Hello again, everybody! I’m back this semester as a DH Prototyping Fellow, and together, Alyssa Collins and I are working on a project titled “Twitterature: Methods and Metadata.” Specifically, we’re hoping to develop a simple way of using Twitter data for literary research. The project is still in its early stages, but we’ve been collecting…
This semester, I am teaching our department’s Archaic to Classical Greek Survey. I specialize in late antique Roman history and GIS, and thus this has been a departure from my normal research interests–and just one reason we are searching for a Homerist with DH skills right now. However, reading and teaching Greek does not mean that…
Early modern scholars oftentimes emphasised the ideal of sharing knowledge beyond confessional and national borders. But was the learned community of early modern Europe truly as open and accessible as these intellectuals proclaimed? Or did the Republic of Letters in action perhaps comprise a number of “sub-republics” divided along the lines of religion, discipline, region,…
Interview by Marilou Tanguay[1], Florence Prévost-Grégoire[2] and Catherine Larochelle[3] with Emily Prifogle and Karin Wulf, two of the co-founders of Women Also Know History. This interview was originally published in French on HistoireEngagee.ca. Last June, the historians behind the Twitter account and the hashtag #womenalsoknowhistory launched a website aimed at increasing the dissemination and use…
We recently put out a paper on how racial bias functions in Hollywood films. This work was based on a few studies that came before it, namely this one, from USC Annenberg. We presented numerical analyses like the number of characters in different racial and ethnic groups and the number of words spoken by these…
Recently, several folks on Twitter have noted their displeasure that the Tate appears to be linking to Wikipedia articles in lieu of authoring their own written biographies of artists represented in their collections. The @Tate is now copying and pasting artist biographies from Wikipedia for catalogs. Nothing against Wikipedia; but this is a misguided strategy…
We (Tim Causer, Kris Grint, Anna-Maria Sichani, and me!) have recently published an article in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities on the economics of crowdsourcing, reporting on the Transcribe Bentham project, which is formally published here: ‘Making such bargain’: Transcribe Bentham and the quality and cost-effectiveness of crowdsourced transcription. Alack, due to our own economic…
Since its establishment in 2001, the English version of Wikipedia[1] has grown to host more than 5.6 million articles that reflect content ranging from culture and the arts to technology and the applied sciences. Consistently ranked as one of the top visited sites on the Internet, Wikipedia provides an open and freely accessible resource of…
Last week (July 31, 2018), I had the honor of speaking at CLIR’s (Council on Library and Information Resources) summer seminar for new Postdoctoral Fellows. I was very excited to get the opportunity to meet a new cohort of fellows just as they are beginning their new positions at various institutions. (For more information on…
In the last 25 years we have seen the web enable new digital means for historians to reach broader publics and audiences. Over that same period of time, archives and archivists have been exploring and engaging with related strands of digital transformation. In one strand, similar focus on community work through digital means has emerged…