Note from the Editors: These posts are part of an ongoing conversation about text-mining and statistical analysis of language. To further investigate the methods used, please follow the links provided by the authors.
“Like Morozov and Lanier, I find a similar Delusion, though one more academically minded, let’s call it the “DH Delusion.” The DH Delusion begins with a similar sort of cyber-utopianism. I remember the excitement of my first Digital History course in which it seemed not only possible, but probable that in a matter of years most scholarship would be produced in the digital medium. The Internet seemed to be promote the sort of intellectual freedom and scholastic democracy that could topple an oppressive and outdated structure of academia.”
Editors’ Note:
Below are links to several pieces about the effects of social media on open access scholarship. Also included is a bibliography focused on the impact of open access scholarship.
By Scott B. Weingart
What I really want to highlight, though, is a brand new feature introduced by Wallace Hooper: automated Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) of the entire corpus. For those who are not familiar with it, LSA is somewhat similar LDA, the algorithm driving the increasingly popular Topic Models used in Digital Humanities. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, but essentially what they do is show how documents and terms relate to one another.
The Media Lab welcomes applications from candidates interested in establishing research programs in: music, performance, arts, design, food, fashion, architecture, games, things we have not thought of, or any combination thereof. Appointments will be within the Media Arts and Sciences academic program, principally at the assistant professor level.
We are thrilled to announce the launch of a new site, Viewshare.org, a platform for empowering curators, archivists, and librarians to provide access to the digital cultural heritage objects they are preserving.
In 2012, NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) at the University of Virginia will be hosting the second of two NEH Summer Institutes in Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. The topic is “Evaluating Digital Scholarship,” and we are specifically inviting current and incoming Department Chairs in English, Foreign Languages, and Classics to participate.
In sum, there’s a whole lot of new in the Digital Humanities, including what I think is already an extremely sophisticated intellectual move to cut through stale assumptions about old disciplinary boundaries, approaches to evidence, understandings of authorship, and more. The bits and bytes of the critical theory that Gibbs calls for is already happening, in my opinion, on numerous Twitter feeds, countless blogs, and at various conferences and un-conferences.
But even as we find ourselves experiencing the new, it’s just as worthwhile to locate Digital Humanities in relation to the old. For there is a return, a circling back, to pursue if we so choose. DH takes us back—in deeply illuminating ways—to age-old issues in various fields across the arts and sciences.
For me, the lines between digital humanities, libraries, and scholarly communication are so faint as to be insignificant. And my perception of the equivalences among these entities that often seem siloed to my colleagues presents a real challenge as I try to help people–both at my own institution and at other campuses–think about possible futures for higher education in our digital culture.
The source of my perception lies in my having begun to learn about how digital innovations are changing libraries and publishing as a result of my first forays into digital humanities.
A list of principles for designing on-line communities created by Dr. Sorin A. Matei and his students registered in various versions of the Online Interaction Graduate Seminar at Purdue University
Online / virtual community design principles
Design guidelines are not guarantees.
Many are necessary for online community development but they don’t guarantee that communities will form. Good design principles are necessary but not sufficient. The following list provides some key principles to consider and implement when designing and online community: