Today, some 20 years after its first formulation, there is little question of the validity of Jerome McGann’s core and repeated argument: that we humanities scholars and publics stand before the vast, near-wholesale digital transformation of our various and shared cultural inheritance. This transformation – more properly, these remediations – are fully underway. They open new avenues for the work of the…
I’ve primarily delivered a version of this talk to digital humanities or plain old humanities or language and literature crowds (my own background being in English). Often times it evolves into a joint effort for the panelists to argue for the importance of injecting critical race/class/gender/queerness/ability into dh, but today, my goal is not to…
In 2012 I started supervising an English undergraduate dissertation: this was a online digital edition and it was my first experience of supervising a student’s digital project. What follows is a joint blog post of two parts – one from me and the other from Jess MacCarthy (the student) – that reflects upon our experiences….
In this video from the Media Systems gathering at UC Santa Cruz, Alex McDowell — one of the most influential designers in the world today — talks about how computational media are transforming storytelling. We are moving from the linear, auteur-oriented storytelling model of the printing press and industrialized film production to a collaborative, non-linear…
The transition from analogue to digital archives and the recent explosion of online content offers researchers novel ways of engaging with data. The crucial question for ensuring a balance between the supply and demand-side of data, is whether this trend connects to existing scholarly practices and to the average search skills of researchers. To gain…
At the Association of Computational Linguistics conference in Bulgaria last month, researchers from CMU presented a model for cinematic archetypes: “Learning Latent Personas of Film Characters.” The model uses the descriptive language of Wikipedia entries along with personal data of actors in films to automatically induce a set of character personas: the traitor, the flirt. As…
My purpose here, following in the spirit of Kathleen Fitzpatrick, is to consider how to cultivate good habits of live-tweeting in academic contexts… The guiding principle that should animate the live-tweeting of a lecture is the attempt to use public words to create a supportive community of thoughts, ideas, and people related to the theme under…
The one-covers-all approach in current metadata standards for scientific data has serious limitations in keeping up with the ever-growing data. This paper reports the findings from a survey to metadata standards in the scientific data domain and argues for the need for a metadata infrastructure. The survey collected 4400+ unique elements from 16 standards and…
Summary: in this post I talk about an experimental semantic website for describing what I’m calling ‘research context’, wondering if such as site can be used as a ‘source of truth’ for metadata entry, for example when someone is uploading a file into a research data repository. The post assumes some knowledge of linked data…
The Open University’s “Innovating Pedagogy” reports explore new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers. The 2013 report updates four previous areas of innovation and introduces six new ones: Crowd Learning, Learning from Gaming, Maker Culture, Geo-Learning, Digital Scholarship and Citizen Inquiry. This second report updates proposes ten innovations that…