History and Today

Over the past few weeks, I've been following two sets of coding tutorials designed for beginners that might be useful for the historian. First, I attended Adam Crymble's masterclass at the IHR on how to use Python to extract keywords from a text and geo-code the places. The lesson is on his Programming Historian - http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/extracting-keywords The second is Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga's tutoral for the New York Public Library on creating online interactive maps using geojson with Leaflet and Mapbox Studio: http://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/01/05/web-maps-primer It took me a couple of weekends to get through the latter, and I finally achieved this result, with a little more tweaking and reading the Leaflet tutorials to work out how to layer more than one map on top of each other: http://protesthistory.org.uk/mcr1794trial.html locations of United English delegates, 1799-1801, plotted on Green's 1794 map of Manchester & MapBoxStudio m...

Two articles serendipitously appeared this week after my IHR seminar paper on Monday. First, this article by Bradley Garrett about contemporary disputes in Lancaster over 'common' land: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/feb/10/battle-for-freemans-wood-lancaster-common-land-locals-property-development Some quick observations: My students should read this article when we study 17th and 18th century enclosure riots so that I can show them that such events weren't odd and purely historical, but still have resonance and indeed share the same sentiments and tactics Indeed, those tactics seem awfully familiar to a historian of rural protest: 'In addition to filing an application for three well-trodden footpaths across the wood to be officially recognised, a council document records that “local people took exception” to the No Trespassing signs and “they disappeared”. Those signs that remained were subversively mutilated'.  A quote from the article about th...

I gave a paper at Keith Flett's Socialist History seminar at the IHR on 8 February. I've put the theoretical musings about space and time developed for that paper on my Protest History website: http://protesthistory.org.uk/about-me/theories-of-space-and-place  It considers Theodore Koditschek, David Harvey, Doreen Massey and David Featherstone. Thoughts probably unfinished and still developing.... The podcast should be up on the IHR website soon.

Here is the link to the video of my talk on the Political Meetings Mapper project with the British Library at the Digital History seminar, IHR, 2 February - http://ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2015/12/14/tuesday-2-february-katrina-navickas-political-meetings-mapper-with-british-library-labs-mapping-the-origins-of-british-democratic-movements-with-text-mining-nlp-geo-parsing-and-crowd-sourcing/ I'm next speaking at the IHR at the Socialist History seminar on Monday 8 February.