But what can writing tools and writing machines really tell us about writing? Having just published my book “Track Changes” on the literary history of word processing, I found such questions were much on my mind. Every interviewer I spoke with wanted to know how computers had changed literary style. Sometimes they meant style for […]
Given how Pokemon Go has kicked up controversy around how it uses public sites of memory and conscience, without in any way considering if it is appropriate to do so, I figured I would pull together some quotes and links and open this up as a point for discussion about the broader issues it opens up. […]
This paper presents the concepts of metadata assessment and “quantification”, provides a technical outline of data pre-processing, and proposes some visualization techniques that can help us understand metadata characteristics in a given context. Additionally, the closing sections introduce the concept of metadata optimization and explore the use of machine learning techniques to optimize metadata in […]
Teaching online is intimidating, but gauging by the audience in my NASSH panel “Teaching Sport History in the Digital Era,” it is a topic that many of us want to learn more about. In this post, I want to build off some of the ideas offered in that panel, on this blog, and offer my […]
This paper uses a combination of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and corpus linguistic analysis to extract and analyse disease related keywords from the Registrar-General’s Decennial Supplements. Combined with known mortality figures, this provides, for the first time, a spatial picture of the relationship between the Registrar-General’s discussion of disease and deaths in England and Wales […]
The following describes an experiment in macro-etymological analysis of Milton’s Paradise Lost, whereby the origins of the epic’s words are quantified by book, section, and speaker. This experiment hopes to reveal trends in the voices and resonances of the poem’s etymological registers that invite the reader to imagine Biblical or classical parallels. Read the full article […]
Suffice it to say that any researcher interested in determining just what made the front page in the nineteenth century, as my talk is titled, would have a difficult time knowing where to start. This broad array of genre and topics, however, also illustrates the challenges related to classifying these texts in a meaningful way. […]
For Sharon M. Leon, associate professor of history and director of Public Projects at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason, the vagueness of “digital humanities” fails to tell us “anything useful.” But that doesn’t mean the field is without value. Although a self-proclaimed optimist about its possibilities, Leon is cautious […]
I made a few comments about the dissertation defense process in a previous blog post, and here I’ll blog the actual defense talk. I’m even resisting the urge to edit and improve (although I’ve learned a lot about slide design and public speaking in the past year…). So, this post is a good representation of […]
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine digital information loss at three Swedish archives. Digital preservation is a complex issue and something most archival institutions struggle with today. While there is merit in focussing on successes in this struggle, doing so to the exclusion of failures runs the risk of creating a blind […]
