based open-source GIS program.

Sources of Maps

Sources of Data
  • MEAD - The Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD) is an online repository of datasets compiled by historians of early North America. MEAD preserves and makes available these datasets in their original format and as comma-separated-value files (.csv).
  • Digital Humanities Datasets from Rutgers

Textual Analysis Resources
  • AntConc - A freeware concordance program for Windows, Macintosh OS X, and Linux.
  • MALLETT - MALLET is a Java-based package for statistical natural language processing, document classification, clustering, topic modeling, information extraction, and other machine learning applications to text. MALLETT best used within "r" statistical software, but it can run (less sophisticated) as a standalone .jar file.
  • tesseract-ocr - Tesseract is a very accurate open source OCR engine.

Other Resources
  • THAT Camp - The Humanities and Technology Camp, is an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.

Sample Projects
  • Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 - Fire destroyed the War Department office in 1800. For decades historians believed that its files, and the window they provide into the early federal government, had been lost forever. This collection unites copies of the lost files in a digital archive that reconstitutes this invaluable historical resource.
  • Dolly Madison Digital Edition - Complete edition of all known Dolly Madison correspondence
  • Project Quincy - A Django application with a MySQL database that uses information about people, places, and organizations to trace how social networks and institutions develop over time and through space.
  • Early American Foreign Service Database - The EAFSD places biographical and professional information about all foreign service officers in a relational data structure. This data structure allows users to trace the early American governments' attempts to deploy and control their overseas representatives.
  • Quantifying Kissinger - Micki Kaufman's textual analysis project. Good sections on methods. This project appears on her web site.
  • Holocaust Geographies Collaborative - Argues for how the key geographic concepts of location, scale, resolution, territoriality and the space/place dichotomy are fundamental to an expanded understanding of the genocide.