Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction

This is a talk that I gave at the Harvard Purdue Data Management Symposium on June 17, 2015, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The audience was mostly librarians and other data-management professionals. I was the only humanities person on the program, so I wanted to talk about the ways that humanists think about data differently from people […]

News, Resources

Resource: HathiTrust Resource Center Workset Browser

From the post: In my copious spare time I have hacked together a thing I’m calling the HathiTrust Research Center Workset Browser, a (fledgling) tool for doing “distant reading” against corpora from the HathiTrust. [1] The idea is to: 1) create, refine, or identify a HathiTrust Research Center workset of interest — your corpus, 2) […]

Editors' Choice

Editor’s Choice: Methods for Uncovering Reprinted Texts in Antebellum Newspapers

This is a pre-print version of this article. The final, edited version will appear in the online edition of American Literary History 27.3 (August 2015)…The Viral Texts Project is an interdisciplinary and collaborative effort among the authors listed here, with contributions from project alumni Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Kevin Smith, and Peter Roby. In the first […]

Editors' Choice

The Sweep of History

Many if not most contemporary historians would probably agree with the statement that “the typical mode of explanation used by historians [is] narrative.” (Roberts 2001) Storytelling, then, is not the difference between history and fiction. Instead, we could say, the scope of the story is what differentiates historical and fictional writing. For the past four months, […]