Big Data

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• SOURCE: Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)
  11/17/2020
  

  Whose History? AI Uncovers Who Gets Attention in High School Textbooks

  Natural language processing reveals huge differences in how Texas history textbooks treat men, women, and people of color.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  11/19/2020
  

  What Did Europe Smell Like Centuries Ago? Historians Set Out to Recreate Lost Scents

  An ambitious project seeks to make museums a more immersive experience by using big data to mine primary sources for references to scent and use chemistry and perfumerie to recreate the mix of odors characteristic of a time and place. 

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• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  9/11/2020
  

  ‘On the Books’: Machine Learning Jim Crow

  by William Sturkey

  Lawyer and activist Pauli Murray undertook the arduous task of identifying racially discriminatory laws across the United States, and published a volume cataloguing them in 1950 as a took for attorneys working to dismantle Jim Crow. A University of North Carolina project uses technology to complete that task and demonstrate the historical pervasiveness of racism in the law.

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• SOURCE: Buzzfeed
  6-15-15
  

  Historians at Columbia University are using big data to draw historical conclusions

  by Joseph Bernstein

  This team of historians and data scientists is developing a “Declassification Engine” that turns documents into data and mines it for insights about the history and future of official secrecy.

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• SOURCE: M.I.T. Media Lab project, Pantheon
  4-7-14
  

  The 100 most important figures from history

  "To celebrate our global cultural heritage we are compiling, analyzing and visualizing datasets that can help us understand the process of global cultural development."

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• SOURCE: NYT
  4-6-14
  

  Historians still needed! (Where Big Data goes wrong)

  by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis

  Was Francis Scott Key really the 19th most important poet in history?

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• How to Cope with Information Overload

  by Walter G. Moss

  Image via Shutterstock.In the 1840s, in his Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote:A man .... steps out into the world’s multiplicity, like one that comes from the country into the great noisy city, into the multiplicity where men engrossed in affairs hurry past one another, where each looks out for what belongs to him in the vast "back and forth," where everything is in passing ... For here one can experience everything possible, or that everything is possible. ... So this man stands there. He has in himself a susceptibility for the disease of double-mindedness. ... Swiftly, alas, swiftly he is infected -- one more victim. This is nothing new, but an old story. As it has happened to him, so it has happened with the double-minded ones who have gone before him.

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• Science Relevant to History

  This page is designed to help historians keep up with the sciences.