Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: When DH Was in Vogue; or, THATCamp Theory

“More hack, less yack,” they say. I understand the impulse, and to some degree admire the rough-and-tumble attitude of those in digital humanities whose first priority is Gettin’ Shit Done. Hell, I like Gettin’ Shit Done.

But as I’ve mentioned before, I cannot agree with the distinction between theory* and practice that this sets up, nor the zero-sum logic that it implies (i.e. in order to do more you must speak less).

I’ve long found the complete domination of THATCamp Bootcamps by technical skills from the CS side curious to the point of illogical. (It turns out that this post is an elaboration of my THATCamp SF post of about a year ago.)

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: E-ject Oriented Ontology

Perhaps this has occurred to others, but I was thinking this morning of the word object and the many other words it shares -ject with: project, deject, eject, reject, inject, interject … perhaps you can think of others. Like “object,” most of these words serve as both noun and verb (sometimes as adj.). In most of the etymologies, -ject comes from the Latin jacĕre meaning to throw. In the case of object, the inherited meaning is to throw something before the mind or senses. I suppose the etymology, in this case, could be viewed as unfortunate for OOO, which clearly presents objects as mind-independent, and certainly the evolved and contemporary understanding of object is mind-independent, though even being “objective” still requires a mind.

News, Reports

Report: Summer Institute docs on Evaluating Digital Scholarship

The first two documents produced during our 2011 NINES / NEH Summer Institute on Evaluating Digital Scholarship have been released: a Statement on Authorship and a set of Recommendations for Chairs of Language and Literature Departments for creating an atmosphere that is conducive to work in new media. We have others in the pipeline and will be releasing them in the coming months.

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Academic History Writing and its Disconnects

This is the rough text of a short talk I am scheduled to deliver at a symposium on ‘Future Directions in Book History’  at Cambrdige on the 24th of November 2011.

I am on the programme as talking briefly about the ‘Old Bailey Online and other resources’ (by which I assume is meant London Lives, Connected Histories, and Locating London’s Past, and the other websites I have helped to create of the last ten or twelve years).  But I am afraid I have no interest whatsoever in discussing the Old Bailey or the other websites.
News, Reports

Report: Library Linked Data Incubator Group Final Report

The mission of the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, chartered from May 2010 through August 2011, has been “to help increase global interoperability of library data on the Web, by bringing together people involved in Semantic Web activities — focusing on Linked Data — in the library community and beyond, building on existing initiatives, and identifying collaboration tracks for the future.”