Well, I am quite behind but working on catching up. I've just finished Exercise 3 and boy howdy, has it been an adventure. By that, I mean I am a little bit grumpy about annoying computer programs.

The first two exercises were not too bad. I am still not a fan of GitHub. It wasn't too hard to figure out, despite the fact that having to use a command line was a surprise for a history course (is there no GUI for this? It seems weird that in this day and age, a GUI is not the default GitHub setup method), but I still have some minor qualms with it. It seems to be very caught up in its own terminology. I feel like this is making it a more difficult and alienating program to use because it takes a while to catch on to the lingo. It's a useful program and concept, but is far from easily accessible. It was certainly intended for programmers, not historians.

In Exercise 3, I learned that I am also not a huge fan of ResophNotes. It is certainly useful that it can be connected so easily to one's GitHub, but as a program it has some annoying quirks. When attempting to create my new notes, I decided to make two notes per tag with similar names, and tried to copy and paste the titles to change them. I suppose the program interpreted this as overwriting the previous note due to the temporary use of the same name, but instead of making a fuss about it, it simply deleted the first note (a couple of which I had already started to work on). Eventually I harassed it into creating all ten note titles, but then wrote all my notes in another word processor and copied and pasted them in, just in case. Also, the program closes when you click it on the task bar, which is a minor but not really useful function.

Regarding the actual exercise, I chose my tags based on what I thought would be useful generalizations while still being applicable to the specific reading. I have a similar system of multiple simultaneous note documents for my practicum as I go through documents, so I set it up in the same vein. I will most likely need more tags, but for now I figured that these ones would do for the reading at hand. I am not really one to use a tag system as I usually just add the relevant details to the title of my notes, since it is an easier way to organize files across platforms, but if the function is there I might as well try to use it.

I tried to take the information provided by the keynote and split it into specific details, such as what life was like in 19th century England and details about Sarah Durrant's court case, but also into broader details, like how digital tools provide information regarding court cases as a whole or what they can tell us about British history. I found it was a useful piece to look at as a sort of introduction to the tools that technology can provide when creating historical narratives. Sarah's case serves as an example of how one can examine both the little details as well as the big picture using these tools. It was neat to look at how this massive amount of data could be extracted and put into graphs for further use.

I probably should have started to use the Slack space more, but the majority of my issues were with the way a program functioned, which is not something that can be easily fixed by my classmates or the professor. Hopefully I will have more reason to use it in the future, because I generally prefer to work individually on something.

Here is the repository for my notes!