In November 2012 the United States Postal Service reported a staggering deficit of $15.9 billion. For the historian, this begs the question: was it always this bad? Others have penned far more nuanced answers to this question, but my starting point is a lot less sophisticated: a table of yearly expenses and income. So, was the postal department always […]
“How people perished in the Ghetto – that I understand; what I cannot understand is how they lived.” — Chaim Grade. reVilna is a digital mapping project dedicated to understanding how the residents of the Ghetto lived, how the ghetto functioned — even, given the circumstances, flourished — how it emerged, and how, ultimately, it was […]
The PressForward Plugin is a tool for aggregating and curating content from the web from within a WordPress dashboard. It is designed to support bloggers and editorial teams who wish to aggregate and share content from a variety of sources. The plugin provides an RSS reader within the WordPress dashboard, a tool for collaborative editorial work, and a process […]
This is part of a longer book project I coauthored with Jason Whittaker called William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media. I wanted to look at Blake as a test case for understanding how digital modalities can impact what literary studies means to us. In other words, I wanted to think about the […]
This Amicus Brief was filed in the United States Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit in the case of Authors Guild v. Hathitrust on June 4, 2013. The case is on Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 11 CV 6351 (Baer, J.) Amici are over […]
The Internet is finally beginning to penetrate historical practice. At the recent North American Society for Sports History (NASSH) Conference, held May 24-26, 2013 at Saint Mary’s University, Douglas Booth and Gary Osmond provided a fascinating primer on the impact digital history is starting to exert on a field like the study of international sports […]
(This post is based on “Improving Software Sustainability: Lessons Learned from Profiles in Science“, an interactive paper (pdf) at the Society for Imaging Science and Technology’s Archiving 2013 conference, April 2-5, 2013.) This story begins in the early 1990s at the National Library of Medicine, when our group experimented with arranging, describing and digitizing historical manuscript collections to make […]
When I was asked to participate on this panel about digital humanities and the alternative publishing needs of faculty, I felt obliged to temper my delighted acceptance of the invitation with a caveat that “ scholarly publishing” (and its associated challenges) is not something I usually see as central to the work I do. One […]
Topic modeling is a catchall term for a group of computational techniques that, at a very high level, find patterns of co-occurrence in data (broadly conceived). In many cases, but not always, the data in question are words. More specifically, the frequency of words in documents. In natural language processing this is often called a […]
The digital age and the tools it provides allow for a different mediation of knowledge than standard forms of scholarly communications. As noted by Abby Smith Rumsey these new methods have brought “fundamental operational changes and epistemological challenges [that] generate new possibilities for analysis, presentation, and reach into new audiences”.[2] The exhibit format in Omeka […]
