debkeepr is now—finally—on CRAN with version 0.1.1! debkeepr integrates non-decimal currencies that use tripartite or tetrapartite systems into the methodologies of Digital Humanities and the practices of reproducible research. The package makes it possible for historical non-decimal currencies, such as the tripartite system of pounds, shillings, and pence (£465 12s. 8d.), to behave like decimalized values through the implementation of the deb_lsd, deb_tetra, and deb_decimal vector types...| A Rogue Historian
Last night, the 17th of November, 2022, I, like so many others, was rather gleefully, but also sadly, doom scrolling through Twitter as Elon Musk seemed to be rocketing the social network into the ground at amazing speed. It seemed a good time to heed the warning that so many had put out about downloading your twitter data: your tweets, those you follow, your followers, and maybe the Twitter lists that you have created or followed. I knew that much of this could be done with the rtweet packag...| A Rogue Historian
It has been a while since I have posted anything new to this site. I had a pretty good pace of posting going for a while and then things got busy, a pandemic occurred, and I moved a couple of times, and somehow it has now been four years since I have made a new post. Every couple of months I would get the itch to write something new, but I just never got around to doing it. But now I hoping to make a concerted effort to revitalize the blog. There are two main reasons for doing so now: an inte...| A Rogue Historian
Note: The API for debkeepr described in this post has been deprecated. For the new API, see the debkeepr website and the blog post announcing debkeepr’s release on CRAN. You can now install the released version of debkeepr from CRAN or the development version on GitHub: # Install CRAN releaseinstall.packages("debkeepr")# Install development version# install.packages("pak")pak::pak("jessesadler/debkeepr") --- After an extensive period of iteration and a long but rewarding process of learning...| A Rogue Historian
It was a year ago today that I launched this website with a post introducing myself and the goals for the blog. When I launched the site, I was at the beginning of teaching myself about digital humanities and how to code in R. Building this Hugo site was part of my learning process. I learned about the command line, Git, and GitHub, not to mention a bit of HTML and CSS to get the website up and going. I also wanted to share my progress and provide information for others who might want to go d...| A Rogue Historian
In 1569 the Flemish cartographer and mathematician Gerardus Mercator published a new world map under the title “New and more complete representation of the terrestrial globe properly adapted for use in navigation.” The title of the map points to Mercator’s main claim for its usefulness, which he expounded upon in the map’s legends. Mercator presented his map as not only an accurate representation of the known world, but also as a particularly useful map for the purposes of navigation....| A Rogue Historian
The previous post provided an introduction to the sp and sf packages and how they represent spatial data in R. There I discussed the creation of Spatial and sf objects from data with longitude and latitude values and the process of making maps with the two packages. In this post I will provide further background for the sf package by going into the details of the structure of sf objects and explaining how the package implements the Simple Features open standard. It is certainly not necessary ...| A Rogue Historian
The geographic visualization of data makes up one of the major branches of the Digital Humanities toolkit. There are a plethora of tools that can visualize geographic information from full-scale GIS applications such as ArcGIS and QGIS to web-based tools like Google maps to any number of programing languages. There are advantages and disadvantages to these different types of tools. Using a command-line interface has a steep learning curve, but it has the benefit of enabling approaches to anal...| A Rogue Historian
Over a wide range of fields network analysis has become an increasingly popular tool for scholars to deal with the complexity of the interrelationships between actors of all sorts. The promise of network analysis is the placement of significance on the relationships between actors, rather than seeing actors as isolated entities. The emphasis on complexity, along with the creation of a variety of algorithms to measure various aspects of networks, makes network analysis a central tool for digit...| A Rogue Historian
In the previous post I discussed some reasons to use R instead of Excel to analyze and visualize data and provided a brief introduction to the R programming language. That post used an example of letters sent to the sixteenth-century merchant Daniel van der Meulen in 1585. One aspect missing from the analysis was a geographical visualization of the data. This post will provide an introduction to geocoding and mapping location data using the ggmap package for R, which enables the creation of m...| A Rogue Historian
Quantitative research often begins with the humble process of counting. Historical documents are never as plentiful as a historian would wish, but counting words, material objects, court cases, etc. can lead to a better understanding of the sources and the subject under study. When beginning the process of counting, the first instinct is to open a spreadsheet. The end result might be the production of tables and charts created in the very same spreadsheet document. In this post, I want to sho...| A Rogue Historian
Digital humanities holds the promise of increasing the means by which scholars are able to analyze and present data. Though some sentiments about the significance of digital humanities might be overblown, there is no doubt that the more ways we have to analyze sources the better. Learning a variety of the tools that make up the rather nebulous universe of digital humanities is like learning a new language. It opens up new possibilities that were previously closed or necessitated the expertise...| A Rogue Historian
In the process of learning about how I could use digital technologies to better organize my research, I quickly started to think about how I might extend these skills to produce new kinds of outputs.1 I was familiar with the concept of digital humanities, but the step from an internal process of organizing research and writing to production seemed both too nebulous and difficult. Digital humanities also seemed to concentrate on the visual. This was intriguing, but did not present itself as th...| A Rogue Historian
In the spring of 2011, I was in the middle of doing research for my dissertation. I had recently returned from my second extended trip to the archives in the Netherlands and Belgium and had accumulated a ton of notes. I knew that technology had drastically altered the possibilities for research, but the fundamentals of my own workflow were hardly different than they had been when I began undergrad in the early 2000s. Sure, I used the internet to watch Netflix, but the basic tools—centered o...| A Rogue Historian
An introduction to the website on history and digital humanities| www.jessesadler.com