Welcome to the American Converts Database With this database, you can explore the lives and relationships of converts in American history. Convert records are categorized by geographical location, date, religion, and sex, among others, and you can also track familial, social, and religious relationships between converts. Finally, you can collaborate with scholars around the world to deepen […]
In the posts in this series so far I’ve demonstrated that games condition humanities. The rulesets of the past, beginning (from the perspective of the traditional canon of Western literature) with the homeric epics, enable the performances of the present; those performances iterate the rulesets, inviting future performances in the great chain of practomime. My next task, as I see it, is to advocate […]
In the 80s and 90s, critical cartographers, such as J. B. Harley, reminded us thatthe map is not the territory. A map is always a representation, a construction, designed by humans to show certain things and to not show other things. The critique was elementary. Fifty years earlier, Borges had acknowledged much more creatively the map/territory […]
Yesterday, Thursday the 14th of March 2013, I had the great pleasure of speaking at the University of Sussex to an entirely mixed audience of humanists, scientists, librarians, OA enthusiasts and OA sceptics on the topic of the Future of Peer Review. The advantage of being too busy to practice a talk was that I […]
Twenty years ago Roy Rosenzweig imagined a compelling mission for a new institution: “To use digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.” I’ve been incredibly lucky to be a part of that mission for over twelve years, at what became […]
Over the past few years, many of the most prominent American universities, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Duke, have joined to embrace a game-changing approach in opening up their previously closed academic resources. Leveraging the revolutionary potential of digital technology to provide access to the world’s best faculty members, this new method of dissemination takes […]
Decoding Digital Pedagogy, pt. 1: Beyond the LMS by Sean Michael Morris We are not ready to teach online. In a recent conversation with a friend, I found myself puzzled, and a bit troubled, when he expressed confusion about digital pedagogy. He said something to the extent of, “What’s the difference between digital pedagogy and […]
Museums and galleries embrace social media and use it as a means to communicate and promote their activities, and also to interact and engage with their visitors (Russo, Watkins, Kelly, & Chan, 2008; Kidd, 2011; Fletcher & Lee, 2012). A large number of museums now have a profile on social media sites to post news, […]
Now back to some texts for a bit. Last spring, I posted a few times about the possibilities for reading genders in large collections of books. I didn’t follow up because I have some concerns about just what to do with this sort of pronoun data. But after talking about it to Ryan Cordell’s class at […]
What do pet cloning websites, YouTube videos of fans playing AC/DC’s “Gone Shootin’”, and discussions of the end times on UseNet all have in common? Answer: Robert Glenn Howard has studied and written about all of them in his ongoing study of the vernacular web. Robert Glenn Howard is the Director of Digital Studies and a Professor […]
