As I’ve noted before, manuscript records collected by the census can be fascinating and informative windows to the past. They can be used to learn more about groups of people that appear only occasionally in the historical record, and since they are generally well-structured, they can be used (with care) to ask data-driven historical questions. When most historians think of using historical census sources, it’s the forms from the decennial census of population that come immediately to mind.

Census microdata, such as that produced by the NAPP project, can help illuminate interesting issues surrounding work and labor. Investigating the history of work using microdata must begin with the questions asked by the census enumerators about employment. These varied depending on the country and year, but were generally quite simple. For example, the U.S. 1880 census form had two questions pertaining to work, and a third that hinted toward labor as well.

It’s finally here! Seeing Underground: Maps, Models, and Mining Engineering in America, published by the University of Nevada Press, is available in hardcover and kindle editions. I examine how maps and models created a visual culture of mining engineering, helping American mining engineers fashion a professional identity and occupational opportunities for themselves. I’m grateful for all the support and assistance I’ve received as I’ve chased this fascinating history. Here’s the description from the press:

Historians often try not to fall in love with our sources, but sometimes I just can’t help it. For me, aside from the chatty personal journal (what historian can resist?) and the underground mine maps I’ve studied for years, my greatest fondness may be for big compilations of small bits of data, called microdata. What’s microdata? It’s small bits of information that, by themselves, might be virtually useless, but when aggregated and analyzed can show bigger trends.

This post is an explanation of the napptools scripts, including how they transform NAPP download files into a SQLite database. The tools napptools consists of three script programs: napp2csv.sh: A Bash script that uses traditional unix tools cut, sed, and tr to chop a NAPP data file into its respective columns, guided by a SAS-format command file. This also creates secondary tables in .CSV format from the variable descriptions in the SAS file.

Last semester, several of my students ran afoul of a perennial problem with PowerPoint. They had created their slide decks on a large screen, but when they connected to the room’s projector, it forced a lower screen resolution. Blammo! – ugly slides. Text too big, images cut off, broken layouts everywhere. The wreckage was so horrifying, two design students in the audience were forced to avert their eyes. There are several ways to solve this problem, but here’s the trick I use all the time: Instead of showing your slides in PowerPoint, make your presentation deck into a PDF, and show that.

In an earlier post I discussed some of the limitations of full-text searching in digitized copies of historic mining engineering literature, and suggested several historic index publications specific to mining engineering that could be used to augment your search by looking for information the old-fashioned way. Mining engineering information also appeared in historic indexes that covered engineering as a whole. Third-party indexes that cover engineering topics generally include at least some of the more popular mining engineering journals in their coverage.

Many excellent historical books on mining and mining engineering are now available from archive.org and Google Books. In some cases, these repositories also have partial (or, rarely, complete) runs of historical technical journals of interest to mining historians. Full-text search of these digitized books is a godsend, but sometimes it doesn’t work right. Maybe you are looking for a topic instead of a keyword, or the conversion to text mangled the word you want, or the website doesn’t allow you to look inside several volumes at once (ahem, archive.

I’ve created a system to help index digitized court records from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. These documents, which include legal briefs and trial transcripts, can be a fascinating source for western history. They were saved by the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, then digitized by the Internet Archive, and span the period from 1891 to the late 1960s. Head over to 9CHRIS, the 9th Circuit Historical Records Index System and have a look!