Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Evaluating Scholarly Digital Outputs: The 6 Layers Approach

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 […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Mal d’Archive

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 […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Made In Sheffield: Industrial Perspectives on the Digital Humanities

It is a great honour to be asked to inaugurate this first Digital Humanities Congress at the University of Sheffield. My connections with digital humanities at Sheffield go back to 1995 when the remarkable portfolio of projects in the Humanities Research Institute at Sheffield caught the attention of the British Library, and I was asked […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The University in the Digital Age: The Big Questions (TILTS 2011) – YouTube Video

Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies 2011 “The Digital and the Human(ities)” The keynote lecture by Alan Liu (University of California at Santa Barbara) started the second symposium of the institute. The lecture was transmitted from New Jersey via Skype. Introduction: Sam Baker TILTS 2011 directors: Matt Cohen & Lars Hinrichs

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Big Data and the Dawn of the Super Researcher

In separate “big data” presentations at the Digital Preservation 2012meeting, Myron Guttmann of the National Science Foundation andLeslie Johnston of the Library of Congress described scenarios that seemed futuristic and fantastic but were in fact present-day realities. Both presenters spoke about researchers using powerful new processing tools to distill information from massive pools of data. Imagine, say, a researcher […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: “There’s no Next about it”: Stanley Fish, William Pannapacker, and the Digital Humanities as paradiscipline dpod blog

In a posting to his blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education, William Pannapacker identified the Digital Humanities as an emerging trend at the 2009 Modern Language Association Convention. Amid all the doom and gloom of the 2009 MLA Convention, one field seems to be alive and well: the digital humanities. More than that: Among all the […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Crowdsourcing, Undergraduates, and Digital Humanities Projects

Crowdsourcing could be a silver bullet for integrating digital humanities methods into the undergraduate curriculum.  Why? Crowdsourcing means getting the general public to do tasks. Jeff Howe explains the phenomenon in “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” (Wired Magazine, June 2006) by analogy with outsourcing.  This method of labor is growing for scholarly and cultural heritage projects, and […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Library as Platform

In May, 2007, Facebook was generating over 40 billion page views a month by providing its users with carefully constructed and controlled services. Yet on May 24, 2007 Mark Zuckerberg took the company in a new direction: developers outside of the company would be given access to many of the services and data at the […]