Week Four: The Google Books Ngram Viewer

For historians and researchers, language-analysis tools such as the Google Books Ngram Viewer, provide a great deal of insight into the usage and trends of any word or small sentence throughout literature during a specific period of time.  The Google Ngram Viewer supports literature dating back as far as the 1800s in many languages including English, German, French, Russian, and Spanish. The Ngram Viewer project is made possible due to Google's partnership with numerous different libraries, which allows them to digitize historical texts that are otherwise inaccessible to the general public. The data is displayed using n-grams, which is a sequence of n items from any given amount of text or speech. The data often consists of syllables, letters, and words. To fully understand what the Google Ngram Viewer is and how it works, consider the following example:

Let’s say you’re researching World War II and you’re interested to see how many times the word “Germany” appears in texts between the years 1939 and 1945. Using the Google Ngram Viewer, you’re able to easily track its frequency.

Not only can you track the frequency of a word or phrase for a specific period of time, but you can track numerous at once, which allows for comparison and extrapolation. This example is obviously very simplistic for the purposes of explanation, but one can clearly see just how powerful this tool can be, especially in the fields of research and history.  At first glance, it may seem like the Google Ngram Viewer is simply just a new way to access and view data, but it’s actually much more than that. It introduces new ways to interpret data and encourages historians to ask additional questions based on their findings.

While the Google Ngram Viewer is already quite impressive, Google is constantly making improvements to the quality of data generated by removing faulty metadata. In addition to these ongoing improvements, Google has also introduced various mathematical operators allowing the user to add, subtract, multiply, and divide ngram counts.

The Google Ngram Viewer is valuable to scholars, linguists, and historians as it allows one to analyze the history of language through the numerous historical texts that Google has digitized over the past few years. This is another example of how technology is changing the way we gather research and look at history. Gathering this type of data a decade ago would have been impossible.

Week Three: Final Project

      In the course Digital Humanities we are required to keep a blog throughout the semester and discuss topics surrounding the emerging field of humanities in the digital age. This blog is the first blog I’ve had and I would like to use this blog to assist my work and research for the final project in this course. The final project aforementioned asks students to apply techniques of digital humanities to a subject within the humanities. Students are given a lot of choice and freedom to use their creativity and could create a project beneficial to the academic world online.

    Since we were encouraged to begin developing topic ideas for this assignment early within the semester, I have started brainstorming ideas and would like to use this post to keep track of my thoughts. Last semester I worked on an essay discussing the Psychiatric Survivor Movement in Canada and accessed the Psychiatric Survivor Archives of Toronto (PSAT). While they have only been able to digitize a small portion of their documents online, they allow individuals to e-mail their staff to request specific documents. They have been able to digitize all copies of the Phoenix Rising magazine, which was a magazine created for and by psychiatric survivors, patients and ex-patients in Toronto through the 1970s-1960s (although it is important to mention it is a little difficult to research through). The Phoenix Rising is accessible to anyone for free on their website. They have also been able to upload a collection of posters used during the Psychiatric Survivor Movement, also accessible for free on their website. The PSAT’s main objective, as they have stated is to preserve their history online.

    While I have not determined how I can contribute to their project directly, I would like my essay on the Movement’s efforts to also become accessible to anyone interested and perhaps have some interactive components to make it easy to access the documents I used from the PSAT, however I am still brainstorming new ideas. If anyone has any helpful ideas as to how I can incorporate my work on the Movement for our final project I would love to hear them in the comments below. I have also provided a link to the PSAT’s website for anybody interested in seeing their work.

Website: http://www.psychiatricsurvivorarchives.com/index.html

Week Two: The Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is a way to view archived websites from a specific point in time and is extremely useful when conducting research. Since the Internet is a constantly evolving medium of information, it is often helpful to have the ability to go back in time and view websites, articles, or other information that is no longer readily available on the Internet as we currently know it. I believe historians and the field of digital history would find this to be exceptionally useful because the Wayback Machine helps preserve and modernize old historical documents and it also makes this information easily accessible to most people. While digital history is a relatively new field, the Wayback Machine contains documents dating as far back as 1996. In total, it preserves 435 billion pages of information and this number continues to grow every day.

      Aside from its primary purpose, which is preserving web content, the Wayback Machine also has a special collection feature that shows how the web reacted to various important historical events, such as September 11, 2001. This feature is notably helpful when conducting research as it can be used to determine which sources were reporting on specific historical events, allows researchers to navigate to these specific pages, and even includes the dates the original websites are archived from. The Wayback Machine also allows researchers to study the way in which popular websites on the Internet have evolved over time. For example, the Wayback Machine contains 50,723 archived snapshots of Google.com dating back to November 11, 1998 where users can see the search engine in its earliest days. For those that are interested, a subscription service is available for the Wayback Machine, which allows individuals (particularly digital historians who would be interested in such features) to automatically preserve their work so that it may be easily accessed in the future. It also allows users to upload their work for free manually using the “save page now” feature. This is a feature I would like to use for the major project in Hist*4170 Exploring Digital Humanities, as it will preserve my project and allow others to access it at any time.  

      Finally, the Wayback Machine contains some useful tools that assist people in maintaining their research/content. For example, those using Wordpress to manage and publish their research can take advantage of the broken link checker tool. This tool will scan your content and notify you of any broken hyperlinks or images. This helps your research be more complete and credible. Also, for the more advanced users that plan to host their own content instead of using a 3rd party such as WordPress, there's a handy 404 handler tool that helps end users get to where they're going. It works by providing the user with a Wayback archived version of a page should they encounter a 404 error. Overall, the Wayback Machine is a useful application readily available to the public with an exceptionally valuable use for historians in the digital age.

Link to the Wayback Machine: http://archive.org/web/

Week One: Digital Tools and Education

The way in which students work and learn has changed dramatically over the past two decades. Gone are the days of hand writing assignments, working long hours in the library, and struggling to share information with one another. Not only has the digital age improved the lives of students, but it has improved the lives of those in the business world as well. Thus far the biggest benefit from using digital tools is the ability to conduct research quickly and efficiently. Having access to a virtually endless amount of resources has helped improve the quality of my work and will be incredibly beneficial as I work towards my degree. This has also proven to be a huge time saver for me as I can work during all hours of the day and am not bound to the library. Also, being able to quickly and easily share and collaborate with fellow classmates, teaching assistants and professors saves time and aides in learning a great deal. I have found that my writing has also improved through the use of word processors and online grammatical resources. The university website also provides a number of tools accessible to students online that outline ways to strengthen their research and written work. These tools include links to databases and online guides to sourcing. Digital tools have also allowed us to store and preserve our work, making it easy to find and access for future reference. Cloud storage services provide users with the ability to upload and save data that can not only be accessed easily but can be accessed on a number of devices and by multiple users. This can be beneficial in a number of situations, such as when your computer devices break down or you are collaborating with others on a piece of work. Many of the courses I have taken here at the University of Guelph have had an online component where students could access course material such as lecture slides, readings and discussion boards. I believe this has enhanced my learning experience as I can access this information at any time to recall what was addressed in class and discuss it with fellow classmates. I have taken full courses online at the university as well, which has also impacted my experience as a student as I could learn the course lecture material and complete assignments at times most convenient for my schedule. This is a relatively new method of teaching, as a credit can be earned with virtually no in-person interaction. As discussed in our Digital Humanities lecture last week, online courses are proving to become a more popular and growing teaching method within the academic community. I believe that we will continue to see more technological advancements in the coming years that will make the lives of students and working professionals even easier than they are today.