Archive

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Building Topic Models through Selective Document Exclusion

October 31, 2011

By Peter Organisciak

Earlier this month, I attended the ASIS&T 2011 Annual Meeting where, much to my delight, the paper I co-authored with Miles Efron and Katrina Fenlon was selected for the Best Paper Award.

In Building Topic Models in a Federated Digital Library through Selective Document Exclusion, we presented a way to improve the coherence of algorithmically derived topical models.

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Some Comments on Writing History in the Digital Age

October 27, 2011

By Bill Caraher

I’ve really enjoyed cruising through the Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki open peer-review volume called Writing History in the Digital Age which is slated to be published by University of Michigan Press’s new Digital Humanities Series in their digitalculturebooks imprint. I commented on many of the contributions and mined them all for references and ideas. I’d encourage anyone interested or invested in the future of history in the digital age to check out the volume and to contribute to its open peer review. Since I have read all the articles in the volume and have been thinking a bit about history in the digital era myself lately, I thought I might offer some overarching comments on the volume (as is my wont).

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On transitive and intransitive uses of the verb “theorize”

October 25, 2011

By Ted Underwood

I’m a relative newcomer to digital humanities; I’ve been doing this for about a year now. The content of the field has been interesting, but in some ways even more interesting is the way it has transformed my perception of the academy as a social structure. There are clearly going to be debates over the next few years between more and less digitized humanists, and debate is probably a good thing for everyone. But the debate can be much more illuminating if we acknowledge up front that it’s also a tension between two different forms of social organization.

Here’s what happens when that dimension of the issue goes unacknowledged: a tenured or tenure-track faculty member will give a talk or write a blog post about

“The Celestial Railroad” and the 1861 Railroad

October 25, 2011

By Ryan Cordell

Cross-posted from my “Hawthorne’s Celestial Railroad: A Publication History” development blog at http://blog.celestialrailroad.org/2011/10/the-celestial-railroad-and-the-1861-railroad/

At this January’s MLA Convention, I’ll be presenting on The Society for Textual Scholarship‘s sponsored panel, Text:Image; Visual Studies in the English Major (viewing the panel description may require an MLA membership). I’ll discuss “Mapping the Antebellum Culture of Reprinting,” thinking through my experiments with GIS in the past few years, particularly since attending the GIS course at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute this past summer.

So I was thrilled this past week to read William G. Thomas’ talk, “What We Think We Will Build and What We Build in Digital Humanities,” from this year’s Nebraska Digital Workshop, and to learn from

Thinking Practically About Metadata for Digital Projects in Your Library…10.24.11

October 25, 2011

By Anna Craft, Metadata Cataloger, University of North Carolina-Greensboro and Elizabeth Gregg, Assistant County Librarian, Jackson County Public Library

[SlideShare]

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Building and Sharing (When You’re Supposed to be Teaching)

October 25, 2011

By Mark Sample

These are my notes “Building and Sharing (When You’re Supposed to be Teaching,” a lightning talk I gave on Tuesday as part of CUNY’s Digital Humanities Initiative. Shannon Mattern (The New School) and I were on a panel called “DH in the Classroom.” Shannon’s enormously inspirational lightning talk was titled Beyond the Seminar Paper, and mine too focused on alternative assignments for students. Our two talks were followed by a long Q&A session, in which I probably learned more from the audience than they did from me. I’ll intersperse my notes with my slides, though you might also want to view the full Prezi (embedded at the end of this post).

“And I truly believe that this transformative power

When DH Was in Vogue; or, THATCamp Theory

October 25, 2011

By Natalia Cecire

“More hack, less yack,” they say. I understand the impulse, and to some degree admire the rough-and-tumble attitude of those in digital humanities whose first priority is Gettin’ Shit Done. Hell, I like Gettin’ Shit Done.

But as I’ve mentioned before, I cannot agree with the distinction between theory* and practice that this sets up, nor the zero-sum logic that it implies (i.e. in order to do more you must speak less).

I’ve long found the complete domination of THATCamp Bootcamps by technical skills from the CS side curious to the point of illogical. (It turns out that this post is an elaboration of my THATCamp SF post of about a year ago.)

We seem to have a tendency

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e-ject oriented ontology

October 25, 2011

By Alex Reid

Perhaps this has occurred to others, but I was thinking this morning of the word object and the many other words it shares -ject with: project, deject, eject, reject, inject, interject … perhaps you can think of others. Like “object,” most of these words serve as both noun and verb (sometimes as adj.). In most of the etymologies, -ject comes from the Latin jacĕre meaning to throw. In the case of object, the inherited meaning is to throw something before the mind or senses. I suppose the etymology, in this case, could be viewed as unfortunate for OOO, which clearly presents objects as mind-independent, and certainly the evolved and contemporary understanding of object is mind-independent, though even being “objective” still requires a mind.

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Academic History Writing and its Disconnects

October 25, 2011

By Tim Hitchcock

This is the rough text of a short talk I am scheduled to deliver at a symposium on ‘Future Directions in Book History’ at Cambrdige on the 24th of November 2011.

I am on the programme as talking briefly about the ‘Old Bailey Online and other resources’ (by which I assume is meant London Lives, Connected Histories, and Locating London’s Past, and the other websites I have helped to create of the last ten or twelve years). But I am afraid I have no interest whatsoever in discussing the Old Bailey or the other websites. The hard intellectual work that went in to their creation was done between 1999 and 2010, and for the mostpart they

Culture + heritage + digital at Web Directions South 2011

October 18, 2011

By Seb Chan

Luke Dearnley and I were last minute additions to the Web Directions South lineup last week. Coaxed by Maxine Sherrin to do a ‘fireside chat’ we sat comfortably by a digital fire and talked broadly around s…

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