A joint project between a history professor and VCU Libraries shows for the first time how the Ku Klux Klan spread across the United States between 1915 and 1940, establishing chapters in all 50 states with an estimated membership of between 2 million and 8 million. The project, “Mapping the Second Ku Klux Klan, 1915-1940,” is an animated, online […]
I was privileged to be able to give the opening keynote for the National Digital Forum in New Zealand a few weeks back. It was a really great conference and event and before too much time went past I wanted to post the content of my talk. I was generally blown away by what the digital library, archive and museum […]
This article gives an overview of the history and current status of the DOAJ. After a brief historical overview, DOAJ policies regarding open access, intellectual property rights and questionable publishers are explained in detail. The larger part of this article is a much requested explanation on how DOAJ uses its new set of criteria for […]
As I typed the title for this post, I couldn’t help but think “Well, yeah. What else would the library be?” Instead of changing the title, however, I want to actually unpack what we mean when we say “research partner,” especially in the context of research data management support. In the most traditional sense, libraries […]
I have been seeing an enormous amount of momentum in the library industry toward “linked data”, often in the form of a fairly ambitious collective project to rebuild much of our infrastructure around data formats built on linked data. I think linked data technology is interesting and can be useful. But I have some concerns about how it […]
These are some remarks I made at the Web Archives conference at the University of Michigan, on November 12th, 2015. I didn’t have any slides other than this visual presentation. To some extent I think the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and similar centers, conferences and workshops like ThatCamp have been so successful at […]
Who remembers Home Improvement? Tim the “Tool Man” Taylor was always trying to show the “Tool Time” audience how to build things, make repairs and of course, demo new tools made by the show’s sponsor, Binford. In true sitcom fashion, he broke more things than he fixed, thanks to his “more power” mantra. But I’m […]
The PressForward team is excited to announce the release of PressForward 3.7, an update to our WordPress plugin that helps you collect, discuss, and share content from the web. In addition to numerous bug fixes, this update brings refinements to the Subscribed Feeds panel and new features to the feed submission and management process. This update […]
The following is a position paper for an upcoming workshop on the dissertation convened by the Council of Graduate Schools. I’ll be speaking on a panel focusing on what new technologies enable us to do with this critical milestone in graduate study. My main argument is that while the affordances of specific technologies can be exciting, more important is the […]
Reproducibility is one of the cornerstones of science. Made popular by British scientist Robert Boyle in the 1660s, the idea is that a discovery should be reproducible before being accepted as scientific knowledge. For most of the history of science, researchers have reported their methods in a way that enabled independent reproduction of their results. But, since […]
