In this short post I want to think about the limits of computation, not the limits theoretically of the application or theorisation of computation itself, but actually the limits to which computation within a particular context should be contained. This is necessarily a normative position, but what I am trying to explore is the limit […]
The second Archaeogaming Virtual Unconference Biennial was held today, in the misty realms of cyberspace. Or at least, that corner of it that can be found at the MIT Unhangouts project. I meant to take some screenshots of the unconference in action, but I forgot to ask the others if that would be ok and in […]
The history of redlining matters. For decades, the government sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation created maps that defined African American neighbourhoods as high risk, which resulted in people not having access to a Federal Housing Administration insured mortgage in these districts. Ta-Nehisi Coates used the research…to develop the case for reparations in his 2014 cover story in the Atlantic. He convincingly argued […]
Stability or cultural vitality: many nations seem as if they can only have one or the other. The Republic of Guinea, for instance, has endured quite a turbulent history, yet its musicians have also enjoyed roles as “pioneers in the creation of African popular music styles and as the voice of a new Africa.” That’s the view […]
The experimental Trump Archive, which we launched in January, is a collection of President Donald Trump’s appearances on TV news shows, including interviews, speeches, and press conferences dating back to 2009. Now largely hand-curated, the Trump Archive is a prototype of the type of collection on a public figure or topic possible to make with material from our library of […]
Last Seen offers genealogists and researchers a new tool for telling family stories of separation and survival during slavery, emancipation, and Civil War. The site offers easy access to thousands of “Information Wanted” advertisements, like this one, taken out by former slaves and United States Colored Troops searching for family members lost by sale, flight, or […]
One of the best places to get your feet wet with text mining is Twitter data. Though not as open as it used to be for developers, the Twitter API makes it incredibly easy to download large swaths of text from its public users, accompanied by substantial metadata. A treasure trove for data miners that […]
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, […]
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. […]
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 […]
