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Category: Editors’ Choice

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: I Always Wanted to Be a Media Theorist Who Wrote with a Telegraph Key

Editors’ Summary: Steve Tomasula’s I Always Wanted to Be a Media Theorist Who Wrote with a Telegraph Key is a thought-provoking exploration of how digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and networked systems are reshaping literature, identity, and human consciousness. Drawing on the scholarship of Joseph Tabbi, Tomasula argues that storytelling is moving beyond individual, character-driven narratives […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Digital Humanities Part 1: What Are the Digital Humanities?

Editors’ Summary: This six-part series by Adam DJ Brett on the digital humanities seeks to provide a starting point for newcomers to DH, practical approaches to undertaking digital humanities, and an argument for the importance of data preservation and resilience. Part one asks what the digital humanities are. The second part surveys tools for dissertation […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Saving Tangible Media for Tomorrow: A Reflection from Natalie Nemes

Editors’ Summary: In “Saving Tangible Media for Tomorrow: A Reflection from Natalie Nemes,” published on the Library of Congress blog The Signal, 2026 Junior Fellow Natalie Nemes describes her work in the Library’s Tangible Media Project, which reformats at-risk carriers such as CDs, DVDs, floppy disks, and USB drives before decay, demagnetization, or equipment obsolescence […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The Archive is Not a Toy: The Hidden Problems of a ‘Vintage’ AI

Editors’ Summary: In “The Archive is Not a Toy: The Hidden Problems of a ‘Vintage’ AI,” published on Active History, Jacob Polay, Chloë Farr, and Jessica Jack critique talkie, a language model trained exclusively on pre-1931 English-language print sources and marketed as both a forecasting experiment and a chatbot “from 1930.” The authors argue that […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Making Marx More Readable: A Minimal Computing Approach to a Community-Driven Edition of Capital Vol. 1

Editors’ Summary: In “Making Marx More Readable: A Minimal Computing Approach to a Community-Driven Edition of Capital Vol. 1,” published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Steven Gotzler and Avery Wiscomb present MARXdown, a minimal digital reading edition of Marx’s Capital Vol. 1, as a retrospective case study in applying minimal computing principles to community-driven DH projects. […]

Editors' Choice

DHNow Newsletter, July 22, 2026

This issue was curated by Colleen Nugent McLean, DHNow’s Editor, and Nico Larrondo, DHNow Guest Editor. Our Editors’ Choice selections this week include a discussion of the difficulties in digitizing at-risk media, a critique of “vintage” AI models such as Talkie, and an article introducing a minimal computing approach to teaching Marx’s Capital. We have […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Mozilla AI at Internet Archive Europe: Owning Your AI Stack

Editors’ Summary: This post reviews a conversation between researchers from Mozilla AI and Internet Archive Europe on computing infrastructure dependency. For digital humanists, we use cloud-based systems on a daily basis, whether that is to store research data, digitized primary sources, machine learning models, etc. As seen in events like AWS’s major outage in the […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Pre-revolution network connections of the 1989 Polish Round Table participants

Editors’ Summary: This paper, focusing on the Round Table meetings in Poland during the late 1980s, meetings that hoped to address political challenges in Communist Poland. Using network analysis, the authors present the considerations behind creating network data visualizations. The metadata that the authors consider, such as affiliations, personal biography, and others, are especially helpful […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Dataset Context(ualisation) in Documentation: Best Practices, Recommendations and Open Questions | Journal of Open Humanities Data

Editors’ Summary: This discussion paper provides multiple perspectives on data curation. It considers not just the work done in academia but also in community organizations, such as Cultural Heritage Institutions. The paper also provides data management recommendations and future questions. Specifically, the authors emphasize the importance of strong and consistent dataset documentation. This paper will […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Conversations about conversational code: on the collaborative critical code studies reading of ELIZA

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, […]