PH Blog

The Programming Historian blog is our space to share news about the project, ideas for how you might use technology in your work, and exciting examples of the Programming Historian applied in the real world. Subscribe to the RSS feed for new blog posts.

July 28, 2017

Our Lessons Page Overfloweth

Fred Gibbs

It’s been a busy year so far at the Programming Historian, and even reaching back into 2016, we’ve been editing and publishing more lessons than ever thanks to the great enthusiasm and energy of our authors and reviewers. Our original lessons index page that’s served us well for many years rapidly grew longer, denser, and considerably harder to use.

June 19, 2017

Sonic Word Clouds - a Digital History Project

Daniel Ruten

My name is Daniel Ruten, and I have just finished my undergraduate studies majoring in History at the University of Saskatchewan. During my last term, I took a course on Digital History (HIST396) with Dr. Jim Clifford. In it, I became familiarized with the various emerging digital tools and methodologies that are becoming increasingly important for historians to learn. The course also required that I create some kind of digital history project myself. For my project, I took inspiration from one lesson in particular featured on the Programming Historian website: historian Shawn Graham’s lesson on data sonification. Building off of what this lesson taught me, I developed my own method to represent and analyze textual data through sound, which I have termed Sonic Word Clouds. In this post I will briefly explain this method of sonification, while reflecting a bit on the learning process that both inspired the idea for this project and allowed me to make it a reality.