Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The Public is Dead, Long Live the Public

Recent calls for finding “public” audiences for scholarly work, engaging “the general public,” and for doing public digital humanities work are encouraging, but only when those calls are informed by the long history of “public” scholarly work with some understanding that the term is contested and changing. We should all acknowledge that is no “general […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Named Entity Extraction: Productive Failure?

This past week in my Humanities Data Analysis class, we looked at mapping as data. We explored ggplot2’s map functions, as well as doing some work with ggmap’s geocoding and other things. One thing that we just barely explored was automatically extracting place names through named entity recognition. It is possible to do named entity […]

Announcements, News

Announcement: Far-reaching “Hydra-in-a-Box” Joint Initiative Funded by IMLS

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Stanford University, and the DuraSpace organization are pleased to announce that their joint initiative has been awarded a $2M National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Nicknamed Hydra-in-a-Box, the project aims foster a new, national, library network through a community-based repository system, enabling discovery, interoperability and reuse of digital […]

News, Resources

Resource: Text Data from the Archive

During graduate school I visited my fair share of archives. Living on funds dispensed from the FAFSA gods in combination with whatever part-time job I had, I often found myself hard-pressed to pony up money for photocopies. Somewhere along the line I got smarter and started using a point and shoot camera to gather as much primary […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Write-only

It’s interesting that Jacobs and Piper offer different explanations for the diminished role of textual commentary in intellectual life. Jacobs traces it to a shift in cultural attitudes, particularly our recent, post-Romantic embrace of self-expression and originality at the expense of humility and receptiveness. Tacitly, he also implicates the even more recent, post-modern belief that the written word is something to be […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: 79 Theses on Technology. For Disputation.

Alan Jacobs has written seventy-nine theses on technology for disputation. A disputation is an old technology, a formal technique of debate and argument that took shape in medieval universities in Paris, Bologna, and Oxford in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In its most general form, a disputation consisted of a thesis, a counter-thesis, and a string […]

News, Reports

Report: Authors Alliance Guide to Rights Reversion

Yesterday I was fortunate to be able to attend a session offered by the Authors Alliance that was hosted by the University of California, Berkeley. As part of this session the Alliance announced the availability of a new guide that covers issues around rights reversion for authors who have published books. The presentation placed this […]

Job Announcements, News

Job: Digital Library Programmer, Librarian I at Michigan State University

Michigan State University is recruiting a Digital Library Programmer, Librarian I. Reporting to the Head of the Digital and Multimedia Center, we are looking for a creative Librarian who will plan, code, test, and implement technologies and systems that promote and advance the Library’s mission of preservation, creation, transmission and application of knowledge. As part […]