As Douglas Adams once memorably said, ‘lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food’. The message is the thing, not the medium through which it is conveyed. But if this is true of print, will it not turn out to be equally true of ‘Digital’? There appears to be some confusion about…

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As we reach a point where many of the classic books of literature and science published before the magical date of 1923 have been digitized, it is time to consider the quality of those copies and the issue of redundancy. A serious concern in the times before printing was that copying — and it was…

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In digital space, everything we do is networked. Real thinking doesn’t (and can’t) happen in a vacuum. Our teaching practices and scholarship don’t just burst forth miraculously from our skulls. The digital academic community is driven by citation, generosity, connection, and collaboration. The work we do as hybrid and critical pedagogues, digital humanists, and alternative…

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Team MARKUP evolved as a group project in Neil Fraistat’s Technoromanticism graduate seminar (English 738T) during the Spring 2012 term at the University of Maryland; our team was augmented by several students inthe sister course taught by Andrew Stauffer at the University of Virginia. The project involved using git and GitHub to manage a collaborative encoding project, practicing…

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Since I work in the CDLR, I get to raise all kinds of wild questions that don’t fall into the purview of traditional, disciplinary bound scholarship. To prepare for my presentation at the Pop Conference (instituted by Experience Music Project in Seattle), this year combined with IASPM-US (International Association for the Study of Popular Music), I became preoccupied with the…

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Editors’ Note: “Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Imagining the Future of Public Interfaces to Cultural Heritage Collections” is a working group meeting at the National Council on Public History this weekend. Leading up to the event, participants have contributed a variety of proposals, discussions, reports,and analysis to the blog Visualizing the Past. Three of the most…

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David Berry, What Is the “New Aesthetic”? April 18, 2012 The New Aesthetic is now subject to discussion and critique on a number of forums, blogs, twitter threads, and so forth (for a list, see bibliography on Berry 2012a, but also Bridle 2012, Kaganskiy 2012, Sterling 2012). Many of these discussions have a particular existential flavour, questioning…

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Mapping Texts is a collaboration between the University of North Texas and Stanford University aimed at experimenting with new methods for finding and analyzing meaningful patterns embedded in massive collections of digital newspapers. Why do we think this is important?  Because, quite simply, historical newspapers are currently being digitized at a scale that is rapidly…

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