Critics did not love 2004 film The Libertine, starring Johnny Depp as dissolute 17th century poet and court favorite John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. Some admiring critics pointed out, dour scripting aside, the film’s depiction of 17th century London is indeed most convincing. You can almost feel the muck that clings to everything, […]
Last month, together with Silvia Stoyanova, I delivered a lecture at the “Methodological Intersections”: Trier Digital Humanities Autumn School 2015 (which Silvia co-organised) on the topic of ‘The Multidimensional Scholarly Archive’. Silvia’s part of the lecture has been posted here, underneath you can find my contribution. I would like to focus on some of the […]
This is the first post in Data Praxis, a new series edited by Thomas Padilla. Data Praxis highlights a range of perspectives on the practice of digitally inflected research, pedagogy, curation, and collection building and augmentation. Topics span methods and tools in the context of research questions and/or exploratory trajectories, and extend to consider reflections on […]
Many scholars have also taken to sharing their work via Academia.edu, a social network that allows scholars to build connections, get their work into circulation, and discover the work of others. I’m glad to see the interest among scholars in that kind of socially-oriented dissemination and sharing, but I’m very concerned about this particular point […]
The International Conference on Open and Distance Education was hosted by the University of South Africa this month. Paul Prinsloo put together a truly remarkable set of keynote addresses and invited me to present the opening keynote. I have more than a few reflections, many of which are probably beyond the scope of a post but […]
Earlier today Paul Putz wrote a post about an interactive bibliography that he and I created of books that study American religion in the context of cities. Paul explained our motivation for the project and how we created it. I’d like to offer a few observations about what I think we can learn from the […]
[this is a draft of a short piece I am writing for a society journal, hence not peer reviewed. I would therefore welcome comments, keeping in mind that I wrote it in one sitting this AM. When it comes out formally – if – I’ll post the link here and direct folks to read the […]
In the Reconstruction South, it was frequently the army that upheld newly freed people’s rights. But where was the army, how much of the South could it access, and did it have the power to uphold emancipation in more remote areas? With their recently published digital project, Mapping Occupation, Gregory P. Downs (UC Davis) and […]
The major question associated with open access is no longer whether OA should be at the centre of the mainstream scholarly communication system, but how? The key challenges are now about how to make OA work, not whether it should happen at all. That was the conclusion I came to following a large-scale analysis of […]
It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the “true” popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural perception of a given topic, such as time or gender. However, the Google Books corpus suffers from […]
