I’m publishing my position statement for “Arguing with Digital History”, a workshop being held at George Mason University in September. We were asked to respond to the following questions: How is argumentation in digital history different from other forms of history, and how is it the same? Should DH argumentation be inherently disciplinary, or should […]
This is a blog post I’ve had sitting around in some form for a few years; I wanted to post it today because: 1) It’s about peer review, and it’s peer review week! I just read this nice piece by Ken Wissoker in its defense. 2) There’s a conference on argumentation in Digital History this […]
To mark the launch of the ODI’s Data Ethics Canvas, Amanda Smith and Peter Wells share the thought behind it, why it is important and how they hope it will be used by organisations and sectors Data is emerging as a vital and virtual form of infrastructure that we rely on. This creates the opportunity […]
Cities capture people’s imaginations because they are a whirlwind of change, adaptation, and challenge. Cities change on almost a daily basis, with the influx and exit of commuters. To survive over time, cities have to adapt to economic change, migration patterns, and citizens’ needs. Cities also have to face society’s toughest problems—poverty, crime, homelessness, and […]
In a previous post in this series I criticized the vague spatial metaphors literary critics use to understand the text and nature of critical inquiry. Think of those vague spatial metaphors as the founding “myth” of post-war literary criticism, one that allowed the explication of “meaning” to take center stage. In advocating a mode of […]
A few months ago, Celeste Sharpe, then a graduate student at George Mason University (GMU), defended what is purportedly the first born-digital dissertation in the discipline of history. Sharpe describes her project, They Need You! Disability, Visual Culture, and the Poster Child, 1945–1980, as an examination of “the history of the national poster child—an official […]
Any attempt at knowledge production has to answer the basic question of what it is. But, before long, it must also address the question of why it is. As early as the 1990s sociologists were asking how to study the way internet technologies were clearly changing societies. The term digital sociology does not make an […]
[The following is the rough text of my short paper given at the 2017 Digital Humanities conference in Montréal.] Thanks very much for having me today! I’m Brandon Walsh, Head of Graduate Programs in the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library. I’ll be talking a bit today about “Collaborative Writing to Build Digital […]
On August 10, 2017, my partner Sara Carlstead Brumfield and I delivered this presentation at Digital Humanities 2017 in Montreal. The presentation was coauthored by Patrick Lewis, Whitney Smith, Tony Curtis, and Jeff Dycus, our collaborators at Kentucky Historical Society. This is a transcript of our talk, which has been very lightly edited. See also the […]
Data is fraught with peril. I want to do two things today. The first is to talk about how archives enact epistemic violence on some of the subjects they preserve. The second is to talk about how DH methods, combined with insights from scholars who study marginalized people, can be used to undermine the inhumanity […]
