Final Project - HIST 680

The AHA’s Blog | A 10-Year Analysis

December 1, 2019 - By 

1 | Introduction

I wrote blog posts for the American Historical Association’s (AHA) AHA Today from October 2008 through February 2011. My posts covered everything from historian interviews, to podcast reviews, to teaching resources. At the time, I didn’t really realize that I was researching and participating in digital history, but in hind sight, I was able to delve into some pretty cool projects, talk to some pretty cool people, and explore some pretty cool digital history topics that have continued to gain popularity and relevance in the industry.

But then my career in government contracting took off, and I lost touch with the AHA’s blog and all of its research. This project is my attempt at brushing off the dust on the blog posts that I wrote a decade ago for AHA Today and seeing how relevant they are today, if at all, when compared to the blog posts written for Perspectives Daily in the last calendar year (December 2018-November 2019).

Note: Perspectives Daily has since replaced AHA Today, but the regular online content and intended audience remains the same, with topics ranging from general history, to career tips, to digital history projects.

Using Voyant Tools, I’m looking for similarities and differences in these blog posts over the last 10 years and hoping to glean some insight as to why certain topics have risen to and/or fallen from popularity in the digital history community.

2 | Methodology

One of the beauties of blogs is that they can be as diverse or as singular as you want, which holds true for both the AHA Today and Perspectives Daily. Both blogs maintain similar high-level categories, but since the blog post topics can run the gamut, I decided to split my research into two themes: 

  • General Interest
  • Careers
    • AHA Today: These blog posts cover primarily historian interviews via the series, Jobs and Careers in History, and career advice for prospective historians.
    • Perspectives Daily: These posts cover the Member Spotlight series, which is comparable to the Jobs and Careers in History series that I organized a decade ago.
      Note: I excluded       What to do with a BA in History because it’s outdated, only including a blog post or two once a year, not including 2019, which had no posts at all, so I thought that the Member Spotlight series would be a more relevant snapshot against the interviews I conducted while I worked for the AHA.

Once I sorted out my data, I populated four corpus views in Voyant Tools using the following Excel spreadsheets with links to all of the blog posts that I wanted to analyze:

I then updated the list of stopwords to include publication names and standard verbiage from toolbars and menus to ensure that my analysis wasn’t superficial and actually got to the heart of the blog posts. This filtered list evolved as I got into my analysis and realized that terms that looked like they’d yield insight ended up being in a menu, like professional, which I thought may be professional resources, professional historian, and so on. In reality, it was (mostly) just standard verbiage on the webpage. Ultimately, I settled on the following stopwords:

  • AHA aha
  • Today today
  • Perspectives perspectives
  • American american
  • Spotlight spotlight
  • Member member
  • Job job Jobs jobs
  • Daily daily
  • Professional professional
  • Historical historical
  • Work work

After I felt like the corpus was filtered sufficiently, I compiled two lists of the top five words in each corpus using the Trends tool, which is detailed more thoroughly in Section 4 | Analyzing the text.

The initial word clouds and trends graphics were informative and provided a solid foundation from which to dig a little deeper, but I decided to use the Correlations, Collocation, and Reader tools in my attempts at tracing the evolution of old digital history terms and potentially the rise of new themes in context of the actual blog posts. The Correlations tool shows term frequencies – i.e., terms that increase and decrease together in context – which I used as a springboard for my analysis in identifying new relationships, topics, themes, and so on. The Collocation tool identifies terms that appear near each other the most in context; I found that this data mostly identified standard verbiage more than anything, but there were a few insightful collocations that made my analytical gears turn a bit. And then the Reader tool is a compilation of all the text, which I used to skim the blog posts using the search syntax tool. Together, these tools helped me analyze common terms and identify themes to see if my AHA Today blog posts are still relevant today under the umbrella of digital history discourse. 

3 | Voyant Word Clouds

General Interest

AHA Today
Perspectives Daily

Career

AHA Today | Career Posts
AHA Today
Perspectives Daily

 

 

 

 

4 | Analyzing the text

4A | Top Five Words

General Interest: AHA Today | Perspectives Today

  1. History | History
  2. Site | Teaching
  3. Teaching | Students
  4. Resources | Research
  5. Digital | Digital
AHA Today
Perspectives Daily

Careers: AHA Today | Perspectives Today 

  1. History | History
  2. Public | Research
  3. People | Teaching
  4. Research | University
  5. Teaching | America
AHA Today | Career Trends
AHA Today
Perspectives Daily

4B | Common Words: Collocations & Correlations

General Interest Posts

  • History

    • Source: AHA Today
      Correlation: Teaching
      Collocations: Teaching, Resources, Education, Learning
      Observations: The correlation value between history and teaching is less than 0.05, indicating that this correlation is strong and valid. A lot of the general interest blog posts showcase resources for history teachers, which then also explains the collocation to resources, education, and learning. I’m a bit surprised that oral wasn’t at the top of the collocation list because I did a series on oral history projects, which touch on teaching, resources, education, and learning, but I guess the stats don’t lie!       Of course it makes sense that history is the number one term in my blog posts – everything I researched and wrote centered on history, from digital history projects, to teaching history resources, to memorializing a day in history. It’s all part of the story that I was trying to tell at the time by unearthing a spectrum of online history resources.
    • Source: Perspectives Daily
      Correlations: Teaching, Letters, Research
      Collocations: Teaching, Education, Graduate, Resources
      Observations: In Perspectives Daily, the term history spans a lot, to say the least. A lot of posts are written by historians and discuss their historical research expertise, like the abolitionist movement. However, most of the posts talked about history as a discipline, not so much specific historical research, which was an interesting change of pace because so much of what I wrote for AHA Today was profiling digital history resources. But the primary focus on history as a discipline makes sense when considering the correlation to teaching and research and also the collocation to education and resources. I was expecting the term graduate to be in the context of graduate degree in history or something along those lines, when in fact, it’s just a term in the webpage’s menu under Graduate Education.       I was curious about the letters correlation, too, so I dug a little deeper and realized that all of these references were standard verbiage related to leaving comments. I didn’t filter out this term because I thought it was insightful in the context of this project – I was initially thinking that letters were written correspondences/artifacts but was able to use the tools to trace its (somewhat insignificant) usage in context.

  • Teaching

    • Source: AHA Today
      Correlations: None
      Collocations: Learning, Resources, Strategies
      Observations: This term is prevalent in my blog posts because so much of what I wrote and researched was surfacing online teaching resources. I’m a little surprised that there isn’t a correlation between teaching and resources, but the learning and resources collocations make sense to me as many of the digital history projects that I profiled provided teaching and learning resources to both the general public and teaching community. For example, I profiled the Memorial Hall Museum, which details the history of Massachusetts through interactive general interest activities as well as teaching activities created by fellow teachers and librarians. A lot of the oral history projects also have teaching resources available to the general public and to teachers alike.
      The only term that stood out to me as being a bit funny was strategies, but then I realized that it’s in the webpage’s menu, Teaching Resources & Strategies, so it’s not a terribly relevant connection.
    • Source: Perspectives Daily
      Correlations: History, Research
      Collocations: Learning, Resources, Strategies
      Observation: I realized that the content of Perspectives Daily has gotten a bit more personal, with more and more historians and teachers – i.e., boots on the ground – are contributing to the blog, offering firsthand experiences of their history career. The teaching term is what really shed light on this evolution of topics because a lot of history teachers – at the secondary education as well as collegiate level – write about, well, teaching. The posts offer glimpses into what a classroom looks like today, challenges educators face, new resources available to the teaching community, and so on. Perspectives Daily offers valuable insight and camaraderie, quite honestly, in the teaching community by sharing these firsthand experiences with others in the teaching community. It’s not all bad either! Like I said, there are often posts that share challenges but also potential solutions, which again, I think really strengthens the historian community, even if you’re not in the classroom. Public historians are educators. Digital historians are educators. If you’re a historian, you’re an educator, so I’m glad to see that teaching is still a focal point in the AHA’s blog.

The only collocation that didn’t align in context with my preconceived notion was strategies. I thought that, in context, this term would be teaching strategies, when in reality it’s in the webpage’s menu and also in the popular tag, Resources and Strategies.

  • Digital

    • Source: AHA Today
      Correlation: Teaching
      Collocations: Teaching, Learning, Resources
      Observation: Digital archives, digital libraries, digital media repositories that house oral history collections, oh my! If it was digital, I wanted to profile it, so I’m relieved that this is one of the top terms in my blog posts. I really enjoyed exploring the web to find digital history projects that provided teaching resources for educators and engaging learning avenues for the general public. Most of the digital history projects that I profiled had a teaching element of some sort, so the correlation between teaching and digital is not surprising.

Just a quick note – digital is sprinkled pretty evenly throughout the actual meat and potatoes of my blog posts, but it’s also in the menu, Digital Teaching & Learning, which skews the count just a bit.

    • Source: Perspectives Daily
      Correlations: History, Teaching, Research
      Collocations: Teaching, Resources
      Observation: The context of digital changes a bit when you look at Perspectives Daily. The correlation between digital and teaching is still very much present, but there’s also a rise in digital technologies, digital skills, digital tools, and digital literacy, which is an evolution I was hoping to see because technology has rooted so deeply that it’s not just about presenting the digital resources any more – the dialogue has grown into something much bigger. What are the ramifications of learning history in the digital age? What does it mean to share history with the public using digital tools? When I wrote the AHA Today, the conversation, as far as I understood it, wasn’t that deep yet; we were still in the look-at-how-much-history-we-can-share-with-EVERYONE phase. Now we understand that the integration of technology in the history field is far more than just a creative outlet for presenting the past, particularly when considering what this technology looks like in a modern classroom and/or to a tech savvy general public.In terms of the collocations, most of the resources were in menus and tags, and the remaining ones, from what I gathered, weren’t digital resources; they were just general references to things like natural resources in Africa, for example. The key takeaway, for me, is the connection of digital with teaching, history, and resources.

Career Posts

  • History

    • Source: AHA Today
      Correlation: Teaching
      Collocations: Careers, Teaching, Interview, Degree
      Observation: History is a pretty significant term in the career-based posts that I wrote for AHA Today because I interviewed historians in the Washington Metro area, so all of the contexts center on career advice in the history industry – public, digital, research, and so on. It’s worth noting that interview and careers are part of the blog series, Jobs and Careers in History: Interview with <name of historian>; however, the term career is referenced in other contexts, like tips for getting a career in the history field. Teaching is another term that appears in standard verbiage and menus, but it’s also referenced in a more useful way, like the recommendation to get involved with substitute teaching before committing to a full-time teaching career.
    • Source: Perspectives Daily
      Correlation: Teaching
      Collocations: University, Fields, Discipline, Teaching
      Observation: The career posts that I used from the Perspectives Daily are from their series, AHA Member Spotlight, and feature a range of career advice for prospective historians. A lot of this advice centers on teaching history and tips on how to get started on the teaching career path. Most of the other posts are general historian career advice – where the AHA member went to school (university), what they studied (discipline), and what their fields of interest are.

  • Research

    • Source: AHA Today
      Correlations: History, Teaching
      Collocations: Learning, Teaching, Submitting, Site, Pacific
      Observation: A lot of the historians that I interviewed for Jobs and Careers in History series talk about the importance of strong research skills, which all history majors have down pat. Other public historians talk about how they wish they had more time to do research, which I found pretty interesting, but many are bogged down with supervisory responsibilities.      The collocation to submitting, site and pacific are all in the menus, so they don’t offer much insight into the content.
    • Source: Perspectives Daily
      Correlations: History, Letters, Teaching
      Collocations: Teaching, Learning, Life
      Observation: A lot of the historians featured in the AHA Member Spotlight talk about how they’re AHA members to keep up with the latest research in history, teaching, and beyond. Collectively, they also talk about their various research projects, which explains why research crops up so much.

In terms of the collocations, teaching, learning, and life are in the menu. However, there is a noticeable correlation between research and teaching as many of the AHA members research and teach their fields of interest.

  • Teaching

    • Source: AHA Today
      Correlations: History
      Collocations: Learning, Thematic, Strategies, Resources, America
      Observation: One of the posts that I wrote had to do with effectively teaching history to accommodate standardized testing while still maintaining learning standards. Most of the historians that I interviewed who are teachers talk about effective strategies in the classroom, tips for getting into teaching, and the challenges teachers face. 

The collocation to thematic, strategies, resources, and America are standard verbiage in the webpage’s toolbar.

    • Source: Perspectives Daily
      Correlations: History, Letters
      Collocations: Learning, Thematic, Strategies, Resources, America
      Observation: Teaching is nearly exclusive to history in the AHA member spotlight posts – historians share favorite resources for other fellow teachers, commiserate over challenges, reflect on how they got into teaching, and, as with so many other career posts, share tips for prospective history teachers.

The collocation to thematic, strategies, resources, and America are standard verbiage in the webpage’s toolbar.

4C | Different Words: Collocations & Correlations

General Interest

  • Site

    Source: AHA Today
    Correlation: Teaching
    Collocations: Map, Teaching, Learning, and Research.
    Observations: The correlation value is 0.6, which indicates that there’s not a strong correlation between site and teaching. Using the Reader tool, I saw that site refers to website or is in the website’s standard verbiage (e.g., AHA Site Map).

  • Resources

    Source: AHA Today
    Correlation:     Teaching
    Collocations: History, Strategies, Digital, Teaching, Learning
    Observations: There are two major contexts that I observed with resources – one is available resources for prospective historians to utilize while launching their career, and the other is helping the general public understand historical resources in an effort to reinforce preservation.

    Outside of history, all of the other collocations are in the webpage’s toolbar – strategies, digital, teaching, and learning.

  • Students

    Source: Perspectives Daily
    Correlation: None
    Collocations: Faculty, History, Digital, Skills, Career
    Observations: This is probably one of the terms that actually gets to the heart of the general interest articles – i.e., it’s a term worth exploring. One of the articles is about students who attended the Omnibus College: America’s College on Wheels during the 1930s. Many other articles center on students in the classroom, both secondary education and college; students as they correlate to specific teaching methods, particularly in the technology age; the perils of graduate students – i.e., not enough money, too much work.The students collocation to digital is prominent in the posts published in the last calendar year because the topic of teaching in the digital age, researching in the digital age, and being a historian in the digital age is a bit of a hot topic. (Yay! I found something!)

    What’s interesting is that, as we’ve talked about and explored this semester, digital history is ever-evolving, meaning that it’s growing quickly and is a bit hard to keep up with as a researcher and/or lay person. Many of the Perspectives Daily posts discuss just that – how to keep up. They’re almost like survival guides! How to be a graduate advisor in the digital age. How to teach elementary history curricula in the digital age. How to write a PhD dissertation in the digital age. This is what I was hoping to see in my analysis. I profiled digital history projects between 2008 and 2010, but digital history hadn’t quite rooted in the classroom the way it has today, so it’s fascinating to read through the latest blog posts over the past year and see that digital historians (and historians in general) are still trying to find their collective footing in a fast-paced technological world.

  • Research

    Source: Perspective Daily
    Correlation:     Digital, Teaching, History
    Collocations: Teaching, Life, Learning
    Observations: Teaching and history seem to be the most connected to research when placed in context. Taken as a whole, research covers just what you’d think it’d cover – researchers’ research. The blog posts cover a spectrum of topics, from archival research to researching the how to accommodate archive users with disabilities. This term showcases the diverse subject matter provided on Perspectives Daily and underscores the vastness of historical research (not just digital historical research). 

Career

  • Public

    Source: AHA Today
    Correlation: None
    Collocations: History, Historians, Field, Academic
    Observations: I’m surprised that there isn’t a correlation between history and public because almost all of the public references are public history, but at least it’s one of the collocations. So yes, a lot of the interviews that I conducted were with public historians, where they explained the types of work that they do, the programs they create, the goals they have, the challenges they face, and so on. The collocation to field is in relation to the historian’s field of study, interest, and/or career. 

  • People

Source: AHA Today
Correlation: None
Collocations: History
Observations: History is all about people, so historians talk about people of yesteryear. I noticed that people is also used as an umbrella reference to the general public. For example, “What kind of misperceptions do you think people have towards those with a history degree?” Another historian said, “We like to tell stories, and that’s how we educate people.”

  • University

Source: Perspectives Daily
Correlation: None
Collocations: History, PhD, MA
Observations: Outside of being included the webpage’s menu, university is used in context of academic credentials, which explains its collocation near history, PhD, and MA.

  • America

Source: Perspectives Daily
Correlation: History, Letters, Teaching
Collocations: East, Thematic, Teaching, Middle
Observations: This is another term that’s in the webpage’s menu and that’s also in reference to America as a country.

5 | Final thoughts

On the surface, Voyant Tools seems like an interesting text analysis tool that spits out these colorful word clouds and basic graphics, but when you go just a pinch below the surface, you realize that the analytical tools available are expansive, if not a bit overwhelming. It took some time for me to work through the tools to settle on which ones to ultimately use for my analysis. I wanted to use other visualization tools, like the Bubbles and TermsBerry – mainly because they’re cool – but I moved forward with the Correlations, Collocations, and Reader tools because they provided an avenue for me to really analyze the text in context, which was my goal for digging into what’s changed in the digital history field and what’s remained the same.

I came into this project thinking that my AHA Today blog posts would be considered archaic at this point given the technological growth in the last decade, but the AHA has remained true to what I see as part of its mission of creating a network of historians and sharing the latest research with its user community. One of the takeaways that struck me the most in this analysis is the sense of community that Perspectives Daily seems to have cultivated, a community that I’m not entirely sure was there when I wrote for AHA Today. I don’t know if it’s in part due to a new editorial staff, or the rise in the AHA’s popularity, or the evolving blog content to remain relevant, or perhaps a combination of all of the above. What I do know is that the Perspectives Daily posts from the last calendar year are intellectually stimulating yet accessible to the masses. Everything from the general interest posts to the member spotlights seem to make history as a discipline and history as a profession more approachable because of the personal element. Historians aren’t talking above anyone or at anyone in these pieces; they’re talking about their passions, their concerns, their insights in a very accessible way that I’m not sure we nailed when I was a part of the staff. Not that we were talking above anyone! I just don’t think that the readership was then what it is today, so while we were profiling basic digital history projects to give educators a starting point in their classrooms and providing basic career advice to prospective historians, now the blog posts are deeply insightful on what history looks like in a modern context.

5A | General Interest Reflection

The following are the top three shared words from my AHA Today writings and the current Perspectives Daily posts:

  • History is a bit of a no-brainer because it’s a blog by historians for historians; however, the history references that I made in my posts were typically in relation to historical events or digital history projects. Today, on Perspectives Daily, there seems to be a shift towards, as I mentioned earlier, history as a discipline, so there’s a focus on strategies for teaching history, techniques for researching history, challenges facing history in a digital age, and so on. It’s not just about profiling interesting digital history projects or digital archives; there’s a lot more discussion around the discipline as a whole, which I think helps contribute to the ever-growing network of historians to communicate, commiserate, and collaborate.
  • Teaching is another key term because historians, no matter their specialty, are almost always educators of some sort, if not exclusively. Public historians are educating the general public. Digital historians are educating the world. History professors in college and history teachers in secondary education are educating the next generation. I think that it’s one of the most crucial elements of all that the AHA has to offer because it’s a network of historians sharing teaching strategies, techniques, resources, tools, challenges, solutions, and so much more. It’s everything, so I’m glad to see that my opinions align with the sheer numbers in both sets of blog posts. (Validation!)
  • Digital is a term I was hoping would crop up but wasn’t entirely sure it would, and then it did, so YAY. The context, like history, has changed a bit to accommodate a more tech savvy authorship and readership. When I wrote about digital history, it was almost exclusively in the context of digital history projects and helping spread the word about all of the solid, creative, innovative ways that history enthusiasts and history educators can explore and teach history. Now, digital is a discipline, really. The Perspectives Daily posts talk about digital skills, digital tools, and digital literacy, which are dramatically different from my original writings. (Not that other historians weren’t queued into this dialogue, but in the context of this project, I wasn’t that knowledgeable on digital history as a discipline.) As we talked about so much this semester, digital history is its own discipline and has earned its spot at the academic table. There’s plenty to talk about, to learn, to share, to explore, to discover, just like any other discipline. I’m glad (and a little relieved) that it made the list.

5B | Career Reflection

I think that the career theme is probably the most tried and true in my analysis. The AHA continues to be an epicenter of career resources for the next generation of historians, both when I wrote for them ten years ago and still to this day. I think part of what stuck out to me is just how much seasoned historians in the field want to share their wisdom with newbies, and again, I think that this more accessible, personal approach via the AHA member spotlight series alleviates the intimidation factor in the career building process. The network of historians that take advantage of all that the AHA has to offer is trying to help prospective historians get their career off the ground in the best possible way.

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