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Welcome to the research and teaching wiki of William J Turkel. Please e-mail me at william.j.turkel@gmail.com if you have any questions.

(29 Dec 2008. This site is still under construction... In particular, the archive for Digital History Hacks, and past course and project pages are mostly unfinished.)

Interactive, Ambient and Tangible Devices for Knowledge Mobilization (2008-). In my previous work I studied the ways that people reconstruct the past from its material traces (The Archive of Place, UBC Press, 2007). In this new research program, I'm looking at ways to build historical interpretations into physical devices and environments. I have put together a modest Lab for Humanistic Fabrication with an associated Fabrication Wiki.

Hacking as a Way of Knowing (2009). I'm organizing a workshop with Edward Jones-Imhotep on the theme of "E-waste and environmental data," to be held in Toronto in May 2009.

Digital History Hacks: Methodology for the Infinite Archive (2005-08). For three years I wrote a research weblog at Blogger.com. My premise was that the web constitutes the largest, most easily-accessible archive that people have ever created, and also the most radically unfamiliar. Material is being added to the web at an exponential rate, but it is of low average quality; it usually has an uncertain provenance and uncertain lifespan. Much of it is created by machines and meant to be ‘understood’ by other machines. Historians and other humanists and social scientists need a new set of computational tools for dealing with the web. About half of the posts in Digital History Hacks were devoted to making the argument for a new historical discipline that is analogous to bioinformatics, and draws on machine learning, computational linguistics, information retrieval and other fields. The rest of the posts were about hacks, short programs that demonstrate the potential of digital history, and were designed to be shared, extended or modified (i.e., hacked) by others. There is an archive of source code and other files for Digital History Hacks on this wiki.

The Programming Historian (2007). With Alan MacEachern I wrote a short open-access monograph on Python programming for historians and other humanists. The book is openly accessible on the NiCHE website in the form of a wiki.

Place-based Computing (2004-06). The convergence of handheld computing devices and GPS receivers makes it possible to augment any place with layers of digital information. Place-based computing has the potential to radically change the way that we experience places and understand the past.

The explosion of printed material after the 15th century fundamentally changed scholarship, making it much easier to compare different editions of the same text, making it possible to read extensively as well as intensively, and creating the conditions for widespread literacy. We are currently in the midst of another such transformation, one that will give us nearly instantaneous access to the contents of the world’s great libraries and archives, will radically democratize knowledge production, and will force us to think of machines as part of our audience. Historians in the 21st century will still need to be able to read closely and critically, to weigh evidence and to make nuanced arguments. They will also need some new skills. They need to be able to digitize and digitally archive existing sources; to create useful metadata; to find and interpret sources that were “born digital”; to expose repositories through APIs; to write programs that search, spider, scrape and mine; and to create bots and other computational agents that interact seamlessly with one another and with human analysts.

Digital History Graduate Course. A graduate course on digital history that emphasizes both the presentation of history on the web and in interactive systems, and the use of computational techniques to work with digital resources.

• UWO History 9808 2008-09. Group project on William Harvey's work on the circulation of the blood.
  

• UWO History 513 2007-08. Group project on The Sky.

Digital History Internships. The digital history internship program provides some financial support to graduate students who wish to experiment with computational methods or new technologies for historical research and teaching. For more information see the individual project pages.

• (under construction)

Public History MA Projects. Group projects created by students in the Western Public History MA program.

• (under construction)

Undergraduate Course. Rob MacDougall and I teach a course on big / global history from the big bang to human extinction, with an emphasis on math, science, technology, medicine and environment.

• UWO History 1805 2008-09 Course Prep. (Page is open only to course instructors.)

Please see the documentation here