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 […]
Over the course of the last few months here at the Literary Lab, I’ve been working on a little project that looks at the distributions of individual words inside of novels, when averaged out across lots and lots of texts. This is incredibly simple, really – the end result is basically just a time-series plot […]
Unlike print, the form of digital projects has a direct bearing on the ideas they convey. Not too long ago we used word processors to write documents on computers. The act of writing itself was called “word processing.” The excitement around the revolutionary new technology (first electric typewriters, then computer applications) inspired a new name […]
First, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are seeking to disrupt education in the same way its technologies have disrupted other areas of everyday life, from hailing a cab and booking accommodation to finding a date or looking after your health. The main concept Silicon Valley uses to explain its focus in education is “personalization,” as demonstrated by […]
As Lawrence Busch has put it, standards and related forms are “the ways in which we order ourselves, other people, things, processes, numbers, and even language itself.” Standards enable access to things, allowing social worlds to interact. Standards tell cars when to stop and go. Standards direct the flow of water and power. In libraries, standards do […]
