Category: Editors’ Choice

Editors’ Summary: In “Conversations about conversational code,” Mark C. Marino and colleagues revisit Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA through the recovered original source code, showing how close, collaborative code reading can reshape software history. Based on four years of interdisciplinary work, the article uncovers discrepancies between Weizenbaum’s published accounts and the actual MAD-SLIP implementation, including undocumented features, […]

Editors’ Summary: In this paper, River Rain and Houda Lamqaddam consider how recommender systems can be reframed as speculative tools for humanistic inquiry rather than commercial personalization. By demonstrating how a fine-tuned computer vision pipeline maps visual similarities across 2,341 animated films, they highlight how algorithmic proximity can trace artistic influence and macro-level aesthetic shifts. […]

Editors’ Summary: This post considers the historical background behind the difficulty of rendering Arabic typography online. The author uses an example of a project where the Arabic prose was rendered with a ragged left edge, even though the team explicitly specified justified text. This issue had nothing to do with the specific stylesheet of the […]

Editors’ Summary: This post considers the relationship between AI and book history. According to Cordell, the chat box relies on a flawed skeuomorphism that misleads users, obscuring rather than revealing the relationship between users’ inputs and the language model systems’ outputs. This post proposes the skeuomorph as a key heuristic for book historical scholarship and […]

Editors’ Summary: This post considers the extent to which the field of DH has embraced the principles of Data Feminism once the initial buzz died down. The author notes how DH is increasingly being shaped by machine learning tools and data-driven methods, making the need for a robust ethical framework for the field more urgent […]