Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Digitization ≠ Repatriation

This week over at Hyperallergic, I wrote about new exhibits at the British Library and the Victoria & Albert Museum which both engage with the cultural heritage of ancient and medieval Ethiopia. An examination of the Ethiopian cultural heritage held in the libraries and museums of Britain can perhaps demonstrate a seminal point about digitization and […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Meaning chains with word embeddings

Matthew Lincoln recently put up a Twitter bot that walks through chains of historical artwork by vector space similarity. https://twitter.com/matthewdlincoln/status/1003690836150792192. The idea comes from a Google project looking at paths that traverse similar paintings. This reminds that I’d meaning for a while to do something similar with words in an embedding space. Word embeddings and image […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: reconstitute the world

[The following is the text of a talk I gave (with changes) as “Reconstitute the World: Machine-Reading Archives of Mass Extinction,” in two different contexts last week. First, I opened the summer lecture series at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, where I’m privileged to be a faculty member and supporter. Next, I closed […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Twitter Conferences – To Do or Not To Do?

In August 2017, I virtually attended and presented at the Beyond 150: Telling Our Stories Twitter Conference ((#Beyond150CA). In collaboration with Unwritten Histories, Canada’s History Society, and the Wilson Institute, this event was the first Twitter conference to focus on Canadian history. This conference seemed like a great opportunity to present my work on “filles […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Are Historians Still Ambivalent About Getting Published Online?

As earlier reports on historians’ use of technology demonstrated, most historians are gathering materials, analyzing their findings, and writing their scholarship in digital form. Curiously, however, a national survey in fall 2015 found that much of the profession remains skeptical about the value of disseminating their scholarship electronically (aside from digital versions of their print publications).  As […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Soon You May Be Able to Text with 2,000 Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Led by Unicode Consortium member Michel Suignard, the proposed Hieroglyphs will add over 2,000 new glyphs to the current Unicode standards. It will also provide greater global standardization and ease of use for Egyptologists through a searchable Hieroglyphs database. Over 2,000 new Hieroglyphs may soon be available for use on cell phones, computers, and other […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Reflecting on Critical Making in Digital History

Editors Note: This is the second post in a two-part post exploring a digital history course taught at Carleton University in Winter 2018. Part one explains the premise behind #hist3812. In part one, Graham explained the rationale and unfurling of HIST3812, Critical Making in Digital History. At the end of the course, he invited the students […]