Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Stories from Black Physicists in Our Collections

Editor’s Summary: Modern sciences in the United States has been a predominately white-dominated workplace. This project at the American Institute of Physics collects oral history interviews from Black and African American physicists. This project addresses the lack of narratives in the history of science, especially physics, from minority communities. The need to record the perspectives […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: AI Inverts the Disciplinary Hierarchy

Editors’ Summary: This post questions the perceived hierarchy of disciplines in the university, and argues that the rise of generative AI challenges this hierarchy. He points to how computer science was considered the most lucrative major in the twenty-first century until the automation of coding made possible by AI. He uses the case study of […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The Price of Scale: AI, Ethics, and the Limits of the Humanities

Editor’s Summary: The question of scale is something that has been troubling many humanities disciplines even before the popularization of computational technologies. In the field of DH, we often perceive that there is an additional layer of abstraction between the researcher and subject because of the digital “screen” and scale of analysis that our technological […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Three Months of DuckDuckGo: Reflections after Partially “De-Googling”

Editors’ Summary: This series of articles comparing the user experience in DuckDuckGo and Google goes beyond a purely UX analysis. Seeing how these two search engines play in an academic or teacher’s work, we get to see how certain search engines, like Google, are more than just “search engines.” As mentioned, Google also controls our […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The Repository of Last Resort? Exploring the Role of Institutional Repositories in the Data Repository Ecosystem through Researcher Perspectives

Editors’ Summary: This paper studies a common tool for researchers to share their quantitative or data sources: the data repository run usually by university libraries. These repositories allow users to download datasets that researchers have curated. This paper provides a helpful glimpse into the user identity and persona of researchers working with data repositories. They […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: User Experience (UX) Heuristics for the Digital Humanities

Editor’s Summary: This article argues that user experience (UX) practices are crucial yet often under-utilized and overlooked in digital humanities (DH) projects because conventional UX methods don’t align well with the complexity of humanities content. To address this challenge, the authors introduce a set of ten UX heuristics aimed at improving accessibility and audience engagement. […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The marionette theater of AI

Editors’ Summary: This post considers the growing phenomenon of what the author deems ‘stateful AI agents’ on social media. In this context, stateful means that the systems are not frozen, or the AI’s state can change. The rise of Moltbook, a social media site for AI agents, has brought more media attention to the practice, […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The Cost of Open by Default in the AI Era

Editors’ Summary: This selection grapples with the difficulties of maintaining open access in the era of AI. The author identifies four ways that generative AI has affected open access resources: the intellectual harvest of cultural heritage, the infrastructure tax, the harvesting of physical collections, and the erosion of trust. She focuses on the erosion of […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: A Prehistory of Digital Archaeology

Editors’ Summary: This post attempts to provide a history of the origins of digital archaeology, with the author acknowledging the relative lack of attention given to the field’s past. He notes similar challenges in pinning down precise origins for the field of digital humanities. The author highlights scholarship from throughout the twentieth century to determine […]