Last month, Dallas Robinson received an email from someone she didn’t know, asking if she would be open to receiving a large sum of money—with no strings attached. For once, it wasn’t spam. She hit reply…The gift from the stranger arrived thanks to a new online map, the Black-Indigenous Farmers Reparations Map, a project to…
I’m increasingly convinced that parsimony and elegance are key values for the socio-technical systems that enable long term access to information. This post is me starting to try and articulate what I mean by that and connecting that back to a few ongoing strands of work and thinking I’m engaged in. Now that the book…
We are taking a week off for spring break. All posts nominated this week will be included for consideration when we return next week. Keep nominating!
Below is an overview of research projects that were carried out by student teams in the project course Visualizing cultural collections taught by Prof. Dr. Marian Dörk since 2014. Students with different disciplinary backgrounds including design, media studies, information science, and cultural management analyzed existing interfaces and developed new approaches for different case studies in…
“Diversity” has become a managerial directive for the twenty-first century university in the United States. In its endless pursuit of diversity, the contemporary academy has required faculty, staff, and administrators to perform diversity work, marshaling the labor of employees to undertake diversity initiatives, often in addition to their stated job descriptions. Participating in diversity work…
In my last book, Planned Obsolescence, I argued for the potentials of open, peer-to-peer review as a means of shedding some light on the otherwise often hidden processes of scholarly communication, enabling scholars to treat the process of review less as a mode of gatekeeping than as a formative moment in which they could learn…
In the Digital Humanities, it is common to weigh the research potential of collections as data by evaluating their representativeness. That is to say, we ask to what extent the data have the capacity to characterize a person, an event, a period, or an experience. Where the data exhibit significant informational paucity, indeterminate values, inordinate…
As Matthew Davis explains, a database is useful as a methodological tool because it does not permit ambiguity. This means that all decisions must be documented and justified.[1] To create the schema for my database, I have already made important decisions about what data to extract from my primary documents – the Slave Narrative Collection,…
On Friday, February 9th I attended the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Office of the Digital Humanities at the National Endowment of the Humanities. It was a jam-packed, vivid testimony to the ODH’s vision and work, featuring a keynote by Kate Zwaard, Chief of National Digital Initiatives at the Library of Congress, and…
“You good?” a man asked two narcotics detectives late in the summer of 2015. The detectives had just finished an undercover drug deal in Brentwood, a predominately black neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, that is among the poorest in the country, when the man unexpectedly approached them. One of the detectives responded that he was looking…