This is part of a series of technical essays documenting the computational analysis that undergirds my dissertation, A Gospel of Health and Salvation. For an overview of the dissertation project, you can read the current project description at jeriwieringa.com. You can access the Jupyter notebooks on Github. My goals in sharing the notebooks and technical…
If you are a friend, family member, or co-worker of mine there is a really good chance you’ve heard me blurt something out about the Loyalist Claims Commission. You were also probably very nice about it and kindly nodded your head when you had no idea what in the world I was talking about. Bless…
I was recently asked by Sally Pewhairangi whether I thought digital literacies could be taught as generic skills, out of any particular context, and whether they would then transfer. When I was asked this question, examples of cooking and learning languages were offered (citing chef Tim Ferris). For example, could we learn the rules of…
I’ve been traveling a lot this past year with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). I’ve been meeting with folks to learn and share about digital scholarship. Most often, the response is, “what is digital scholarship?” Yes. Digital scholarship is a term that doesn’t really work, and that won’t persist. The term is a…
War and games have much in common: multiple contestants compete to win within a physically determined set of realities, each using strategies that are frequently buffeted by interventions of chance and chaos. It is no surprise, then, that war games have been used as predictive tools by military leaders since at least the early 19th…
How do archives, museums and libraries enable digital access to works in their collections when it is difficult to identify or locate the copyright owners? The problem of orphan works has been addressed in part by the EU Orphan Works Directive 2012 and the UK Orphan Works Licensing Scheme (OWLS). But are these solutions fit for…
Like many of my colleagues who think carefully about digital literacy and pedagogies, I began seriously considering the use of social media platforms in educational settings — sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr — around 2008. Despite nearly a decade of innovative uses of digital platforms in educational settings, the use of these platforms and…
Drawing from the work of “Mapping Inequality,” a ProPublica investigative report published earlier this month uncovered a phenomenon similar to redlining in the car insurance industry today. The report found insurers charged premiums that were up to 30 percent higher in minority neighborhoods than in predominantly white neighborhoods with similar rates of accident risk. “As rates have…
Endangered Data Week highlights the urgent need to protect public records. Our ongoing collaboration with the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) project provides a specific example of why public records matter. Before we discuss DINAA in detail, first we need to provide some context. The United States has enacted a variety of laws and…
The Internet Archive does some amazing work in the Sisyphean task of archiving the web. Of course the web is just too big and changes too often for them to archive it all. But Internet Archive’s crawling of the web and serving it up out of their Wayback Machine, plus their collaboration with librarians and…