Chapter 1 Hello world

In the research group for the Congregation of the Council we work on a variety of digital humanities projects, which include such applications as interactive multitasking book catalogues, glossaries, interactive timeline and mapping projects on micro and macro levels. The reason, why I decided to write this series of tutorial is a retrospective view on the first steps of our projects the development. Scholars in history have to face very specific issues, related to the visualization of the data that more likely need some advanced coding experience, some creative approach and technical knowledge. Since these issues are not common in the coding handbooks and more likely, historians will have to create the own solution for visualizing the historical data, I decided to make a cookbook, which will explain some specific issues that I had to solve during the working process. Among the challenges for visualizing of the historical data, I would like to focus on such questions as how to visualize the data in time? How to show historical uncertainty? How to visualize changing space in its historical context? These questions come in the workflow of our projects and I would like to propose several approaches that can be useful for solving non-trivial issues in the development of DH projects.1

The main programming language of all the projects is R. I chose R for a couple of reasons. R is a common and standard language in academic disciplines. A wide spectrum of academic areas use R on a daily basis, from bioinformatics to social science. I would also propose R for the DH workflow, becasue of flexibility, simplicity and multitasking of R libraries. In addition, such accompanying instruments as RMarkdown, shinyapps and RStudio in general provide users and developers a friendly environment for academic publishing and development.

As the main audience of R users involves scholars, researchers and students, this manual will cover predomenantly particular issues, related to the challenges that I had to approach during my studies and development, but not R and its instruments in general.