Workflows for Doing Historical Work in IPE
Primers
Are you new to working with archival sources? The UK National Archives offers a deep dive on archival research in a digital age. It might be useful as some background for those who have not done archival work before.
Robert Karl has also made several useful primers:
Karl, Robert. “Research Methods for Historians. Part 1: Secondary Sources + Best Practices.” YouTube: 21 July 2018. Link
Karl, Robert. “Research Methods for Historians. Part 2: Digitizing + Organizing Archival Sources.” YouTube: 21 July 2018. Link
Users’ Perspectives on Archives
Typically, each “archive” has its own website. But wouldn’t it be nice to get some standard perspective on what it is like to really work in the world’s many archives? For instance, is there a cafe nearby? What is the temperature like? &c.
Fortunately, there is a wonderful, collaborative website/wiki that allows contributors to share these perspectives: Archives Made Easy.
See, for example, the UK National Archives.
Programming Historian
The Programming Historian website offers many great “lessons” from scholars across the field/discipline of history. These will prove useful for both qualitative and quantitative approaches.
I highly recommend these lessons in particular:
working with batches of pdf files
cleaning ocrd text with regular expressions
intro to bash
preserving your research-data
sustainable authorship in plain text using pandoc and markdown
Sample Spreadsheet
Over the years, I have evolved a spreadsheet that helps me keep track of the archival materials that I use in my research. The highly specified design follows from much experience of organising, filtering, and consulting the spreadsheet. A copy is available here. Within the spreadsheet, please consult the comments/notes in the column titles for usage information. These materials are all licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.