DHNow

Author: Colleen Nugent

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: On Sharing With the Right People, or Why Online Metrics to Assess “Impact” Should Be Qualitative (Too)

There has been much talk recently about “maximising” and measuring academic impact through blogging and social media (as well as the academic impact of online publications and resources), but what is not often discussed thoroughly is what the meaning of “maximising” is in this context.

“Maximising” seems to refer to the quantitative, rather than the qualitative, implying that “impact” is necessarily related to how many people or visits or clicks or downloads a given online resource is getting.

Job Announcements, News

Job: Prof. English Literature, History of the Book, and Digital Humanities, Cardiff University

Following the University’s acquisition of the Cardiff Rare Books Collection, the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University invites applications for a Professorship in English Literature, tenable from 1st September 2012, or as soon as possible thereafter. The successful candidate will be a leading expert in the History of the Book and Material Culture and in Digital Humanities, with an international portfolio of research publications in English Literature. You will be expected to make a substantial contribution to the School’s Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research by pioneering the development of initiatives relating to the Rare Books Collection.

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: “Academic History Writing and the Headache of Big Data”

[T]he seven or eight major projects I have co-directed are, from my perspective at least, fragments of a single coherent research agenda and project.

And that project is about the amalgamation of the Digital Humanities with an absolute commitment to a particular kind of history: ‘History from Below’.  They form an attempt to integrate the British Marxist Historical Tradition, with all the assumptions that implies about the roles of history in popular memory, and community engagement, with digital delivery.  In the language of the moment, they are a fragment of what we might discuss as a peculiar flavour of ‘public history’. 

News, Resources

Resource: OpenStreetMap Beginner’s Guide

Switch to OpenStreetMap and discover how you can build beautiful maps from the world’s best map data. We give you the data for free; you can make any map you like with it. Or benefit from the expertise of those already using OpenStreetMap. Host it on your hardware, or elsewhere. You have control. switch2osm.org explains how to make the switch – from first principles to technical how-tos.

News, Resources

Resource: In the pipeline: LEXAN, an advanced Annotation Framework for ELAN

Many users have asked for support for advanced annotation tasks in ELAN, ideally using LEXUS to build, access and expand a lexical database. Making this possible is the objective of TLA’s newest project called LEXAN, a modular annotation support framework coupled to a new interface in ELAN. It will support different “annotyzers”,  i.e. modules that produce annotation suggestions for the researcher, including machine-learning modules.