A big question for me, as a designer of text analysis tools for the humanities is: how do the tools I’m building fit in? Sure, you can have fancy word trees and grammatical search histograms. Sure, they’re chock-full of interesting information that you can make an argument about. But where exactly in the humanistic analysis […]
How should we understand the part played by code in digital media and learning? We are accustomed to arguments that digital media are affecting our existing practices of reading, looking, seeing and hearing, yet relatively little is said of how the underlying code and algorithmic architectures of software actually exert those effects. The work done […]
*Editors’ Note: American History Now is the newest journal to be launched as part of the Pressforward Project. Have you got some research, a small conclusion, an idea or possibility; some piece of work which isn’t really suitable for the standard journal format? Maybe a piece which doesn’t fit easily in any single discipline? Would you […]
This paper examines the state of the current digital humanities canon, provides a historical overview of the decline of early digitally recovered texts, literature designed to expand the literary canon, and offers suggestions for ways that the field might work toward expansion of the digital canon. My research shows that a subfield of early literary […]
A few weeks ago, I posed the idea of global prayer metrics. I compared the function of prayer notices to journalism and reflected on the theology of quantifying prayer. Today’s post is a thought experiment and dataviz on measuring global religious activity across cultures. During a brainstorm with Andy Moore and James Doc at the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students a few […]
“The intellectual is still only an incompletely transformed writer” — Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero There could be many epigraphs hailing a discussion of digital writing, many pithy observations about its nature, becoming, qualities, mysteries, dilemmas. From Oscar Wilde: “A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.” Virginia Woolf: “We are nauseated by […]
So much of the content of digital humanities begins in the analog world: documents that are scanned and indexed; maps that are recast in GIS; quantities that are converted to machine-readable tables. Although we tend to focus on the final product — the digital construction viewed over the web — we remain cognizant of this […]
Humanities in the Digital Age by Alan Liu and William G. Thomas III ….As humanities chairs with a long involvement in digital issues, we have seen clearly that top-down budget cuts are often justified with arguments about how digital technologies are driving change in higher education…. So we believe that humanities faculty members, chairs, and […]
The OKFestival [Open Knowledge Festival], the biggest open data and knowledge event ever held, has come to an end. And what a great week it was. On Tuesday we hacked on a number of Finnish cultural datasets and the 20 million openly licensed objects in Europeana. (writeup coming soon!) On Wednesday we met with a […]
Here’s a trick question: How do we get people to understand programming?< Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a “live coding” environment, where the program’s output updates as the programmer types. Because my work was cited as an inspiration for […]
