Names can shape fields. In the proposal for a panel to be held at the MLA this week, Lori Emerson argued that the introduction of the term “electronic literature” by the founding of the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999, in fact founded the field by creating “a name, a concept, even a brand with which a remarkably diverse range of digital writing practices could identity: electronic literature,” as Lori explains in a blog post. Seen in this perspective, the first book on electronic literature is Loss Glazier’s Digital Poetics in 2001. This renders invisible the very rich theory and practice of electronic literature before 2001 (as
In accordance with the general description of ALLC calls for workshop and project support we hereby call for support for workshops and projects in 2012. The deadline for this call is January 31, 2012. Notifications will go out by February 28, 2012.
From all of us at Digital Humanities Now, happy holidays and best wishes for the new year!
We will return in January to bring you more digital humanities scholarship, conversations, news, and events.
In the meantime, we invite you to participate in this experiment in digital publishing. Please tell us how we can improve Digital Humanities Now in the upcoming year by taking a brief (3-question) survey.
Text Encoding Positions | Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.
The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH: http://mith.umd.edu/) is hiring for two part-time (10 hours per week) positions as Text Encoders to join the Shelley-Godwin Archive project.
digital humanities deutschland | Digital Humanities 2012.
In order to facilitate future strategic development of DH as a leading future research paradigm, we invite all academic Digital Humanities researchers in the German speaking region to come together, exchange ideas and information and establish a joint professional organization called “Digital Humanities Deutschland” (hereafter: DHD). The DHD is intended as a chapter organization within the European ALLC (Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing).
Real-world data are messy. Relationships between two variables can take on an infinite number of forms, and while one doesn’t see, say, umbrella-shaped data very often, strange things can happen. When scientists talk about correlations or associations between variables, they’re usually referring to one very specific form of relationship–namely, a linear one. The assumption is that most associations between pairs of variables are reasonably well captured by positing that one variable increases in proportion to the other, with some added noise. In reality, of course, many associations aren’t linear, or even approximately so. For instance, many associations are cyclical (e.g., hours at work versus day of week), or curvilinear (e.g., heart attacks become precipitously more frequent past middle age), and so on.
Detecting a non-linear association is potentially just
George Mason University and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media are pleased to announce Digital History Research Awards for students entering the History and Art History doctoral program in fall 2012.
Linguists and others interested in more in-depth information about the Omaha language may view the working database behind the Omaha Ponca Digital Dictionary. This database is a work in progress.
I like this essay by John Jones about search algorithms, which he compares to “mechanical Turk” automatons of the 18th Century.
It’s a point that’s well-understood in some circles and completely not in others. Witness the degree to which users continue to express some preference for couching search queries to Google and Siri in the form of natural-language questions: according to Bo Pang and Ravi Kumar, that tendency seems to be steadily increasing as users become more familiar with the functioning of search engines rather than decreasing. Users sometimes relate to Google as if it were an oracle, a non-human being with its own personality and knowledge.
Fred and I got some fantastic comments on our Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing paper through the Writing History in the Digital Age open peer review. We are currently working on revising the manuscript. At this point I have worked on a range of book chapters and articles and I can say that doing this chapter has been a real pleasure. I thought the open review process went great and working with a coauthor has also been great. Both are things that don’t happen that much in the humanities. I think the work is much stronger for Fred and I having pooled our forces to put this together.