Doing Digital History: A Beginner’s Guide to Working With Text As Data

This book is a practical introduction to digital history. It offers advice on the scoping of a project, evaluation of existing digital history resources, a detailed introduction to how to work with large text resources, how to manage digital data and how to approach data visualisation.

Doing digital history covers the entire life-cycle of a digital project, from conception to digital outputs. It assumes no prior knowledge of digital techniques and shows you how much you can do without writing any code. It will give you the skills to use common formats such as XML. 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.

Jonathan Blaney was Head of Digital Projects at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London until 2021

Sarah Milligan is an independent scholar based in Victoria, Canada

Marty Steer is Technical Lead, Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London

Jane Winters is Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London