This is the transcript of the talk I gave this evening at the CUNY Graduate Center. …I do want to talk a little bit this evening about the work I’ve been doing as a Spencer Fellow. That’s not what it says in my title and abstract, I recognize. And that’s the curse of making up […]
Two Directions in AI In the inaugural issue of AI & Society, published in 1987, Ajit Narayanan identified two directions that propelled the discipline of artificial intelligence. The first was “Implement and be damned” whereby programs are produced to replicate tasks performed by humans with relevant expertise (p. 60). Motivated by efficiency, these programs might […]
[At Jeff McClurken’s invitation, I was recently part of a panel focused on reviewing digital history at Organization of American Historian’s annual meeting. My portion of the discussion was to focus on reviewing digital public history projects, which have their own particularities that make them different that some other genres of digital history. I welcomed […]
I have been chewing on a topic and I could use others’ help. I, like many others, am frustrated by the enormous time gap between scholarly understanding of the privacy issues in digital media technology here in the U.S. and public and political awareness. This is an area of research and teaching for me, so I’ve […]
If you know me, the topic of this first post may come as unsurprising but also a bit eyebrow-raising. “Sharon, you’ve been working on the Old Bailey Online project (OBO) since forever. Aren’t you bored with it yet?” Meanwhile, those who don’t know me might more likely be asking, “What are the Old Bailey Proceedings?” […]
Last year, I wrote about my early impressions of the possible uses of virtual reality technology for public history and history education. I also led a session in my fourth-year digital history class on virtual reality and its potential for generating a sense of historical presence, an ability to simulate the sensation of standing in […]
Open Source and copyright are intimately related. It was Richard Stallman’s clever hack of copyright law that created the General Public License (GPL) and, thus, free software. The GPL requires those who copy or modify software released under it to pass on the four freedoms. If they don’t, they break the terms of the GPL […]
This post (and its partner post on Evaluating Digital Humanities Beyond the Tenure Track Part 2: For Employers) continues a series of blog posts from the MLA Committee on Information Technology about evaluating work in the digital humanities. (See Amanda Visconti’s post on digital dissertations and Shawna Ross’s explanation for the series.) I’ve taken on […]
I want to frame my talk around a quote from Community Futures Lab co-director Rasheedah Phillips from her workshop “Time, Memory, and Justice in Marginalized Communities.” She states “Oral Futures is about speaking into existence what you want to have happen.” I want to think with you today about how such future-making materials are collected, […]
I was invited to be a discussion leader for a panel on Preprints: Challenges and Opportunities at the National Academy of Sciences Journals Summit, but a nor’eastern prevented me from attending. I am grateful to Diane Sullenberger, Executive Editor of PNAS for reading my remarks. Discussion leaders were asked to talk about preprints from their own […]
