Google Books and HathiTrust have been making headlines in the library world and beyond for years now, while a new player, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), has only recently entered the scene. This article will provide a “state of the environment” update for these digital library projects including project history and background. It…
A Digital Re-Creation of John Donne’s Gunpowder Day Sermon The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project helps us to explore public preaching in early modern London, enabling us to experience a Paul’s Cross sermon as a performance, as an event unfolding in real time in the context of an interactive and collaborative occasion. This Project uses architectural modeling software and acoustic simulation software to…
The Digital Public Library of America was launched in April 2013. Explaining what it actually was, Dan Cohen, the Executive Director, pointed to three key elements: the DPLA was a portal, a platform, and an advocate for open public access to scientific and cultural content. We understand portals – they’re just web gateways or starting points. Similarly,…
Digital Humanites Now has had a facelift! In honor of DHNow’s fourth anniversary, PressForward graduate research assistant Sasha Hoffman has redesigned our website to improve readability and provide more information about our processes. To highlight scholarship surfaced by DHNow, the five most recent Editors’ Choice selections are now featured first on the home page. The…
Dreaming of What Might Be examines the contentious but significant history of the labour organization known as the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. The comic book shows how the organization took root in Canada and “encouraged people to ‘dream of what might be’ and take action on the job rather than give…
Recent research indicates a high recall in Google Scholar searches for systematic reviews. These reports raised high expectations of Google Scholar as a unified and easy to use search interface. However, studies on the coverage of Google Scholar rarely used the search interface in a realistic approach but instead merely checked for the existence of…
This academic year (2013-14), I am the lead researcher for the Maker Lab’s “Z-Axis” project, which—in collaboration with the Modernist Versions Project (MVP)—is exploring forms of visualization that express subjective encounters with literary data through 3D modeling and prototyping. Stephen Ross (director of the MVP) describes this research as a combination of “literary analysis and…
Many would argue that there is a clear distinction between videogames and the art of gamification since the latter specifically applies game mechanics to non-game contexts. However, with a generation brought up on videogames and the need to engage these children in the classroom, the lines are becoming ever more blurred. Traditionally, one may think…
The materials featured in this sixth issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities expose “communities of practice” in digital humanities beyond the constellations of people and institutions directly engaged in experimental and digitally-inflected scholarship. Communities of practice, socially constructed groups that form around shared interests or crafts, often generate forms of tacit knowledge that circulate informally….
Today we live in computational abundance whereby our everyday lives and the environment that surrounds us is suffused with digital technologies. This is a world of anticipatory technology and contextual computing that uses smart diffused computational processing to create a fine web of computational resources that are embedded into the material world. Thus, the historical…