Editor’s Summary: The question of scale is something that has been troubling many humanities disciplines even before the popularization of computational technologies. In the field of DH, we often perceive that there is an additional layer of abstraction between the researcher and subject because of the digital “screen” and scale of analysis that our technological […]
Editors’ Summary: This series of articles comparing the user experience in DuckDuckGo and Google goes beyond a purely UX analysis. Seeing how these two search engines play in an academic or teacher’s work, we get to see how certain search engines, like Google, are more than just “search engines.” As mentioned, Google also controls our […]
Editors’ Summary: This paper studies a common tool for researchers to share their quantitative or data sources: the data repository run usually by university libraries. These repositories allow users to download datasets that researchers have curated. This paper provides a helpful glimpse into the user identity and persona of researchers working with data repositories. They […]
Editor’s Summary: This article argues that user experience (UX) practices are crucial yet often under-utilized and overlooked in digital humanities (DH) projects because conventional UX methods don’t align well with the complexity of humanities content. To address this challenge, the authors introduce a set of ten UX heuristics aimed at improving accessibility and audience engagement. […]
Editors’ Summary: This post considers the growing phenomenon of what the author deems ‘stateful AI agents’ on social media. In this context, stateful means that the systems are not frozen, or the AI’s state can change. The rise of Moltbook, a social media site for AI agents, has brought more media attention to the practice, […]
Editors’ Summary: This selection grapples with the difficulties of maintaining open access in the era of AI. The author identifies four ways that generative AI has affected open access resources: the intellectual harvest of cultural heritage, the infrastructure tax, the harvesting of physical collections, and the erosion of trust. She focuses on the erosion of […]
Editors’ Summary: This post attempts to provide a history of the origins of digital archaeology, with the author acknowledging the relative lack of attention given to the field’s past. He notes similar challenges in pinning down precise origins for the field of digital humanities. The author highlights scholarship from throughout the twentieth century to determine […]
Editors’ Summary: In this post, the author considers the growing problem of ‘zombie citations’, or citations that may have been “hallucinated” or constructed by generative AI. He uses an example of a reference to an article that he never wrote, and traces the citations of it through Google Scholar. Williamson demonstrates how the non-existent paper […]
Editors’ Summary: This article examines how common web-mapping tools such as Google Maps, Leaflet and OpenStreetMap are used in the Digital Humanities, arguing that their default design choices shape interpretation and should be chosen intentionally. The author distinguishes between maps used for visual analysis (revealing spatial patterns) and those used for discovery (serving as gateways […]
Editors’ Summary: In this post, Salvaggio considers how a lot of current scholarship on LLMs is fixated on proving that they are conducting something “akin to thought.” He discusses a recent paper that tested the ability of LLMs to make sense of ‘Jabberwocky’ language in which most or all content words have been randomly replaced […]
