The Internet Archive is the largest collection of historical software online in the world…. a fully-accessible, worldwide-reachable, massive-bandwidth and completely unrestricted collection of computer history up right now, in these [Internet Archive collections] I’ve just mentioned. Some are mirrors of incredible projects that have been around long before this moment, and let me not diminish…
The opening plenary from CNI’s spring 2013 membership meeting by Herbert Van de Sompel, From the Version of Record to a Version of the Record, is now available on CNI’s two video channels: In the past two decades, scholarly communication has evolved significantly to become mainly digital and network-based. This transition has brought along changes in the…
The National Digital Stewardship Alliance Content Working Group is excited to launch a new series for the Signal. We’re calling it Content Matters, and much like the Insights series that the Innovation Working Group has published here for few years now, the interview series will feature discussions and stories about the content that our members are passionate about, the importance of…
Every week Digital Humanities Now (DHNow) distributes the most important news and pieces for the field by publishing links on our website and Twitter feed. In order to identify the content most valuable to this broad and dispersed community, we rely on volunteers who help us read through the aggregated RSS feeds from our collection of 500+…
Topic modeling could stand in as a synecdoche of digital humanities. It is distant reading in the most pure sense: focused on corpora and not individual texts, treating the works themselves as unceremonious “buckets of words,” and providing seductive but obscure results in the forms of easily interpreted (and manipulated) “topics.” In its most commonly…
Abstract We report here trends in the usage of “mood” words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive…
Online publications that aggregate content from a wide variety of sources have become increasingly valuable to readers and publishers. The academy, however, is still unsure how to efficiently identify, collect, survey, evaluate, and redistribute the valuable scholarly writing published both formally and informally on the open web. Fortunately, some scholarly communities are developing methods to…
An Intern Considers the Digital Preservation Challenge, Part 1 I came to NDIIPP expecting to hear that institutions and the public weren’t prioritizing digital preservation, and that the next wave of librarians would need to shout from the rooftops to raise awareness that digital objects are facing mass obsolescence. I expected a clear, clean outline…
In February, I visited Matthew Kirschenbaum’s #ENGL668K Introduction to Digital Humanities course at the University of Maryland, and I brought to class an activity that I had been mulling over in my own mind for a long time, called the Topic Modeling Game. The game is designed to teach the basic principles of topic modeling with LDA…
Once upon a time in a land far far away there was a beautiful princess named Snow Byte. Snow Byte was a wonderful child who loved and was beloved by all who knew her, except for one. Her father, the king, had married a new wife and, as is often the case in fairy tales,…