Colin Wilder

Law reformation projects in the states of the Holy Roman Empire constitute an important link between “The Reformation” of the 16th century and state-building of the 17th century.  Like confessionalization, these projects reflect the growth of princely political monopolies.  Legal reforms promulgated from regional regimes in the Hessian area in Darmstadt (1569, 1578), Solms (1571), Marburg (1572) and Frankfurt (1578) were nodes in a network of knowledge, bringing together customary and Roman law, in court and in country.  Typically, law reform commenced with a survey of existing custom, in which standard questions were put to impaneled local juries.  Some reform projects (e.g. Marburg) resulted in nothing more than reports, to be read in the regime centers by elite legal operators who were tasked to reconcile these accounts with one another and with learned law.  Others (e.g. Solms) resulted in new codes which remained in use at the appellate level for centuries.  These projects also both produced and were the product of scholarly networks.  Chanceries and universities in the Hessian region were welcoming harbors for Protestant scholars traveling to and from Paris, Milan, Geneva, Freiburg, Wittenberg, and the Netherlands.  These traveling literary republicans brought with them state of the art ideas about man and God and law.  Ideas also traveled within the region from one regime to another, as teachers trained students and as professionals moved from regime to regime.  Law reformation continued through the 17th century as the pace and objectivity of police regulation in the larger and more progressive polities increased, as smaller, subsovereign polities such as Friedberg in Hessen followed suit, and generally as states created taught webs of appellate jurisdiction throughout their territories based on the new universal, objective laws.  Such serial connections of influence and parallels of ideas and execution thus constituted an important, locally inflected category of reformation in the early modern period.

In this paper, I discuss an incipient research project, the systematic study of library collections in the Hessian and Rhine-Main region of Germany in the early modern period.

Project stages and themes:

I envision a multi-stage project which includes, to begin with, data acquisition; selection or adaptation of an appropriate metadata schema; creation of proper dataset; general surveys of collecting and library creation in the region; and analysis of the content of both individual collections and of library collecting in the region taken as a whole. Connecting to my present scholarship on legal history, I intend for the final stage of the project to be a detailed study of legal materials in these collections, including of course special legal collections such as those of law faculties. At the end, I expect to publish the metadata schemas and source code used in the project, should these prove useful to others.

Scope:

The period studied is ultimately very long – the early Reformation through the dissolution of many libraries in the Napoleonic Wars and aftermath. Catalog collections in the period usually changed slowly, albeit punctuated by sharp sudden changes e.g. the early Reformation or the wartime plunder of 1618-1648. To use a metaphor from physics, libraries may be thought of as constituting masses of intellectual capital, persisting over a long period and undergoing only slow change, with high inertia and strong gravitational pull toward them. They tend to change more slowly than regimes or even political boundaries, reflecting a kind of slow Braudelian spiritual development of a culture.

The geographical scope of the work is a region rather than an empire, a nation, a state, a city, or a single institution. In the course of earlier research for my doctoral thesis and monograph, I have seen in great detail how universities, other educational institutions, and lordly courts may be thought of as nodes in a network which professionals (e.g. jurists) and scholars (e.g. historians, archivists, antiquarians) traversed throughout their careers. That said, a degree of regionalism is also apparent in legal scholarship, with jurists using a combination of important national (imperial) historical materials and materials of local origin which reflect local events and customs.

The study focuses on the libraries of 13 institutions in 9 localities in the region. These include the Stadbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, the abbey of Fulda, the Adolphsuniversität Fulda, the University of Giessen, the Leih-Bibliothek zu Hanau, the Regierungsbibliothek Hanau, the Hohe Schule Herborn, the Lateinische Schule Herborn, the Gymnasium zu Hersfeld, the (Landes-) Bibliothek zu Kassel, the Hofschule zu Kassel, the Universitätsbibliothek Marburg, the Samthofgericht Marburg, a number of small collections in the many small Nassau lordships. Two large private collections in the region that would be ideal objects of study would be those of Zacharias Konrad von Uffenbach (40,000 works) and Johann Georg Estor (9,000 works).

There are a number of outliers which I have been collecting information on but which (at present) I do not intend to include in the study. These include the abbey of Lorsch (with its close ties to Fulda, but about 60 km south of Frankfurt) and the cathedral administration of Mainz (which though geographically proximate was almost invisible because Catholic). I also have data for a number of printers and book sellers in Frankfurt, Herborn, and Hersfeld, though at this time I do not foresee adding the study of the new book market to the project. The broader comparative field is of course scholarship on collecting and reading patterns across Germany or in other parts of Europe for the same period.

Law libraries excepted, the average library collection contains the usual mixture of belles lettres, histories, natural science, liturgy, Bibles, theology, law, legal deeds, and diet resolutions.

This article is an experiment in applying some techniques from text analysis and network analysis to book history, specifically to the study of the title catalogs of four libraries in Germany in the 17th and 18th centuries. My goal is to make empirical discoveries about the collections that would be difficult or impossible to do through purely reading and study of the 1,296 titles contained in the four collections. First, I briefly discuss the domain of work – in time and space, and the model of library collections I employ. Second, I account for the methods I employ and introduce the theory of distant reading that informs the study. Third, I present findings, in several areas – general findings, findings about law libraries in Marburg, and findings about the city library of Frankfurt. I contend that, despite the limitations of the methods, some real contributions to our knowledge about these collections and perhaps others like them can be made with these methods.

In the past millennium in Europe, there have been thousands of polities and millions of laws. This article contributes to efforts by historians and sociologists to make some sense of this sprawl by constructing common types of law and legal change. Such types constitute distinctive patterns by which historical actors change names, ideas and applications of rules of law under various circumstances. Three classic forms of change, namely legislation, mutation of custom and judge-made law, were described by Max Weber. To Weber’s model I add four new types or motifs of change, which I dub legal deeds, voice-supersession, legal fictions and anthropological expansion. The major advance of the four motifs is that they each combine what could be called a semantic and a social view of legal change. That is, they take seriously the fact that law is often bound in a self-conscious tradition of thought and practice. But each motif of change is also characterized by a typified social configuration of legal operators and legal subjects, who apply competing ideas to one another in distinctive ways. The paradigm of law in which the four motifs are embedded is evolutionary, pluralist and liberal, in that it posits creative social organization by multiple, independent, interacting individuals in society, weaving cumulative, complex orders.

This theory makes several significant scholarly interventions. First, it attempts to reconcile outstanding semantic and social theories of legal change. Second, it historicizes legal pluralism, while giving evolutionary theory a healthy dose of contingency. Third, the four motifs should also be serviceable to intellectual historians as tools for describing how historical actors interact with traditions generally. Tradition need not be viewed as conservative or even overwhelmingly static. This paradigm may help historians and social scientists assess how the force of the status quo balances against the power of individuals to innovate.

In this paper, we identify the most accurate method of clustering to deduplicate the past centuries book records from multiple libraries for data analysis out of five common algorithms. The presence of duplicate records is a major concern in data analysis. The dataset we studied contains over 5 million records of books published in European languages between 1500 and 1800 in the Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) data format from 17,983 libraries in 123 countries. However, each book record was archived by the library owning it. This creates a consistency problem in which the same book was archived in a slightly different way between libraries. Moreover, the change in geography and language over the past centuries also affects data consistency regarding the name of a person and place. Many slightly different names represent the same record. Analyzing such a dataset without proper cleaning will misrepresent the result. Due to the size of the dataset and unknown number of duplicate records with variation, it is impractical to create a lookup table to replace each record. To solve this problem, we use data clustering to deduplicate this dataset. Our work is informed by scholarship on European History and the History of the Book. We find that clustering is an effective method for detecting the slight differences in records caused by the above-mentioned cataloging inconsistencies. Our foundation was experimentation with several candidate clustering methods on a test dataset. The test dataset was prepared by corrupting a clean dataset according to the same characteristics found in the whole dataset. The clean dataset contains roughly 1,000 random records in English, German, French, and Latin with approximately the same language distribution and average record lengths as the whole dataset. Our evaluation reveals that some clustering algorithms can achieve accuracy up to 0.97072. The clustering techniques perform well on the dataset we studied as demonstrated in this paper.

In this paper, we identify the most accurate method of clustering to deduplicate the past centuries book records from multiple libraries for data analysis out of five common algorithms. The presence of duplicate records is a major concern in data analysis. The dataset we studied contains over 5 million records of books published in European languages between 1500 and 1800 in the Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) data format from 17,983 libraries in 123 countries. However, each book record was archived by the library owning it. This creates a consistency problem in which the same book was archived in a slightly different way between libraries. Moreover, the change in geography and language over the past centuries also affects data consistency regarding the name of a person and place. Many slightly different names represent the same record. Analyzing such a dataset without proper cleaning will misrepresent the result. Due to the size of the dataset and unknown number of duplicate rec...

1 Abstract In this paper, we identify the most accurate method of clustering to deduplicate the past centuries book records from multiple libraries for data analysis out of five common algorithms. The presence of duplicate records is a major concern in data analysis. The dataset we studied contains over 5 million records of books published in European languages between 1500 and 1800 in the Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) data format from 17,983 libraries in 123 countries. However, each book record was archived by the library owning it. This creates a consistency problem in which the same book was archived in a slightly different way between libraries. Moreover, the change in geography and language over the past centuries also affects data consistency regarding the name of a person and place. Many slightly different names represent the same record. Analyzing such a dataset without proper cleaning will misrepresent the result. Due to the size of the dataset and unknown number of duplicate records with variation, it is impractical to create a lookup table to replace each record. To solve this problem, we use data clustering to deduplicate this dataset. Our work is informed by scholarship on European History and the History of the Book. We find that clustering is an effective method for detecting the slight differences in records caused by the above-mentioned cataloging inconsistencies. Our foundation was experimentation with several candidate clustering methods on a test dataset. The test dataset was prepared by corrupting a clean dataset according to the same characteristics found in the whole dataset. The clean dataset contains roughly 1,000 random records in English, German, French, and Latin.

Motivated by the important archaeological application of exploring cultural heritage objects, in this paper we study the challenging problem of automatically segmenting curve structures that are very weakly stamped or carved on an object surface in the form of a highly noisy depth map. Different from most classical low-level image segmentation methods that are known to be very sensitive to the noise and occlusions, we propose a new supervised learning algorithm based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to implicitly learn and utilize more curve geometry and pattern information for addressing this challenging problem. More specifically, we first propose a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) to estimate the skeleton of curve structures and at each skeleton pixel, a scale value is estimated to reflect the local curve width. Then we propose a dense prediction network to refine the estimated curve skeletons. Based on the estimated scale values, we finally develop an adaptive thresholding algorithm to achieve the final segmentation of curve structures. In the experiment, we validate the performance of the proposed method on a dataset of depth images scanned from unearthed pottery shards dating to the Woodland period of Southeastern North America.

Motivated by the important archaeological application of exploring cultural heritage objects, in this paper we study the challenging problem of automatically segmenting curve structures that are very weakly stamped or carved on an object surface in the form of a highly noisy depth map. Different from most classical low-level image segmentation methods that are known to be very sensitive to the noise and occlusions, we propose a new supervised learning algorithm based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to implicitly learn and utilize more curve geometry and pattern information for addressing this challenging problem. More specifically, we first propose a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) to estimate the skeleton of curve structures and at each skeleton pixel, a scale value is estimated to reflect the local curve width. Then we propose a dense prediction network to refine the estimated curve skeletons. Based on the estimated scale values, we finally develop an adaptive thresholding...

The surfaces of many cultural heritage objects were embellished with various patterns, especially curve patterns. In practice, most of the unearthed cultural heritage objects are highly fragmented, e.g., sherds of potteries or vessels, and each of them only shows a very small portion of the underlying full design, with noise and deformations. The goal of this paper is to address the challenging problem of automatically identifying the underlying full design of curve patterns from such a sherd. Specifically, we formulate this problem as template matching: curve structure segmented from the sherd is matched to each location with each possible orientation of each known full design. In this paper, we propose a new two-stage matching algorithm, with a different matching cost in each stage. In Stage 1, we use a traditional template matching, which is highly computationally efficient, over the whole search space and identify a small set of candidate matchings. In Stage 2, we derive a new m...

Study of cultural-heritage objects with embellished realistic and abstract designs made up of connected and intertwined curves crosscuts a number of related disciplines, including archaeology, art history, and heritage management. However, many objects, such as pottery sherds found in the archaeological record, are fragmentary, making the underlying complete designs unknowable at the scale of the sherd fragment. The challenge to reconstruct and study complete designs is stymied because 1) most fragmentary cultural-heritage objects contain only a small portion of the underlying full design, 2) in the case of a stamping application, the same design may be applied multiple times with spatial overlap on one object, and 3) curve patterns detected on an object are usually incomplete and noisy. As a result, classical curve-pattern matching algorithms, such as Chamfer matching, may perform poorly in identifying the underlying design. In this paper, we develop a new partial-to-global curve m...

Caspar Friedrich Dernbach's wild ride performed a foundation in two different senses. First, was a performance of taking possession. That is, these actions were coded to indicate the inaugural use of the land, its fruit, and the man-made infrastructure on it, such as the mill. Second, the coded acts in the ride formed part of what was interpreted to be a corpus or body of primitive Germanic law which intellectuals could research, treasure and reflect upon. In this chapter, the author offers three such fundamentalisms: antiquarianism, ancient constitutionalism and state of nature arguments. Keywords:ancient constitutionalism; antiquarianism; Caspar Friedrich Dernbach; primitive Germanic law

This article presents the contexts, methods, contributions, and preliminary findings of Snowvision, a digital archaeology project developed by faculty and students at the University of South Carolina and the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. Snowvision uses computer vision to reconstruct southeastern Native American paddle designs from the Swift Creek period, ca. 100-850 CE. In this essay, we first present the context of the Swift Creek culture of the southeastern United States, along with broader related issues in prehistoric archaeology. Then, the relevant methods from archaeology and computer vision are introduced and discussed. We also introduce World Engraved, our public-facing digital archive of sherd designs and distributions, and explain its role in our overall project. We then explore, in some level of technical detail, the ways in which our work refines existing pattern-matching algorithms used in the field of computer vision. Finally, we discuss our accomplishments and findings to date and the possibilities for future research that Snowvision provides.

This article presents the contexts, methods, contributions, and preliminary findings of Snowvision, a digital archaeology project developed by faculty and students at the University of South Carolina and the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. Snowvision uses computer vision to reconstruct southeastern Native American paddle designs from the Swift Creek period, ca. 100-850 CE. In this essay, we first present the context of the Swift Creek culture of the southeastern United States, along with broader related issues in prehistoric archaeology. Then, the relevant methods from archaeology and computer vision are introduced and discussed. We also introduce World Engraved, our public-facing digital archive of sherd designs and distributions, and explain its role in our overall project. We then explore, in some level of technical detail, the ways in which our work refines existing pattern-matching algorithms used in the field of computer vision. Finally, we discuss our accompli...

English version (German version below):

In the eighteenth century, the state of Hesse-Cassel adopted parts of the law merchant pertaining to the use of bills of exchange. The Privy Council and High Appellate Court adapted and changed common rules governing especially who could use bills and what rights and obligations were involved in use and transfer of bills. This article presents several case studies. These show that the regime liberalized rules about which Christians and Jews, burghers and farmers could use bills. They also show that the regime augmented the rights of parties to bills and debt notes, while sometimes limiting the protections of third parties. There appears to have been a broad trend toward expanding the use of paper financial instruments to wider circles of the population and augmenting the rights of bearers and the liabilities of promisors. These changes resulted from a growing demand for a legal framework to transfer capital easily and securely, a demand that can be seen both on a societal scale and in individual actors’ motives. Intellectually, the new laws and policies were constructed from older law merchant principles, imperial common law, and natural law. The changes in law presented here fill a gap in law merchant scholarship, but more importantly they show us how the liberal economic and social order was constructed in concrete steps in Germany under the Old Regime.

Im 18. Jahrhundert übernahm die Landgrafschaft Hessen-Kassel Teile des Wechselrechts (ius cambiale), die insbesondere die Verwendung von Wechseln betrafen. Der Geheime Rat und das Ober-Appellationsgericht adaptierten und veränderten allgemeine Gesetze, die regelten, wer Wechsel verwenden konnte und welche Rechte und Pflichten mit dem Gebrauch und der Übertragung von Wechseln verbunden waren. Die vorgestellten Fallstudien zeigen, dass die Regierung die Gesetze dahingehend liberalisierte, dass die Möglichkeit, Wechsel zu gebrauchen, mehr sozialen Gruppen als bislang zur Verfügung stand. Darüber hinaus wird deutlich, dass die hessel-kasselsche Regierung die Rechte derjenigen Parteien stärkte, die ursprünglich an der Ausstellung des Wechsels oder Schuldscheins beteiligt gewesen waren – manchmal auf Kosten der Rechte später involvierter Dritter. Dadurch dass papierne Finanzinstrumente verbindlicher und verlässlicher und die Rechte ihrer Inhaber gestärkt wurden, weitete sich ihr Gebrauch auf immer größere Kreise der Bevölkerung aus. Diese Veränderungen waren die Antwort auf stärker werdende soziale und individuelle Forderungen nach einem gesetzlichen Rahmen zur einfachen und sicheren Übertragung von Kapital. Die geistigen und theoretischen Grundlagen dieser neuen Geld- und Handelspolitik lieferten ältere handelsrechtliche Grundsätze, das Reichsrecht und das Naturrecht. Die hier vorgestellten Überlegungen füllen eine Lücke in der handelsrechtlichen Forschung, zeigen aber vor allem, wie im frühneuzeitlichen Reich Schritt für Schritt eine liberale Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftsordnung errichtet wurde.

In this article, we discuss the Collex stack, a software bundle which creates digital meta-archives. A meta-archive is an electronic portal which gathers metadata for digital assets held in multiple, otherwise siloed, digital archives. Specifically we do three things here: First, we document how the Collex stack works and describe in detail how to install and customize it. We believe this to be a valuable contribution to Digital Humanities infrastructure work because there are a growing number of meta-archives which use the Collex stack despite very little public documentation of the software. Second, we give advice on how to adapt the NINES-based Collex metadata schema for such archives. Third, we offer a partial (and friendly) critique of the Collex stack, both in technical terms and in terms of its practical usefulness for meta-archive projects. An appendix contains extensive detail about metadata schemas appropriate for Collex meta-archives, as well as further critical discussion.

During the early modern period, concepts of fundamental human rights became integrated into civil and international law in Europe. This began with Hugo Grotius, who appropriated and secularized earlier thinking about fundamental rights, and then built his system of international law on this basis. Later thinkers like Johann Georg Estor actually integrated this rights construct into the civil law of the Holy Roman Empire. Thus a robust set of discourses and practices concerning fundamental rights existed during the early modern period amid jurists in Northern Europe – a period, place and set of actors which historians have not previously thought to look to for a theory of fundamental rights, much less any institutional practice.

This paper argues that historians and jurists in the Holy Roman Empire in
the eighteenth century took three approaches to ancient law, each of which
had important legacies. The three approaches were antiquarianism, ancient
constitutionalism (Rechtstraditionalismus) and state of nature arguments.
Each approach used the past differently. Antiquarian historians investigated
ideas, institutions and laws of the past for their own sake, unconnected to
present-day concerns. Finding and examining the ancient past like a timeless
Garden of Eden, antiquarians presented ancient laws or “folk” ideas as
general structures. Such laws and ideas were set forth as comparable in
dignity and sophistication to those of ancient Roman civilization. Ancient
constitutionalist arguments investigated concrete individuals and events in
the past. Such individuals were conceived as having established a distribution
of rights or laws at a discrete time in the past which underwrote the
present legal order. In other words, ancient constitutionalism investigated
how ancient right or law was established and then transmitted down through
the ages, undiminished. Finally, state of nature arguments proposed speculative
hypotheses about what laws had been established by general, idealized
actors at the birth of society. This was a stripped-down scenario, but history
nonetheless. State of nature arguments used classical legal terms and Stoic
philosophy to create a new form of philosophical foundationalism which
(like ancient constitutionalism) served present purposes. I present examples
of these three approaches in the works of some of a number of jurists and
legal historians of the period, including Johann Georg Estor, Hugo Grotius,
Johann Leonhard Hauschild, Johann Nikolaus Hert, Justus Möser and Heinrich
Christian Senckenberg.

This brief document summarizes my areas of college and graduate teaching at the University of South Carolina and speaks briefly to my philosophy of teaching as well. My first, original area of teaching focus was in Digital History. My current focus is embodied in a suite of courses on the history of capitalism, business, public finance, money and international finance and monetary policy. My next area of course development will be courses on the history of European and American constitutional and republican thought.

In this class, students learn about how, when and why capitalism emerged as the dominant socio-economic system in Europe and later America over the past millennium.  We begin by learning about the foundations of capitalism in trading networks in northern Europe and Italy in the late middle ages. The next unit of the course focuses on the 16th and 17th centuries, especially in England, which is often regarded as capitalism’s country of origin. The focus then shifts to mercantilism, imperialism, and colonialism in the 17th-19th centuries, followed by the Industrial Revolution. Finally we will consider the development of the modern system of international trade and finance that has characterized global capitalism since World War 2.  Major themes will be trade, agriculture, technology, proto-industrialization, natural resources, governance, and “soft” resources such as cultural and social capital. The readings will not favor any single theory about the emergence of capitalism, but will give equal attention to liberal, Marxist, and other schools of thought.

Major themes of course

- Definitions of capitalism: There have been several competing definitions of capitalism. For example, is it the same as a currency-based economy, production for sale at market (rather than subsistence), industrialization, or a “modern” economy?
- Periodization of the emergence of capitalism: Historians, economists, and political thinkers disagree on when capitalism developed. For instance, did it emerge with the Industrial Revolution, transatlantic trade, the Italian Renaissance, or even earlier?
- Universality of capitalism: Is capitalism something that humans everywhere can and should practice, or is it somehow really only European?
- Power of capitalism: What has been the relationship between capitalism and power, especially military might?
- Science, technology, and capitalism: How has the development of capitalism been related to the growth of scientific knowledge, and to the development of specific military, productive, and transportation technologies?

This course explores major periods and themes in the history of business with two main focuses. One is the history of American business from the Colonial Period through the first Internet Boom ending in about 2001. The second is the history of debt and accounting, including public and private debt, bonds, and accounting and bookkeeping practices.

There will also be some consideration of political economy and economic policy in this class. We will look at how they affect business activity. Historically, we will focus on the following: early white settlement; growth of business and finance; the Civil War period; the industrial revolution and scientific management; the populist era; the rise of big business and trusts; the progressive era and antitrust policy; the Roaring Twenties, Great Depression, New Deal and World War II; the post-War boom; the stagflation of the 1970’s; the long period of growth and bubble in the 1990’s and early 2000’s; and rise of the internet. We will consider the themes of changing business culture; labor vs. management; factors of economic growth; the role of technology in business; and the international context of American business.

This course, taught at Brown University in 2011 while I was a postdoctoral associate with the Political Theory Project, is an interdisciplinary study of the history, ethics, and economics of the wealth and poverty of nations. Students evaluate the institutions of the market using the tools of ethics, political philosophy, economics, history, and political science.  We investigate issues concerning the nature of money and prices, the role of the division of labor, business ethics, commerce and entrepreneurship, overconsumption and overpopulation, exploitation and alienation, the relationship between wealth and happiness, the motivations of market actors, the rule of law, liberty and market society, rent-seeking and corporate welfare, and more. We also conduct experiments and play games in class to illustrate certain concepts.

This is a course in the intellectual history of American republican and constitutional thought. It stretches from Montesquieu through the end of the generation of the American Founding Fathers, ca. 1748-1826. Students consider three intellectual moments and the relation between them: first, the publication and influence of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748); second, the constitutional thought of the Scottish Enlightenment (David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith); and third, the constitutional prudence of the American Founders (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams). (CWCID: Based on a course taught by Paul Rahe.)

The theme of this course is changes in the historical profession caused by the advent of personal computing and the internet over the past three decades. We will consider both the new and the old-how new digital methods are changing the way historians work, but also long-term continuities in the study of history that manifest today in new, " digital " ways. Professional innovations in two main forms will be covered (each representing about half of the course hours for the semester) – ideas and tools: (1) We will study issues confronting the profession, including digital archives; intellectual property of research and sources; scholarly collaboration; tenure and promotion; and funding issues. Toward these ends, students will read a variety of current professional literature as well as practice using and thinking critically about prominent Digital History projects such as Pleiades, the Valley of the Shadow, and text archives such as the Carlyle Letters Online. (2) We will also learn to use new forms of technology for historical research and writing – particularly computer programming methods (in Python) and web-based software. These will enable students to discover, collect, and process data from web pages and analyze large amounts of text (" distant reading "). There will also be an introduction in passing to simpler, ready-to-use software for doing things like taking notes on sources and creating and organizing large bibliographies. No prior knowledge of computer programming is assumed.