Blog
Dates and Dating
Matthew Milner: October 23, 2017 at 11:32
You'd think that historians would be experts on time and chronometry. While most are able to rattle off dates significant to their particular objects of study, time itself often appears only as an element of the framing of an historical study or narrative. Rarely do historians discuss time in ways that allow or permit the comparison of time across cultures, let alone historical phenomena. It becomes even more messier when historians talk about epochs or periods themselves as discernible historical "events", as if the mere declaration of a start and a stop some how automatically circumscribes a bona fide and worthwhile object of scholarly attention. What constitutes a temporal start or a stop, moreover, is contextual - not just in terms of the later at hand (as in picking an event that deno...
Tool: Revised Radar
Matthew Milner: October 22, 2017 at 20:59
I spent a bit of september revising the Radar tool. While the initial draft worked, it didn't look as nice as I wanted it to, and it also wasn't interactive. Moreover, there were some issues with how the data was compiled. I also wanted some kind of scaling in the layout of the rings, and in the centre. It was difficult to see anything around zero, especially if the largest value was above 10%. Here's a screen capture of the older version of the tool: I didn't change much, if anything, in the underlying job handler. But I did take advantage of ...'s revision of the radar visualization, and alter it accordingly. Primarily it meant blending what I'd already done in radar, with some new cleaner graphic effects and svg techniques (especially the filtering). The hardest part was figuring...
Tools: Tree
Matthew Milner: October 13, 2017 at 16:09
Let's be honest, everyone finds a family tree interesting to look at. And there are plenty of tools out there for creating them, and viewing them online. That said, the existing options for family trees in D3, the javascript library Nanohistory uses for visualizations, is fairly problematic and doesn't correspond well with our model. Some use culturally-deterministic terms that don't mesh well with Nanohistory's approach to interactions; others don't track extra-marital relationships or other kinds of family models. Many simply think individuals are linked to two individuals, and that's it: no step-parents, etc. They also don't track kin relationships like guardianship, adoption, wards, etc. But family trees aren't the only kind of trees we might want to look at. Historians are also intere...
EEBO-TCP Agents
Matthew Milner: September 12, 2017 at 13:06
Over the last year I've been slowly working through the revised metadata I created for Voyant DREaM using Phases I and the pre-release version of Phase II of EEBO-TCP's TEI headers. While EEBO employs TEI, and seems to have created an authority list of authors and some agents, the work for DREaM also focused on agents and places within the unparsed . These agents aren't recognized, nor do they appear in any sense in an authority or canonical form. The DREaM revised metadata mashed up OCLC and VIAF metadata with EEBO-TCP's in an attempt to find identifiers, and actual authority versions of these agents. But with Nanohistory the problem becomes a bit more complex. Nanohistory doesn't treat titles, or dates, as primary data for agents, while EEBO-TCP doesn't disambiguate or resolve authority ...
Historical Phenomena: Episodes
Matthew Milner: August 24, 2017 at 20:36
Nanohistory's model reserves the word 'event' for its named graphs which represent historical interactions or assertions of historical activity. They're unnamed by design, allowing users to create large multi-dimensional networks that represent the past. That said, it presents a problem when scholars or users want to label or name historical phenomena, or assert that events belong to a particular happening discussed in documents and evident in the historical record. We've opted for a sub-type of term: 'episodes'. 'Episode' is more flexible than 'event' or 'historical phenomenon', and 'period'. It not only invokes the idea that history is 'episodic', but that the recounting and representation of the past is constructed, narrative, and ultimately something that can be revisited or replayed. ...
Pseudo-Entities: Episodes, Serials, and Titles
Matthew Milner: August 13, 2017 at 11:15
Though six entity types offer considerable flexibility for modeling the past, Nanohistory also employs three pseudo-entity types: Episode, Serial, and Title. Episode and Serial are sub-types of terms, reserved for specific kinds of proper names, historical phenomena, and serial publications, respectively. Titles are a form of event described by an organization, the verb 'has', and a term with a sub-type of 'office' or 'position'. Each has their own colour, and in many instances function like entities in search forms, as well as visualization tools. While it seems rather obvious to have reserved types for historical phenomena and serial publications, Titles as events can seem awkward. Nanohistory's model, however, is designed to allow for the study of the past in a series of ways: the st...
2016 Screen Shots
Matthew Milner: January 3, 2017 at 14:37
I've spent much of the fall reworking existing tools, and prototyping others. Here are some screenshots. Radar - Historical Episodes by Verb Radar - Terms by Events Webs - 4 Things, Distance of 1 Weave - Creating new events Scribe - Implementing DivaJS for IFFF-based transcription Parsley - Parsing & Basic Entity Recognition Narrate - Case Study of Anne Askew GEXF - Detail of Gephi visualization using generate gexf file, Case Study of Anne Askew FOAF XML - Example data output for person in FOAF Person - Example record entry ...
Thinking about names
Matthew Milner: June 5, 2016 at 00:10
Building parsers for Nanohistory has involved quite a bit of thinking about what's in a name. I'm going to leave organizations, places, and things and outline how I've approached the issue for prosopographical data. Let's get some basics out of the way first - just so we're clear on what's going on. A "name" is essentially a label; whether it as attached to anything in particular is secondary in practical terms. In short, a name is a descriptor for something that can exist in reality or be completely fictive. This is important to note because unlike a cataloguer in a repository, historical scholars are interested in the movement and shaping of identities: names are the lynchpins, but do not need to be associated, necessarily, with an *actual* human being who has lived, breathed, had emoti...
Templates for People, Places, and Organizations
Matthew Milner: May 19, 2016 at 23:17
Open Data is great - despite the fact most historians have no idea what it is or how to use it. It uses standard vocabularies, namespaces, and taxonomies to describe data, allowing researchers to move data from one context to another easily. Yet it's also rather complicated for the average humanities scholar (let's be honest here) since it also requires familiarity with data types and formats like XML, JSON, Turtle, etc. These aren't always usually picked up for those with mind towards prose and manuscripts, though they're not difficult, really. When it comes to the bibliographic world, we now have excellent tools for quickly creating lists and generating metadata as needed - Zotero, EndNote, Refworks, Mendeley, are among many that allow users to store citations and documents quickly and e...
Tools: Weave & Scribe
Matthew Milner: March 3, 2016 at 13:20
I've been busy migrating two new tools for NanoHistory. Both are geared towards making life easier for users, as the main problem for NanoHistory is the density of data entry and connections which need to be made quickly, easily, and accurately. This work focuses on rapid creation of new events or connections between existing nodes or entities, and the transcription or documentation of entities and events from online source materials that aren't well suited to automated processing - mainly manuscript sources. Like existing NanoHistory tools, I've given these them one word names - Weave and Scribe. Weave In Making Publics, in many ways NanoHistory's progenitor, we created a workbench tool consisting of overlaid canvas elements that allowed users to drag and drop entities from a defined wo...
Tools: Radar
Matthew Milner: February 15, 2016 at 16:03
Is it possible to build a kind of fingerprint of a given historical source or text using discreet parameters, and compare it with others? Radar is an experimental tool that seeks to do just this. Whereas text analysis tools and software allows scholars to extract named entities, parts of speech, or identify elements of a given text, NanoHistory's model requires users to do so in order to create evidence trails through the historical record. In essence this establishes a different kind of typology for text analysis as entities are mentioned, referenced, or cited in a thing, imbuing the resulting data with a critical characteristic - an assertion of meaning. Radar allows users to compare the entities referenced by several things as a radar graph. Each spoke on the graph represents an entity,...
Tools: Webs
Matthew Milner: January 21, 2016 at 09:24
NanoHistory's use of graph or network models immediately lends itself to creating the usual force-directed representations of networks that we've grown accustomed to over the past decade or so. For the inhouse network visualization tool, which I'm calling 'webs' for lack of a better name, I've opted to adapt D3's well known force directed example. I've mashed it up with some later versions by other D3 designers, and tweaked it for our use. Two issues related to scale affected the development of this core tool. The first was building an effective query engine that would allow for users to create visualizations of data as needed from the overall NanoHistory collection. The second was handling the dataset and the force direction during rendering, both in terms of 'ticks' and scaling. We...
Soft Launch
Matthew Milner: December 17, 2015 at 17:09
So the lid is off, as a manner of speaking. I've taken down the .htaccess to the site, allowing the outside world to take a look (finally) at the public side. It's preoccupied much of my time since mid-November, as I'd been focused on the internal layout and migration of tools, etc. from Making Publics from this summer until then. We decided to go ahead and open it up as Nano-History is part of two grant applications currently under consideration by SSHRC: we needed to have something for the assessors to look at. Equally, I wanted to start writing about the data I've been working on, and test drive the platform. We're still very much in beta, but things are far enough along that having something viewable will help us gather a series of case studies we can use to test the platform. Over the...
The New Site
Matthew Milner: September 21, 2015 at 23:59
The new site is almost in a state where it will be possible to start letting a few people look at it. It's taken a while - much of the old Making Publics prototype remains, but it's been thoroughly cleaned up. Aside from the obvious new interface, the database has gone through some much needed standardization of fields and table structures. But the real joy has been the interface development - thinking through the site not as a publication engine for a specific project, but as a tool for individual researchers, has been the most rewarding aspect of the work. There's an almost overwhelming amount left to do - while it's possible add data to the site, the key node type that still has yet to be migrated is 'things'. It's by far the most complex, and likely the most important. All of the code...