as i mentioned in my last post, the ”short guide to digital humanities” (pages 121-136 of digital_humanities, by anne burdick, johanna drucker, peter lunenfeld, todd presner, and jeffrey schnapp, mit press, 2012) includes the following stricture under the heading “what isn’t the digital humanities?”: the mere use of digital tools for the purpose of humanistic research and communication […]
“Knowledge is power: information is the fabric of knowledge; the controller of information wields power.” –”Some Laws of Personal Computing,” Byte 1979 (Lewis 191) “If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual…Any barrier that exists between the user and some part of the system will eventually be […]
Editor’s Note: Unlike other posts that start off text or images, Wendy Hsu @WendyFHsu opens up her third post in her guest series on digital ethnography with sound. She wants us to click PLAY before reading on. It doesn’t matter if you don’t use sound in your fieldwork, you’ll still find this to be a useful exercise in […]
The digital world provides historians with an array of tools and ways to make our time in the archive and our research process more fulfilling, thorough, and generally productive. But the changes we make need to happen from the bottom up–from conception to execution. For example, Trevor Owens, assessing the Ithaka report on historian’s research practices released […]
This is the second in my series of posts on the Old Bailey Online (OBO) corpus. I’ve downloaded all of the trial transcripts from 1674 to 1834 (find out how on the Programming Historian 2), which is about 100,000 trials and 51 million words of text. In the last post I looked at the impact of editors […]
Ukiyo-e Search provides an incredible resource: The ability to both search for Japanese woodblock prints by simply taking a picture of an existing print AND the ability to see similar prints across multiple collections of prints. Ukiyo-e Search was created by John Resig, a computer programmer and avid enthusiast of Japanese woodblock prints. In his personal research he […]
Back in August, Miriam Posner’s post “What are some challenges to doing DH in the library?” initiated a wide-ranging conversation in the blogosphere examining the relationship between DH and libraries. As the dh+lib blog gets a’rolling, it seems useful both to revisit Miriam’s post, but also remind ourselves of the potential DH holds to enable […]
I’m excited to be off to the Digital Methods Winter School in Amsterdam tomorrow! The first day is a mini conference (and look at all the interesting stuff in the reader!) and then there’s a three day workshop where we actually do data sprints and hands on work with data capture and “abbreviated analysis”. Richard Rogers and Sabine […]
Deeds, or charters, dealing with property rights, provide a continuous documentation which can be used by historians to study the evolution of social, economic and political changes. This study is concerned with charters (written in Latin) dating from the tenth through early fourteenth centuries in England. Of these, at least one million were left undated, […]
A few weeks ago I was discussing early modern vocabulary with Tim Hitchcock(as one does on a Wednesday evening). If I recall correctly, he felt that new words likely appeared at roughly the same rate as old words disappeared from the language. In essence, we’re not getting a bigger vocabulary, we’re just using an ever-shifting one. […]
