Thanks to Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, an environmental historian post-doc at Università degli Studi di Trento in Italy, the Programming Historian (1st ed.) is now available for download as a PDF. This should make it easier to follow along with for those who prefer a hard copy, or to dedicate their browser window to their programming endeavours.

Download the full e-book: The Programming Historian, 1st ed.

Thanks again Wilko!

In a Skype conference call yesterday with the NiCHE New Scholars committee, the conversation turned to Twitter. Sean Kheraj and I both maintain more than one account, one in our own names, and one which broadcasts information about web-based projects we work on. Two of the members proudly proclaimed, “I've thus far resisted Twitter.” [ Click here to read more » ]

NiCHE is sponsoring a slidecast competition to increase awareness of topics int he study of history and environment. Each slidecast is a five-minute audio presentation accompanied by fifteen slides, three per minute.

The subject matter is up to you as long as it has something to do with history and environment.

Submissions will appear both on the NiCHE website and the "NiCHE Canada" YouTube channel. They can be in English or French. The deadline for submissions is 15 November 2009. All entrants must be 18 years of age or older. [ Click here to read more » ]

On 16-17 October, the NiCHE Digital Infrastructure will be hosting a SSHRC-funded workshop on Application Programming Interfaces for the Digital Humanities. Historians and other humanists now have access to digital primary and secondary sources on an unprecedented scale, but almost all of these resources are delivered through web browsers with the assumption that a person will be plodding through them one at at time. [ Click here to read more » ]

Thirty-six straight days of full-time work for Adam Crymble and I, but we've finally gone live with the new NiCHE site. Now we'll continue to improve it into the fall, correcting bugs, improving the layout and adding plenty of new features. Some of the changes are obvious on the surface. We have a new permanent URL (http://niche-canada.org), one which better reflects the geographically-dispersed nature of our knowledge cluster. [ Click here to read more » ]

We've updated a number of features of the website and moved to a brand-new address: http://niche-canada.org Please change your bookmarks to point to our new URL. The old address will redirect here for a while, but this is our new permanent home. We've also done our best to track down bugs and gremlins, but if you notice anything wrong with the site, please e-mail Bill Turkel or Adam Crymble

We now have a directory of NiCHE members that allows you to search by name, by research interest or by participation in NiCHE activities. Want to find other people with an interest in eighteenth-century Arctic and Subarctic climate? Want to track down the fellow you met at the Toronto summer school who was named "Mac-something"? [ Click here to read more » ]

¿Hablas español?

Me neither, but if you did and you wanted to learn how to incorporate computer programming into your research, now you can. Sections of the Programming Historian have been translated into Spanish - at least I think it's Spanish - and posted on 'Tapera', a Spanish language digital humanities blog. The examples have been converted from the Canadian Dictionary of Biography into something more culturally relevant to a Spanish speaking audience, but the ideas are still there. [ Click here to read more » ]