I’ve been asked this morning to talk to our new cohort of MA students on ‘doing digital history’. I thought about how I might do this. Typically, I’d throw together a powerpoint and begin talking about various tools, trends in the field, try to get a sense of what people are interested in, tailoring my comments to those topics.

Today though, I’m trying a different approach. I want students to understand that the choice of tool, and the way data gets represented or manipulated in a computer, are not inconsequential choices. To that end, I’m working with Prezi. Its metaphor – zooming – couldn’t be further from Powerpoint – recreating the 35 mm slide.  It’s a simple example, but I think it should make the point elegantly. Now, as to ‘getting started with digital tools’, I could’ve just sent the students to the DiRT wiki (which I am indeed doing), leaving it at that, but again, I wanted to make my larger point have more resonance. In which case, I’m going to take them through my digital workflow as I use topic modeling to try to understand deeper structures in the corpus of ancient writers. I’m not pretending to comprehensiveness this morning. Rather, I am using my own research (and how I came to this research) as a trajectory for launching students into their own research. Below is my prezi; please feel free to use, adapt, alter accordingly to your own needs.

[gigya  src=”http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf&#8221; type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” width=”550″ height=”400″ bgcolor=”#ffffff” flashvars=”prezi_id=jeohvtgf32aa&amp;lock_to_path=0&amp;color=ffffff&amp;autoplay=no&amp;autohide_ctrls=0″ href=”http://prezi.com/jeohvtgf32aa/digital-tools-perspectives-for-new-graduate-students-in-history/”>Digital Tools & Perspectives for New Graduate Students in History</a> on <a href=”http://prezi.com”>Prezi</a></p></div></div>%5D