As Matthew Davis explains, a database is useful as a methodological tool because it does not permit ambiguity. This means that all decisions must be documented and justified.[1] To create the schema for my database, I have already made important decisions about what data to extract from my primary documents – the Slave Narrative Collection, […]
On Friday, February 9th I attended the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Office of the Digital Humanities at the National Endowment of the Humanities. It was a jam-packed, vivid testimony to the ODH’s vision and work, featuring a keynote by Kate Zwaard, Chief of National Digital Initiatives at the Library of Congress, and […]
“You good?” a man asked two narcotics detectives late in the summer of 2015. The detectives had just finished an undercover drug deal in Brentwood, a predominately black neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, that is among the poorest in the country, when the man unexpectedly approached them. One of the detectives responded that he was looking […]
It’s about time to infuse feminism into data science and visualization. At least, that’s what Emerson data visualization and civic tech professor Catherine D’Ignazio says based on her research into what an intersectional feminist perspective on data could look like. “We’re in this moment when big data and visualization are being heralded as powerful new […]
At DHNow we try to use our Editor’s Choice pieces as an opportunity to highlight debates and important scholarship related to the Digital Humanities. Below is a round-up of commentary on two controversial twitter debates related to Safiya Umoja Noble’s (@safiyanoble) forthcoming book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. The controversy began when the […]
This is the third part in a multi-part series about participants in the Race, Memory, and the Digital Humanities conference. This series features public intellectuals discussing digital literacy issues. “He was always on the lookout for what the next big thing would be, and made sure I knew about it.” In an email interview with DML […]
Since 2009 we have been contributing to the development of Europeana, the European platform that provides access to the digitised collections of cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) across Europe. One of our main contributions to Europeana is the Europeana Licensing Framework which ensures that data published on Europeana can be freely reused, and that all digital […]
As a digital humanities librarian, E. Leigh Bonds (The Ohio State University) undertook an institutional environmental scan as the basis for assessment, identifying gaps, and developing recommendations. In this post, Bonds details her approach and framework, which prompted conversations and coordination across campus. In August 2016, I became The Ohio State University’s first Digital Humanities Librarian. I’d […]
Electronic health records, quantified health, and diagnostic tools are all ‘digital technologies’ that co-create meaning and knowledge throughout the medical industrial complex. The initial connection between digital humanities (DH) and medicine is an easy association to make: DH works with data, with structures of data, with big data, with various forms of tech. Medicine and […]
The weather prevents me from being there physically, but this is a transcript of my remarks for “Varieties of Digital Humanities,” MLA, Jan 5, 2018. Using numbers to understand cultural history is often called “cultural analytics”—or sometimes, if we’re talking about literary history in particular, “distant reading.” The practice is older than either name: sociologists, […]
