Like many Americans, I have a love-hate relationship with technology: I inwardly cringe when my preschooler clamors for screen-time with our iPad instead of storytime with a book. Our municipalities, our government, our insurers, and even the vendors of books are awash with technology as well. At a recent hackathon, the expert from the local transit authority […]
The virtual reality tour of Rome at the heart of Rome Reborn started as a digital humanities project collaboratively developed by dozens of artists, classicists, archaeologists, and 3D modelers. Even those visiting the ruins of the Roman Forum within the city of Rome today find it hard to envision the sheer magnitude of the marble, brick, and […]
This map is a sonic exploration and representation of the North Campus of the University of Alberta. Campus has a long history as Native Land, be it as a traditional meeting place for diverse Indigenous peoples (Cree, Blackfoot, Métis, Nakota Sioux, Dene, Saulteaux/Anishinaabe, Inuit, Haudenosaunee and many others) on the banks of the kisiskāciwani-sīpiy (North […]
early virtual reality experiments with humbead’s revised map of the world. What would it mean to enter into the space of a map that itself reimagines the spatial relationships of the world? The digital history project Revising Humbead’s Revised Map of the World: Digitally Remapping the Sixties Folk Music Revival explores a psychedelic mattering map […]
[Yesterday I gave a talk at the Oxford/London IF Meetup. The session was about conversation as gameplay, and also featured Flo Minuzzi of Tea-Powered Games, speaking about their released game Dialogue and their upcoming Elemental Flow. There’s a nice livetweeted thread version of my talk available on Twitter thanks to Florence Smith Nicholls, but I […]
Think of all the things you learned in elementary school: How to read. How to write. How to count. How to do add, subtract, multiply, and divide. These are all learned skills, things that we are not innately born knowing how to do. Just like these, reading graphs is a skill. We might be taught […]
The 19th century saw something of an explosion in periodicals. For example, the number of newspapers in Britain alone leapt from 550 in 1846 to more than 2,400 just 60 years later. For humanities scholars, tracking information in such a huge mass of publications poses a daunting challenge. Digital humanities efforts have made some headway […]
On its release in 2004, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was called “the greatest book ever” and “a more enthralling read than all the novels ever entered for the Booker Prize put together.”The tabloid The Daily Mail, where these giddy pronouncements appeared, is not known for understatement, but more cautious academic researchers have long […]
“Learn from the Past, Organize the Future, Make Democracy Work.” This is the mission statement that greets visitors at the SNCC Digital Gateway—a wide-ranging, collaborative website that documents and animates the history of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Founded in April 1960 under the guidance of veteran activist Ella Baker, SNCC became a leading […]
In a previous post, we explored how using language models and the idea of “perplexity” can allow us to study stereotypes in movie character roles using their dialogue as a basis. We examined a corpus of 750 Hollywood films, released between 1970 and 2014, and tried to model assumptions from the research that people of […]
