This summer, there was an extensive discussion on the Humanist mailing list about the form and nature of research methods in digital humanities. This matters, as it speaks in a fundamental way to a question whose very asking defines Digital Humanities as a discipline: when does the development and use of a tool become a […]
The Web Library for this issue of Common-place features insights by four early-career scholars who work at the intersection of early American studies and the digital humanities… These scholars of early American literature, history, and culture were asked to respond to a series of questions about their experiences working in the digital humanities (DH), how those […]
An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called ‘mapping digital humanities in India’, this enquiry began with the term ‘digital humanities’ itself, as a ‘found’ name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present […]
Social science explores human interaction. So, now that we have data on virtually every type of human interaction, can we, once and for all, see exactly how human society works? Sort of. The potential of “big data” is enormous. But data by themselves are not enough. In this essay, I will argue that research still […]
I’m designing a digital humanities (DH) initiative here at the Purdue University Libraries, and “initiative” means our whole vision for DH, support for which is now enshrined as a specific point in our department strategic policy. To kick off a series of blog posts covering this infrastructure and community design work I’ve been up to, […]
Kellen Funk and I have just published an article titled “A Servile Copy: Text Reuse and Medium Data in American Civil Procedure” (PDF). The article is a brief invited contribution to a forum in Rechtsgeschichte [Legal History] on legal history and digital history. Kellen and I give an overview of our project to discover how nineteenth-century codes of […]
This notebook illustrates some of the behaviors of the singular value decomposition of time series data. I’ve written it in part as a response to a paper by Andrew J. Reagan, Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds recapitulating an argument first made by Matt Jockers: that certain kinds of eigendecompositions […]
Hundreds of thousands of artworks, objects, books, and records in the Getty’s collections have been photographed and posted online. But how do objects go from the physical world to your screen? People. Holly McGee is one of them. Here’s what a typical day in her life at work is like. Read full post here.
This fall quarter I am teaching my digital history course. You can find the draft of the syllabus here. While the title of the course hasn’t changed since the last time I taught it, I’ve made two substantial changes to the overall structure of the course. First, the course focuses more heavily on public history […]
In 1861, the census for the colony of New South Wales (as it was back then) recorded just one Chinese woman living in Balmain in Sydney. The historian Eric Rolls, writing in 1992, commented that this ‘lone woman is exceptional and inexplicable’. Inexplicable? My partner and collaborator Kate Bagnall is a historian of Chinese Australia and […]
