Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Copyright – the Immoveable Barrier that Open Access Advocates Underestimated

 In calling for research papers to be made freely available open access advocates promised that doing so would lead to a simpler, less costly, more democratic, and more effective scholarly communication system. To achieve their objectives they proposed two different ways of providing open access: green OA (self-archiving) and gold OA (open access publishing). However, […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Encoding vs. Decoding

What makes visualization powerful is our ability to go beyond the mere decoding of values from a chart. That makes it interesting, but it also makes it complicated. So far, we have focused our understanding largely on the encoding side of visualization. We need to learn much more about the complex and powerful decoding side. […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: What We Talk About When We Talk About Digital Humanities

The first day of Alan Liu’s Introduction to the Digital Humanities seminar opens with a provocation. At one end of the projection screen is the word DIGITAL and at the other HUMAN. Within the space they circumscribe, we organize and re-organize familiar terms from media studies: media, communication, information, and technology. What happens to these terms when they are […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Ed-Tech in a Time of Trump

My talks – and I guess I’ll warn you in advance if you aren’t familiar with my work – are not known for being full of hope. Or rather I’ve never believed the hype that we should put all our faith in, rest all our hope on technology. But I’ve never been hopeless. I’ve never […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Hacking the Attention Economy

For most non-technical folks, “hacking” evokes the notion of using sophisticated technical skills to break through the security of a corporate or government system for illicit purposes. Of course, most folks who were engaged in cracking security systems weren’t necessarily in it for espionage and cruelty. In the 1990s, I grew up among teenage hackers […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Tales of Many Places – Data Infrastructure for Named Entities

The use of computational methods for ancient world geography are still very much dominated by the URI based gazetteer. These powerful and flexible reference lists, trail-blazed by projects such as the Pleaides and Pelagios projects, allow resources to be linked by common spatial referents they share. However, while computers love URIs unconditionally, the relationship they […]