Doing digital history : a beginner's guide to working with text as data

"This book is a practical introduction to digital history, with a focus on working with text, covering the life cycle of a digital project, from conception to digital outputs. It places digital history in its historiographical context and stresses the importance of understanding the history of digital history. This guide assumes no prior knowledge of digital techniques and shows how much you can do without writing any code. It will also give you the skills to use common formats such as XML with confidence. The book will benefit anyone who is considering carrying out research in history that has a digital or data element and will also be of interest to researchers in related fields within digital humanities, such as literary studies or classics. It offers advice on the scoping of a project, discusses the evaluation of existing digital history resources, and provides a detailed introduction on how to work with large text resources, how to manage digital data and how to approach data visualization. A key message of the book is that data preparation is a central part of most digital history projects, but that work becomes much easier and faster with a few essential tools. It will be especially useful for postgraduates or other researchers about to embark upon a large piece of research." -- Includes bibliographical references (pages 166-171) and index. xvii, 173 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 20 cm.