My point here is not that there are no philosophers developing digital content or using information technology to further philosophical research: David Bourget’s PhilPapers.org John Immerwahr’s teachphilosophy101.org and Andy Cullison’s sympoze.com are notable examples of excellent and innovative uses of informational technology to advance philosophy. At the same time, there are a number of notable philosophers thinking about the interface of technology and ourselves- David Chalmers, Luciano Floridi and Andy Clark spring to mind.

There are not, however, numerous examples of philosophers using techniques of the digital humanities to _do_ philosophy or using digital tools to teach philosophy.

On an incredibly basic, overly simplified level, philosophy is interested in the discovery, development, classification and analysis of human concepts and reasoning.

I thought, why not map the places that had Wikipedia articles associated with them, to see what patterns emerged.  The results of this excursion are presented below.

DBpedia is the ongoing attempt to transform Wikipedia into a semantically rich and queryable database of human knowledge.  It stores much of the categorical information found in Wikipedia articles using RDF triples–simple links for every snippet of data, from the death date of a famous (and sometimes even real) person to the season number of every Simpsons episode, to the latitude and longitude of over half a million articles on a wide variety of subjects.

Jon is the director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, and he brought with him two undergraduate research assistants,  Jenny Rempel