In July 2017, I presented a version of this talk on a panel on “Temporality” at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference (#keydh on Twitter) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The project I discuss here, a digital tour of the Nightingale-Brown House, will debut in September 2017. I’ll update this post with a direct link when we go…
Kellen Funk and I have co-authored an article titled “The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice.” The article has been recently accepted for publication in the American Historical Review. It is currently scheduled for the February 2018 issue. Here is our abstract. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the…
Over the course of the last few months here at the Literary Lab, I’ve been working on a little project that looks at the distributions of individual words inside of novels, when averaged out across lots and lots of texts. This is incredibly simple, really – the end result is basically just a time-series plot…
Unlike print, the form of digital projects has a direct bearing on the ideas they convey. Not too long ago we used word processors to write documents on computers. The act of writing itself was called “word processing.” The excitement around the revolutionary new technology (first electric typewriters, then computer applications) inspired a new name…
First, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are seeking to disrupt education in the same way its technologies have disrupted other areas of everyday life, from hailing a cab and booking accommodation to finding a date or looking after your health. The main concept Silicon Valley uses to explain its focus in education is “personalization,” as demonstrated by…
As Lawrence Busch has put it, standards and related forms are “the ways in which we order ourselves, other people, things, processes, numbers, and even language itself.” Standards enable access to things, allowing social worlds to interact. Standards tell cars when to stop and go. Standards direct the flow of water and power. In libraries, standards do…
In light of word embeddings’ recent popularity, I’ve been playing around with a version called Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). Admittedly, LSA has fallen out of favor with the rise of neural embeddings like Word2Vec, but there are several virtues to LSA including decades of study by linguists and computer scientists. (For an introduction to LSA…
Digital Humanities Now is taking the day off. We’ll be back with new featured posts on July 6th!
The panel “Critical Writing as Emergent Techne” worked with both criticality and technology, showing how both critical discourse and hands-on, constructive practices could reinforce each other in the college writing classroom. Anthony Stagliano opened the session with a paper that situated “critical making” as a position that works to avoid both the “Scylla” of self-destructive…
These were my remarks as a guest speaker in Donna Murdoch’s class “Online Teaching and Learning – Applying Adult Learning Principles” this evening. I was asked to speak about learning analytics, but like I said in my keynote last week at NMC, ed-tech is boring. So this is a talk about pedometers. “Know thyself” –…