using the spreadsheet to connect evidence to argument. For most humanists, spreadsheets makes their eyes glaze over. There is even an ominous sense of imprisonment: one must literally put ideas into cell blocks. The database would seem to limit the subtlety and dexterity of humanistic analysis in problematic ways. It insists on squeezing the messy […]
One of the ironies of the Internet age is that traditional standards for accessibility have changed radically. Intelligent members of the public refer to undigitized manuscripts held in a research library as “locked away”, even though anyone may study the well-cataloged, well-preserved material in the library’s reading room. By the standard of 1992, institutionally-held manuscripts […]
The topic of appropriate standards for the evaluation of scholarly digital outputs has come up in conversation at my institution (the University of Canterbury, New Zealand) recently and I’ve realised I haven’t got a ready or simple answer, usually replying that such standards are extremely important because we need to ensure scholarly digital outputs attain […]
On Sunday the 2nd of September 2012, Lynn H. Nelson, an American Digital History Pioneer passed away. “I more or less stumbled into computer telecommunications in 1989,” he wrote telling us about his curiosity for the new digital humanities discipline, “rather late in life, but, led by Thomas Zielke, of the University of Oldenburg and list […]
You know you’re a pretentious academic blogger when you start titling your posts in French, and if you can quote one of the most notoriously abstruse French philosophers at the same time, well that’s just a bonus. Jacques Derrida is not much in style these days (if he ever was). His ideas, and especially his prose, have […]
Social media content has grown exponentially in the recent years and the role of social media has evolved from just narrating life events to actually shaping them. In this paper we explore how many resources shared in social media are still available on the live web or in public web archives. By analyzing six different […]
It is a great honour to be asked to inaugurate this first Digital Humanities Congress at the University of Sheffield. My connections with digital humanities at Sheffield go back to 1995 when the remarkable portfolio of projects in the Humanities Research Institute at Sheffield caught the attention of the British Library, and I was asked […]
Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies 2011 “The Digital and the Human(ities)” The keynote lecture by Alan Liu (University of California at Santa Barbara) started the second symposium of the institute. The lecture was transmitted from New Jersey via Skype. Introduction: Sam Baker TILTS 2011 directors: Matt Cohen & Lars Hinrichs
In separate “big data” presentations at the Digital Preservation 2012meeting, Myron Guttmann of the National Science Foundation andLeslie Johnston of the Library of Congress described scenarios that seemed futuristic and fantastic but were in fact present-day realities. Both presenters spoke about researchers using powerful new processing tools to distill information from massive pools of data. Imagine, say, a researcher […]
In a posting to his blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education, William Pannapacker identified the Digital Humanities as an emerging trend at the 2009 Modern Language Association Convention. Amid all the doom and gloom of the 2009 MLA Convention, one field seems to be alive and well: the digital humanities. More than that: Among all the […]
