What connects Open Source Software development, scholarly edition making, Linked Open Data, and Digital Sustainability? All of them rely our human capacity for managing fine detail as much as or more than they rely on technological infrastructure. Although Digital Humanities often tends to focus on the macroscopic, with text mining, visualization, and distant reading, it…
Alison Booth and I are co-teaching a graduate course this semester on Digital Literary Studies. As a part of the course, we’re having a series of technical workshops – command line, Python, text analysis, encoding, and markup. The scheduling worked out such that these workshops wound up being on Wednesdays, with the discussions of critical…
Like many Americans, I have a love-hate relationship with technology: I inwardly cringe when my preschooler clamors for screen-time with our iPad instead of storytime with a book. Our municipalities, our government, our insurers, and even the vendors of books are awash with technology as well. At a recent hackathon, the expert from the local transit authority…
The virtual reality tour of Rome at the heart of Rome Reborn started as a digital humanities project collaboratively developed by dozens of artists, classicists, archaeologists, and 3D modelers. Even those visiting the ruins of the Roman Forum within the city of Rome today find it hard to envision the sheer magnitude of the marble, brick, and…
This map is a sonic exploration and representation of the North Campus of the University of Alberta. Campus has a long history as Native Land, be it as a traditional meeting place for diverse Indigenous peoples (Cree, Blackfoot, Métis, Nakota Sioux, Dene, Saulteaux/Anishinaabe, Inuit, Haudenosaunee and many others) on the banks of the kisiskāciwani-sīpiy (North…
early virtual reality experiments with humbead’s revised map of the world. What would it mean to enter into the space of a map that itself reimagines the spatial relationships of the world? The digital history project Revising Humbead’s Revised Map of the World: Digitally Remapping the Sixties Folk Music Revival explores a psychedelic mattering map…
[Yesterday I gave a talk at the Oxford/London IF Meetup. The session was about conversation as gameplay, and also featured Flo Minuzzi of Tea-Powered Games, speaking about their released game Dialogue and their upcoming Elemental Flow. There’s a nice livetweeted thread version of my talk available on Twitter thanks to Florence Smith Nicholls, but I…
Digital Humanities Now will be taking a break until the end of January. On behalf of the DHNow staff, thank you for another great year of publication! A special thanks goes to the generous community of volunteer editors-at-large for dedicating their time and expertise, whether for a single week or throughout the year. We hope you’ll join…
Think of all the things you learned in elementary school: How to read. How to write. How to count. How to do add, subtract, multiply, and divide. These are all learned skills, things that we are not innately born knowing how to do. Just like these, reading graphs is a skill. We might be taught…
The 19th century saw something of an explosion in periodicals. For example, the number of newspapers in Britain alone leapt from 550 in 1846 to more than 2,400 just 60 years later. For humanities scholars, tracking information in such a huge mass of publications poses a daunting challenge. Digital humanities efforts have made some headway…