Sources to Data: Recording, Sorting, and Analysing Historical Sources Digitally

Course Details

• You know your historical sources and your research questions, but how do you decide which digital tools might help you most, and how to structure your research data within them? 
• How do you organise your research notes, tables, or spreadsheets most effectively to be able to sort, search or analyse to answer your questions? 
• Do you need to transcribe your primary sources, summarize them, or create tables of key details – and which columns should your tables have?

This short course brings together analysis of historical primary sources with a basic introduction to best practice with spreadsheets and other digital research organisation tools, to help all kinds of historical researchers gain confidence in organising their research digitally. 

The course will begin with analysis of some historical primary sources to think about questions they might help answer, and which bits of information might be most useful in answering them. Planning out what information is available, what is consistent, and what might need to be inferred or cross-referenced, and how this ties to your research needs, are all crucial to effective design of your research project. This is the process of ‘data modelling’.

We will move on to consider best practice with design and organisation of spreadsheets, which are the most common way of recording and working with historical materials. This includes both the design and ‘modelling’ of how to set out your columns and sheets, and key skills for making efficient and effective use of tools like Microsoft Excel. Finally, we will consider other ways of digitally organising historical research materials, including tagged notebooks and dedicated qualitative analysis software such as NVivo.

There are no pre-requisites for this course, but you should be confident in terms of general computer literacy, and be prepared to talk about the primary sources you will use in your own research.

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Please note that this course will be taking place in-person only, and that the number of places available is limited.

In order to provide an interactive, dynamic short course experience the IHR requires a minimum number of delegates to run the short course.

If a course is cancelled due to low enrolment, delegates will be offered the option of a refund or a transfer on to the same course at a later date.