The traditional role of the database in scholarship has been as a repository – a place to store information for later retrieval. Over the past couple of years, however, I’ve found myself becoming more interested in the methodological use of the database not simply to store information, but to clarify points of tension between the […]
While I am deeply awed by people who are able to choose to be stay-at-home parents, I never imagined myself to be one of them. Simply put, I never thought in that way about my contribution to the world. I always endeavored to seek my own path, to put my heart and soul into making […]
I want to take a brief moment to explain the personal and theoretical underpinnings of this project, and state why I want to connect critical DH work with certain aspects of critical university studies (CUS). At last year’s MLA I organized a panel on Digital Humanities in Secondary Education with excellent panelists doing critical DH […]
I used The Altmetric Explorer to locate any articles from the Journal of Digital Scholarlship in the Humanities that had had any ‘mentions’ online anytime. An original dataset of 82 bibliographic entries was obtained. With the help of Joe McArthur the Open Access Button API was then employed to detect if any of the journal […]
We are surrounded by models. When you check the weather forecast in the morning before going to work, you are seeing the result of a model of your local atmosphere. This model is a set of rules and data manipulations built according to past observations of the weather, and refined over many years of testing […]
Zoe LeBlanc asked how basic statistics lead to a meaningful historical argument. A good discussion followed, worth reading, but since I couldn’t fit my response into tweets, I hoped to add a bit to the thread here on the irregular. I’m addressing only one tiny corner of her question, in a way that is peculiar to my […]
Argumentation for digital history stumbles over the ontology of its evidence. I’m writing here about corpus-scale analysis, the digital methodology I know best from my work on the Viral Texts project, and variously named by terms like “distant reading” or “cultural analytics.” Though the specifics of these methods are hotly debated, we might gather them […]
In “Publication, Power, and Patronage: On Inequality and Academic Publishing,” Chad Wellmon and Andrew Piper motivate their study in a laudable spirit: they seek to expose and root out elitism in the name of a more egalitarian and truly meritocratic academy.[1] That the study at the same time makes a claim for more studies of […]
In July 2017, I presented a version of this talk on a panel on “Temporality” at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference (#keydh on Twitter) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The project I discuss here, a digital tour of the Nightingale-Brown House, will debut in September 2017. I’ll update this post with a direct link when we go […]
Kellen Funk and I have co-authored an article titled “The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice.” The article has been recently accepted for publication in the American Historical Review. It is currently scheduled for the February 2018 issue. Here is our abstract. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the […]
