The long answer is that historians don’t necessarily need scientists, but that we do need fresh scientific methods. Perhaps as an accident of our association with the ill-defined “humanities”, or as a result of our being placed in an entirely different culture (see: C.P. Snow), most historians seem fairly content with methods rooted in thinking […]
Some reasons graduate students (and any scholars) should maintain an online presence, with an emphasis on using Twitter and blogging to develop intellectually and professionally: Blogging is magic (I’m blogging right now!). Blogging can help you develop content for your dissertation, article, or future conference paper, without the same constraints of sitting down to produce […]
The application of computer vision to art photo archives has largely been unexplored up to this point. Lev Manovich has explored ways of analyzing images of artworks while looking for trends in an artists oeuvre or entire artistic movements. However, most institutions have used large scale image analysis primarily for cases of copyright enforcement, face […]
What if the Leaves of Grass was instead called Webs of Grass? I’ve created a series of network graphs that represent the multiple editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, in which pages are represented as nodes and the edges represent the lexical similarities between them. The networks are drawn in an “evolutionary” way, so for each page […]
Power in human societies derives from the ability to get people to act together. Armies, religions, governments, and businesses have dominated societies using weapons, beliefs, laws and money to exert collective effort. In modern societies, mass media have emerged as a similar organizing power.A new kind of collective organization, mediated by the internet, code and […]
For some reason I can’t explain, I have had for many years a very keen interest in crime fiction, especially French crime fiction written since the 1950s, roughly. Some of my favorite authors are Léo Malet, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Sébastien Japrisot and Didier Daeninckx. And it is not for no reason that I was drawn to […]
We’ve got a lot of great scholarship here on Play the Past. I’m continually astounded by these authors – their insights, their wit, and their ability to surprise and delight. In the interest of making something tangible in the off-line world, I’ve been experimenting with Pressbooks. I’ve examined our page views, our shares, the pingbacks, the […]
Archive Team collected the data and made the dataset available for bulk download. If you like, you can also just access the 51,000 MIDI music files from the data set from the Internet Archive. Beyond that, because the data was available in mass, the corpus of personal websites became the basis for other works. Taking the […]
Along with the less-than-romantic scenes of butchery and betrayal, murder and mayhem (see our previous post Sex and Death in the Roman de la Rose), there are of course many miniatures in Harley MS 4425 which depict an idealised courtly world and its inhabitants. As well as serving as a narrative accompaniment to the text, these […]
For months now I’ve been stewing about how much I hate @HistoryInPics and their ilk (@HistoryInPix, @HistoricalPics, @History_Pics, etc.)—twitter streams that do nothing more than post “old” pictures and little tidbits of captions for them.1 And when I say “nothing more” that’s precisely what I mean. What they don’t post includes attribution to the photographer […]
