There are lots of tools out there that aggregate existing information and even organize it for users to interpret. Since the early Hypercities, GIS tools, for instance, have been very much the rage among humanists who wish to add geographical and census data to enhance the “lived experience” of a text. But there are fewer tools that actually build an archive of live interpretation—as opposed to facts layered and ready for interpretation–around a stable text. And that’s where what I call “Reading with the Stars” comes in.
By Geoffrey Rockwell
These are my notes on a symposium organized by Tokyo University on “The Establishment of a Knowledge Infrastructure for the Next Generation and the Mission of Digital Humanities.” This was organized by Masahiro Shimoda.
NITLE Event: Teaching DH 101: Introduction to the Digital Humanities.
December 16, 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Seminar organizers encourage faculty, instructional technologists, librarians, and others interested in digital scholarship, digital humanities, and related projects to attend this seminar in institutional teams if possible. This seminar will be especially interesting to those interested in how to teach digital humanities to undergraduates. (Times EST)
This database is a finding aid to the British Library’s bookbinding collections. It includes information and images for selected items from the Library’s rich collection of fine bindings of books printed in western Europe from the fifteenth century to date. There is also a selection from the valuable bookbindings collections of the Library’s partner, the National Library of the Netherlands. The database is a work in progress and its scope will be widened as resources allow.
via The British Library – Database of Bookbindings – Default
So with all that comes the new Walker Art Center website. Launched yesterday it represents a potential paradigm shift for institutional websites.
What are the access requirements for digital cultural heritage collections? This was one of the questions that the National Digital Stewardship Alliance started exploring earlier this year. Different access requirements result in very different kinds of preservation storage systems, and the NDSA Infrastructure working group wanted to know more about the kinds of requirements that are in place for its members’ collections.
And this brings me to the danger inherent in Culturomics. First, machine-readable texts do not, and will never, represent the totality of the human experience. What about paintings, illustrations, and photographs, statues and figurative art, architecture, music, material culture, and ecology? What about oral history? What about economic, statistical and demographic evidence? Although there are millions upon millions of books, magazines, newspapers, and other printed material, they represent only the visible, privileged, literate tip of a vast store of human culture.
How does an invisible system shape the experience of an end user?
I found myself pondering this question again and again throughout the 2011 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, which took place November 20-21. This event is jointly sponsored each year by Northwestern University, Loyola University, University of Chicago, and the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Please note that the course is now open to PhD students from any COST country (essentially Europe and Israel), and includes bursaries for travel and accommodation.
The Institute of English Studies (London) is pleased to announce the fourth year of ‘Medieval Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age’, an intensive course for PhD students jointly funded by COST and the AHRC, and run in collaboration with King’s College London, the Warburg Institute, and the University of Cambridge.
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog. November 29, 2011.