Reflections about historical research and digital tools

Risky New York: Gendered Spatial Practices Between the Gay City and the Normative City

The study of historically marginalized groups and their presence in, movement through, and production of space must be conceived in consideration of the multiple ways through which those groups, in historian George Chauncey’s words, sought “to claim space for themselves in the midst of a hostile …

Tableau: Inquiring Far and Beyond with Data Visualization

To experiment with Tableau, an interactive data visualization application, I acquired data in XLSX format from the National Register of Historic Places online database. The spreadsheet contained information on all the properties listed in the National Register until 2022 for local, state, national, …

Palladio: Everything is Connected

As surprising as it sounds, for a long time historians overlooked implicit connections between things, people, organizations, and ideas across time and space. But they were not unfamiliar to the idea of networks. As a crucial part of historical scholarship, historiographical works are fundamentally …

Voyant and Text Mining: When Quantitative Meets Qualitative

When Dr. Leisl Carr Childers introduced me to Voyant during her graduate methods seminar at Colorado State University, I realized a few things. First, that historians can take for granted the textual nature of traditional primary sources. The structure, vocabulary, and terms of a textual corpus tell …

StoryMaps: A place-based form of historical narrative

Professor Elizabeth Tulanowski’s introductory class on Geographic Information Systems at Colorado State University exposed me to ArcGIS tools. Developed by Esri, the world’s leading supplier of GIS software and tools, ArcGIS tools are not open source. They are, however, available to most …

AirTable: Data Management and Collaboration

Dr. Amanda Regan, my supervisor and co-director of the digital mapping project Mapping the Gay Guides, first introduced me to AirTable when I started to work as a research assistant in the project. Since Mapping the Gay Guides depends on the collaborative work between many researchers and graduate …

Omeka: Curatorship and exhibits in the digital age

The great thing about Omeka is that it is an open-source system. The software is what we call a content management system (CMS), and the terminology is mostly self-explanatory: it increases the user’s ability to. manage and showcase digital contents in the form of a dynamic virtual exhibit. …

Organize your mess: Tropy and historical research

In the summer of 2021, I did my first solo research trip. With little time to prepare, I had one major goal to accomplish while in Chicago: to take as many pictures of historical records as I could. I had two days to visit the Chicago Public Library where most of the materials relevant to my …

The day has finally come: Zotero has found me and it's here to stay

I never really loved dishwashers. One of the few things that gives me some sense of control over the chaos of life is washing my dishes. I take my time and choose the order, the pace, and the method I will use to get everything clean and dry.

I was highly skeptical of Zotero when I first heard about …

Coding: Baby steps towards a new form of communication

Of course, the first blog post of the Time Sensitive is about coding. Not because I love it madly, but because coding may be one of the most, if not the most important and difficult learning curves in the career of aspiring digital historians. As someone who speaks three languages, reads four, and …