.entry-header My last piece of work of 2017 was a treat, and worth resurrecting this blog for. Some time ago, Tabitha Tuckett in UCL Special Collections and I had a stimulating chat which sparked a handful of potentially intriguing projects. Today’s was to see whether we could find any interesting features associated with the printed […]
Digital Humanities Now will be taking a break until January 9, but before we go, we’d like to take the time to wrap up 2017. This November marked nine years of publication for Digital Humanities Now. Through the work of our dedicated staff and our generous community of volunteer editors, DHNow continues to build a new model for scholarly communication based on open scholarship, community […]
This paper explores pragmatic approaches that might be employed to document the behavior of large, complex socio-technical systems (often today shorthanded as “algorithms”) that centrally involve some mixture of personalization, opaque rules, and machine learning components. Thinking rooted in traditional archival methodology — focusing on the preservation of physical and digital objects, and perhaps the […]
I recently gave a talk at Brown University on “Institutionalizing Digital Scholarship,” and upon reflection it struck me that the lessons I tried to convey were more generally applicable. Everyone prefers to talk about innovation, rather than institutionalization, but the former can only have a long-term impact if the latter occurs. What at first seems […]
In their 2005 article in First Monday, Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig recount the story of a remarkably prescient colleague, Peter Stearns, who “proposed the idea of a history analog to the math calculator, a handheld device that would provide students with names and dates to use on exams—a Cliolator, he called it, a […]
This past week, I had the opportunity to give a talk as part of Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage’s new US Latina/o Digital Humanities (#usLdh) Incubator series. If you missed it, you can access our group notes on Google Drive or Storify. I’ve also started a Zotero Group with a growing bibliography related to […]
Every aspect of our social and economic lives. New data systems have tremendous potential to empower communities of color. Tools like statistical modeling, data visualization, and crowd-sourcing, in the right hands, are powerful instruments for fighting bias, building progressive movements, and promoting civic engagement. But history tells a different story — one in which data […]
As a first time attendee of MCN last week, I didn’t know entirely what to expect, other than all things digital plus museums. The program was really quite diverse, and ranged from relatively technical discussions (sometimes dry; sometimes hilarious) to more meta-professional sessions that really did function as a kind of group therapy. The latter sessions were […]
This white paper is the product of the Arguing with Digital History Workshop organized by Stephen Robertson and Lincoln Mullen of George Mason University, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The two-day workshop, which involved twenty-four invited participants at different stages in their careers, working in a variety of fields with a range […]
As part of the Digital Dialogues series at Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities (MITH), Walter Forsberg, Media Archivist for the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian, presented “an overview of the new museum’s audiovisual digitization programs and activities, in place since 2014.” Forsberg “discuss[ed] how NMAAHC established digital file-management workflows, […]
