DHNow

Category: Editors’ Choice

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
Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Stop Choosing Tools. Start Building Them.

Our take: In “Stop Choosing Tools. Start Building Them.,” published on Active History, Jacob Polay, with Chloë Farr and Jessica Jack, argues that historians no longer need to rely on software built for other fields. Polay tested fifteen named entity recognition systems on early modern texts and found that common tools missed most entities or […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: What’s the Deal with Topic Modeling?

Our take: In “What’s the Deal with Topic Modeling?”, Alyssa Virker writes for the Data-Sitters Club’s TL;DR series, which offers short introductions for people curious about digital humanities. Writing as a newcomer, she explains in plain terms what a topic modeling tool does and what it cannot do. The tool groups words that often appear […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Apollo Restore: A Foundation LLM for Historical Greek Optimized for Fill-in-the-Middle Restoration of Ancient Greek Texts

Our take: Apollo Restore is an LLM for restoring fragments of ancient Greek text. In this article, the authors present Apollo Restore, a 24-billion-parameter LLM built from Mistral Small and note that it is the first decoder model for any ancient Mediterranean language. Apollo Restore is an output of the Decoding Antiquity initiative to build […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: For Whom and For What Purpose? A Position Paper on Digital Humanities and AI in African Studies

Our take: In “For Whom and For What Purpose? A Position Paper on Digital Humanities and AI in African Studies,” Frédérick Madore and colleagues critically examine the growing role of artificial intelligence in African Studies. The paper considers how large language models intersect with digital archives, linguistic inequality, data governance, consent, and uneven technological infrastructures. […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: An Agenda on Generative AI for the Digital Humanities

Our take: In “An Agenda on Generative AI for the Digital Humanities,” Fabio Ciotti explores the growing significance of generative artificial intelligence for digital humanities research. The article considers how large language models are reshaping established methods of textual analysis, knowledge representation, and scholarly interpretation while introducing new methodological and epistemological questions. Ciotti argues for […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Projecting emotions: Mercator and Equal Earth

Our take: Following the United Nations’ recent vote in support of the Equal Earth projection, this article looks beyond the question of which map is more “accurate”, but to ask what map projections actually do. He traces Mercator from early modern navigation and nineteenth-century education to its continued dominance in digital mapping, showing how a […]