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a born-digital, open-review volume edited by Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki

Part 4: Writing with the Needles from Your Data Haystack

1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 How are electronic databases and text-analysis tools changing how historians research and write about the past? Are we finding more “needles in the haystack” that we otherwise might not have noticed? Ansley Erickson launches this section with “Historical Research and the Problem of Categories: Reflections on 10,000 Digital Notecards,” which richly illustrates how using a relational database package reshaped her dissertation source-work and writing process, and led her to reflect on broader questions of historical categorization. Reflecting on their long-term collaboration, Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin describe the transformation of their intellectual goals, technology, funding, and global audience in “Creating Meaning in a Sea of Information: The Women and Social Movements Sites.” Finally, Frederick Gibbs and Trevor Owens argue that historians should emphasize our research methods more than traditional narratives, with a case study using tools such as Google Book’s Ngram viewer, in “The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing.”

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Source: https://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/data/