It’s my last day in Indianapolis. It’s been hard work and I’ve met some great people … Have we, in the last two weeks, defined what a deep map actually is? In a sense we did, but more importantly than the semantic definition, I reckon we managed to form a set of shared understandings, some fairly intuitive, […]
The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project uses database technology to map the trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a celebrated Swiss publishing house that operated between 1769 and 1794. As the STN sold the works of other publishers alongside its own editions, their archives can be considered a representative source for […]
We are pleased to announce the release of the second issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities. In the introduction to our first issue, we explained how the journal’s content came directly from the writing, coding, and projects of our field’s community of practitioners, without a traditional academic publication’s process of submission. We think it […]
Editors’ Note: In February the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum at the Smithsonian Institution released their collection metadata on GitHub using the CC0 Creative Commons license. Mia Ridge explores the shape of Cooper-Hewitt collections. Or, “what can you learn about 270,000 records in a week?” by Mia Ridge Museum collections are often accidents of history, the […]
Last week, the Library of Congress Archives Forum hosted a talk by Kate Theimer of the popular blog ArchivesNext. Theimer is a prominent voice in the archival community, frequently writing and speaking about archival advocacy issues as well as the challenges and opportunities that technology and the Internet offer for cultural heritage institutions. Theimer spoke on […]
In this Blogpost we describe how we improved the accuracy of the process by which we aligned Arachne to Pleiades. The fact that the first Arachne-Pleiades matching was strictly string-based brought several problems with it. (See previous posts 1, 2.) In a place matching process, each usable context can reduce the prospect of making errors, especially when […]
Last month, I gave a presentation about paid crowdsourcing in the humanities at SDH-SEMI. Below are my notes. I The rhetorical model in the humanities is appreciation: we believe that by paying attention to an object of interest, we can explore it, find new dimensions within it, notice things about it that have never been […]
Interview with Aharon Varady New technologies are naturally and generally controversial, but perhaps nowhere more so than in religious communities. For many religious leaders (and their followers), recent digital technologies are corrosive solvents of community life: the old ways are surely best. For others, new technologies offer opportunities to extend the reach of religious bodies, to […]
To begin: One question and one metaphor. The question is, what use is visualization to historians? How does this method add value to the work we do? The metaphor is accretion, the term geologists use to describe the building up of new soils through deposits of materials eroded elsewhere. Accretion works to describe the process […]
What follows is a draft of a paper written in conjunction with Robert Blades concerning the Looted Heritage project. Introduction In his overview of what ‘open access’ might mean in the academy, Peter Suber draws attention to the salient features of what it means to call something ‘open’ – that it is digital, the cost (to […]
