Most neighborhoods in America have a public library. Now the biggest neighborhood in America, the Internet, wants a library of its own. Last week, Ars attended a conference held by the Digital Public Library of America, a nascent group of intellectuals hoping to put all of America’s library holdings online. The DPLA is still in […]
April 28 and 29 was Transparency Camp 12 (TCamp), an unconference to gather journalists, technologists, activists, and others to work on ways to promote and work with openness in government. The 30th was a special hack day on the Voter Information Project. Turns out, I was over my head in that context and couldn’t really […]
Every once in a while, a new project comes around bearing a message loud and clear: this is a sign of things to come. ORBIS, the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, is one such project. ORBIS was created by Walter Scheidel, Elijah Meeks, and a host of others. At the very beginning, I […]
I’ve gone on record as saying that the digital humanities is not about building. It’s about sharing. I stand by that declaration. But I’ve also been thinking about a complementary mode of learning and research that is precisely the opposite of building things. It is destroying things. I want to propose a theory and practice of […]
Digital Conversations @ British Library is hosted by the Digital Research and Curator Team. In this bi-monthly series, inspirational and creative individuals and organisations are invited to give short, thought-provoking presentations on a topic relating to the digital environment. The series offers an invaluable opportunity for colleagues to engage in a lively discourse about digital […]
The increasing interest number of courses and concentrations focusing on public history suggests that we need to have a serious conversation about what are the skills that are necessary for students to pursue careers in public history in the 21st century. In his presentation for our panel on the future of public history instruction, Steven Burg from […]
The research I am doing presently uses visualizations to show latent patterns that may be detected in a set of poems using computational tools, such as topic modeling. In particular, I’m looking at poetry that takes visual art as its subject, a genre called ekphrasis, in an attempt to distinguish the types of language poets […]
Discussions about early modern books and digital tools have tended to focus on one of two responses. One of the first things that people focus on is the amazing access that digital tools have given us to early modern works. Instead of schlepping from library to library across the globe—a series of journeys that many […]
As Douglas Adams once memorably said, ‘lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food’. The message is the thing, not the medium through which it is conveyed. But if this is true of print, will it not turn out to be equally true of ‘Digital’? There appears to be some confusion about […]
As we reach a point where many of the classic books of literature and science published before the magical date of 1923 have been digitized, it is time to consider the quality of those copies and the issue of redundancy. A serious concern in the times before printing was that copying — and it was […]
