History SPOT will soon be home to training modules from the IHR Digital project (funded by JISC) HISTORE.  This project is developing short modules introducing various digital tools that might be of use to historians.  For instance, I’m currently working on the introduction pieces for a module on Text Mining.  This tool allows historians to search large corpuses of digitalized texts in a deeper and more meaningful way than an ordinary search engine could ever achieve on its own. 

As part of the project the IHR will be holding an afternoon working on Thursday 21 June (2pm to 4.30pm) on the topic of using and learning about digital tools for historical research.  This blog post, then, is an invitation.  If you would like to join us please email Jonathan Blaney at jonathan.blaney@sas.ac.uk.  It doesn’t matter if you have in-depth knowledge of digital tools or whether you are just interested in finding out something about what such tools might offer, we would very much like to have you there. 

There will be several talks followed by a break-out session.  The project team will discuss the work we’ve done to date and there will be more general talks on the topics of semantic markup and text mining.  Attendees are encouraged to bring digital project ideas to discuss during the break-out. There will also be an opportunity to discuss your projects with us one-to-one, if you’d like to.

This workshop is free but places are limited. So again, if you’d like to come to the workshop, or have any questions about it, just drop us an email at jonathan.blaney@sas.ac.uk.