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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
When Ian Bogost and Mike Migurski both mention the same term in close chronological proximity, I feel the need to pay attention. Of course, the one thinks it’s more fodder for taking seriously the personhood of objects (so much so that my use of ‘personhood’ in describing this would likely result in claims that I’m being personist) while the […]
Right now, humanists often have to take topic modeling on faith. There are several good posts out there that introduce the principle of the thing (by Matt Jockers, for instance, and Scott Weingart). But it’s a long step up from those posts to the computer-science articles that explain “Latent Dirichlet Allocation” mathematically. My goal in […]
So here we are in 2012, the Year of Code, and we should all be learning to code! Shouldn’t we? Especially if we belong to this community known as Digital Humanities, a field that is endlessly wrestling with its self-definition. Who’s in, who’s out? Is it really necessary to code? Don’t we have to know […]
The Department of Education released a draft report about big data and education today. It’s called “Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics,” a title that’s unlikely to win any converts to the notion of a data-curious* view of learning. Part of what’s going to get stuck in the craw is that phrase […]
Easter 1982 – thirty years ago! – was spent feeding my latest addiction. Like over a million others, I had acquired the Sinclair ZX 81, which popularised home computing in Britain. It had just one kilobyte of on-board memory; I soon invested in the upgrade to take it up to 16 kilobytes. You used your […]
We asked the captain what course of action he proposed to take toward a beast so large, so terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said judiciously: “I think I shall praise it.” – Robert Hass Praise I find the Debates in the Digital Humanities volume terribly upsetting. Before I go any further […]
