Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The Theory and Infrastructure Behind Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Round-up

What is the theory that underpins our moocs? By George Siemens If you’re even casually aware of what is happening in higher education, you’ve likely heard of massive open online courses (MOOCs). They have been covered by NY Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TV programs, newspapers, and a mess or blogs. While MOOCs have been […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Crowdsourcing and Cultural Heritage Round-Up

Editors’ Note: Several recent pieces by Mia Ridge and Trevor Owens have been focused on Crowdsourcing and Cultural Heritage. Excerpts and links to the original pieces are below. Frequently Asked Questions about Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage By Mia Ridge ….What kind of cultural heritage stuff can be crowdsourced? I wrote this list of ‘Activity types […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Quantitative Approaches to Nineteenth Century Literary and Intellectual History

Editors’ Note: Two new publications using quantitative methods to study the literary and intellectual history of nineteenth century Britain have been released. The first by Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac from the Stanford Literary Lab, and the second from Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs. Excerpts and links to the original texts are included below. A […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: In Praise of “Shock and Awe”

Why graph? And why, in particular, use innovative and unfamiliar graphing techniques? I started this blog without addressing these questions, but a recent blog post by Adam Crymble, critical of “shock and awe” graphs made me realize the need to explain EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis) and data visualization. Crymble wisely challenged data visualization practitioners to […]

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Editors’ Choice: Papers from MIT Presented at International Conference on Computational Creativity 2012

Many exciting things here at ICCC-12 (the International Conference on Computational Creativity 2012) in Dublin, but here are those that come from MIT, Writing and Humanistic Studies, and Comparative Media Studies: I represented my lab, The Trope Tank, by presenting by the position paper “Small-Scale Systems and Computational Creativity” (PDF) by Nick Montfort and Natalia […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Why the Google Art Project is Important

Our schools and libraries are being radically re-imagined for the digital age, but what about our museums? The New York Public Library, for example, is bravely (and controversially) rethinking its Fifth Avenue flagship building. Last month, MIT and Harvard announced edX, a partnership to offer free online courses, and last fall, Stanford offered three massive […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Reports from Human-Computer Interaction Lab Annual Symposium at the University of Maryland

Reports from the 29th Annual Symposium, held May 22-23, 2012, are now available in the archive. Sopan, A. (May 2012) Monitoring Scientific Conference: Real-time Visualization and Retrospective Analysis of the Backchannel Conversation HCIL-2012-12 [Link to Report] Dunne, C., Shneiderman, B. (May 2012) Motif Simplification: Improving Network Visualization Readability with Fan and Parallel Glyphs HCIL-2012-11 [Link […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: A Vision of the Role and Future of Web Archives: The Web Archive in Today’s World

Editors’ Note: This piece consists of three posts. A PDF of full report available from netpreserve.org. From the first in the three-part series: Imagine a world in which libraries and archives had never existed. No institutions had ever systematically collected or preserved our collective cultural past: every book, letter, or document was created, read and […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: More Hack, Less Yack?: Modularity, Theory and Habitus in the Digital Humanities

One of the most prevalent debates within the Digital Humanities (DH) is the idea that practitioners should just go about doing rather than talking, or to practice “more hack, less yack.” In other words, instead of pontificating and problematizing, DH scholars should be more concerned with making stuff, and making stuff happen. The “more hack, […]