In another visualization (figure 2), I used the keyword search technique to determine the frequency of the term "woman" across a number of journals. One of the current FHQ editors observed that via this method, I had visualized "the biography of the journal."įigure 2: Frequency of the key term "woman" across twenty journals (1888–2013) "Woman" appears in frequency only after the mid-1990s. "Black" appears with frequency after the mid-1960s, and indeed terms denoting race, are prominent key terms. Most of the key terms referred to the eighteenth and nineteenth century, terms tied to Florida's twentieth-century history ("animation," "space," "Disney," "retirement"), do not appear in the top one hundred.
Political history is a historiographic concentration (reflected in terms such as "governor," "state," "county"). The Seminole War looms larger in Florida's history than the Civil War. In the FHQ, the top key term was "Indian," and terms related to Native Americans occurred frequently. Thus, we can observe how the importance of these terms have waxed and waned over the eighty-five-year history of the journal. The "spikes"-what might be thought of as the z-axis-reflect the number of times that a key term appears in a given year. In this visualization, the x-axis represents time, and the y-axis indicates the top one hundred key terms. This measure determines the frequency of a word in a specific document, giving us a measure of the importance of the term as well as some idea of the subject of the article. The application allows us to determine the top key terms across the more than 1,500 articles published by FHQ, using a statistical procedure known as TF-IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency). I first applied my method to The Florida Historical Quarterly ( FHQ), using the Data for Research application from JSTOR (see figure 1). Keeping in mind Moretti's technique, my goal is to "read" all of the academic articles written by historians, not just those now identified as seminal in the field. Reading the entire corpus of a journal at a macro-scale can tell us what subjects historians have been interested in over time. I would argue that it need not.Īs a way to view historiographic change over time, historical journals prove to be a relatively coherent record of how scholars have understood a body of knowledge. Some historians might fret that such macro-level analysis will push us too far into the quantitative realms. I want to know if we can "read" the literature of a field at a macro-scale distance to discern the shape and form of historiography. What can we learn when we apply macro-scale reading techniques to secondary sources, to historiography? We ask graduate students to master "the literature of a field" by reading lots of books and articles. Crucially, the questions we ask and the results we seek at the macro-scale are different from those at the micro-scale.īig-data approaches are being employed to examine the primary sources we have been digitizing over the last two decades. Most historians, on the other hand, work with "city-level maps": small-scale investigations via a close reading of a relatively small set of documents. To engage in distant reading is like using a world map. The literary scholar Franco Moretti coined the term "distant reading" for this style of investigation, as opposed to a "close reading" of a relatively small number of texts. The History Manifesto (2014), by Jo Guldi and David Armitage, argues that big-data analytics allow historians to see patterns in large data sets that stretch over long periods of time. "Big data" analytics are increasingly used in historical research. As digital collections become more "complete," (1) some historians wish to identify patterns across entire collections: in effect, to "read" those collections at a macro-level scale. We are now in the third stage of digitization. A researcher could search a term and locate records across a large collection of documents that would have otherwise been logistically difficult if not impossible.
By the early 2000s, digitization was accompanied by improved search capabilities. The digitization of historical documents began in earnest in the mid-1990s, driven by a desire to make records accessible and as a way to digitally preserve fragile documents. Staley Visual Historiography: Toward an Object-Oriented Hermeneutics David J.