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Category: Editors’ Choice

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Where They Actually Went: The Presence Problem in Digitised Travel Writing

Our take: What makes this article particularly compelling is how it questions whether extracting geographical information from historical texts necessarily produces an accurate representation of the past. Using Thomas Roe’s seventeenth-century travel accounts, the author highlights a crucial distinction between places a traveller actually visited and those mentioned through secondhand information. This piece moves beyond […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: AI: A Matter of Significance

Our take: In “AI: A Matter of Significance,” published in electronic book review, Davin Heckman examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping our understanding of writing, creativity, and human significance. Rather than treating generative AI as an entirely new disruption, Heckman places it within a longer history of writing technologies, cybernetics, and changing forms of cultural […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Composing and Inputting Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs with Unicode Control Characters: The Impact of Egyptian OpenType

Our take: In “Composing and Inputting Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs with Unicode Control Characters,” published in The Digital Orientalist, So Miyagawa traces how Unicode has slowly learned to handle the two-dimensional layout of hieroglyphs. Basic signs entered the standard in 2009, but they could only appear in a flat line until control characters for stacking and […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Off the pedestal, into the world

Our take: In “Off the pedestal, into the world,” published in the magazine Phi / AI, Cassandre questions the habit of measuring AI against humans as either an inferior tool or a superior rival. Drawing on James Bridle’s Ways of Being and Christine Webb’s The Arrogant Ape, she argues that human exceptionalism has long shaped […]

By: Cassandre
Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Escaping the Technology Trap, Reclaiming Liberalitas

Our take: In “Escaping the Technology Trap, Reclaiming Liberalitas,” Rosalyn Metz introduces a four-part series adapted from her closing keynote at the Fantastic Futures conference of the AI4LAM community. This first post sets the stage for the argument to come. Rather than focusing on how generative AI works, Metz asks how libraries, archives and museums […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed

Our take: This post compares the “essential vocabulary” lists called the General Service List (1953) and the New General Service List (2013, revised in 2023). The lists were designed as teaching tools for people learning English as a second language, built from real-world usage data and extensively tested. This post does computational text analysis on […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: On Digital Humanities in Japan, the Public Humanities and Digital History: An Interview with Prof. Kikuchi Nobuhiko

Our take: This post is a part of a series featuring interviews with researchers working at institutions affiliated with the National Institutes for the Humanities exploring different projects, ideas, and initiatives. This interview with Prof. Kikuchi Nobuhiko, the Vice-Director of the Center for Data-Driven Research on Premodern Japanese Texts at the National Institute of Japanese […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Mapping Prefectural-Level Financial Mobilisation in Wartime Japan

Our take: In this post, Brian Wong brings overlooked local archives into conversation through AI-assisted transcription, historical geocoding, and interactive mapping. By tracing the spatial relationships between banks and factories in Kyoto, Wong identifies patterns of wartime financial mobilisation, including newly established Shiga Bank branches located near munitions manufacturers. The post demonstrates how digital methods […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The (Im)possibility of Autonomous Feminist Infrastructures

Our take: Can a digital infrastructure ever be truly autonomous from the systems it seeks to challenge? In this article, Cécile Chevalier, Irene Fubara-Manuel, and Sharon Webb explore this question through an experiment in building a feminist server using Raspberry Pi computers. From hardware shortages to institutional dependencies and barriers to technical knowledge, their experience […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The Slow Formation of Durable Software

Our take: In this post, Dan Cohen reflects on the early development of Zotero and details this history. He focuses on “Zotero’s pre-history, what it took to conceive, design, and build the 1.0 release.” He emphasizes the slow pace of development as one reason for the durability of the tool. This slow development and emphasis […]

By: Dan Cohen