“The intellectual is still only an incompletely transformed writer” — Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero There could be many epigraphs hailing a discussion of digital writing, many pithy observations about its nature, becoming, qualities, mysteries, dilemmas. From Oscar Wilde: “A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.” Virginia Woolf: “We are nauseated by […]
So much of the content of digital humanities begins in the analog world: documents that are scanned and indexed; maps that are recast in GIS; quantities that are converted to machine-readable tables. Although we tend to focus on the final product — the digital construction viewed over the web — we remain cognizant of this […]
Humanities in the Digital Age by Alan Liu and William G. Thomas III ….As humanities chairs with a long involvement in digital issues, we have seen clearly that top-down budget cuts are often justified with arguments about how digital technologies are driving change in higher education…. So we believe that humanities faculty members, chairs, and […]
The OKFestival [Open Knowledge Festival], the biggest open data and knowledge event ever held, has come to an end. And what a great week it was. On Tuesday we hacked on a number of Finnish cultural datasets and the 20 million openly licensed objects in Europeana. (writeup coming soon!) On Wednesday we met with a […]
Here’s a trick question: How do we get people to understand programming?< Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a “live coding” environment, where the program’s output updates as the programmer types. Because my work was cited as an inspiration for […]
using the spreadsheet to connect evidence to argument. For most humanists, spreadsheets makes their eyes glaze over. There is even an ominous sense of imprisonment: one must literally put ideas into cell blocks. The database would seem to limit the subtlety and dexterity of humanistic analysis in problematic ways. It insists on squeezing the messy […]
One of the ironies of the Internet age is that traditional standards for accessibility have changed radically. Intelligent members of the public refer to undigitized manuscripts held in a research library as “locked away”, even though anyone may study the well-cataloged, well-preserved material in the library’s reading room. By the standard of 1992, institutionally-held manuscripts […]
The topic of appropriate standards for the evaluation of scholarly digital outputs has come up in conversation at my institution (the University of Canterbury, New Zealand) recently and I’ve realised I haven’t got a ready or simple answer, usually replying that such standards are extremely important because we need to ensure scholarly digital outputs attain […]
On Sunday the 2nd of September 2012, Lynn H. Nelson, an American Digital History Pioneer passed away. “I more or less stumbled into computer telecommunications in 1989,” he wrote telling us about his curiosity for the new digital humanities discipline, “rather late in life, but, led by Thomas Zielke, of the University of Oldenburg and list […]
You know you’re a pretentious academic blogger when you start titling your posts in French, and if you can quote one of the most notoriously abstruse French philosophers at the same time, well that’s just a bonus. Jacques Derrida is not much in style these days (if he ever was). His ideas, and especially his prose, have […]
