Humanists know the subjects we study are complex. So on the rare occasions when we describe them with numbers at all, we tend to proceed cautiously. Maybe too cautiously. Distant readers have spent a lot of time, for instance, just convincing colleagues that it might be okay to use numbers for exploratory purposes. But the […]
I have been thinking about POWs and forced laborers lately. My article on digital memory of World War II came out with Memory Studies and in it I analyzed projects like the Russian governments OBD-Memorial, a huge database of Soviet soldiers who died in the war. I’ve also been working on a project on the […]
I was excited to be invited to participate in a panel discussion on Data Management and Curation in 21st Century Archives at SAA, given my perspective is not that of an archivist. I’ve been studying data reuse in academic communities and more recently I’ve been examining libraries’ role in e-research and data on their campuses. Given […]
I set out this summer to write a column for Places on mapping, informed by all the background work I did to develop my new “Maps as Media” grad studio. Today, my editors mercifully informed me that what I’ve written is not an article, but a pedagogical prospectus. Doh! I sort-of suspected that. Re-reading the piece again, after about […]
Last year I wrote a review of Peter de Bolla’s extraordinary book, The Architecture of Concepts: the Historical Formation of Human Rights (Fordham, 2013)… Since he wrote this book, de Bolla has spear-headed the at Cambridge, where he leads an interdisciplinary group of scholars devoted to precisely this project: developing a more sophisticated and rigorously theorized […]
It is now possible to measure and manage emotions through mobile apps and other digital devices. As part of my current research exploring the expert practices and knowledge base of the emerging field of “educational data science,” I have been gathering examples of educational technologies that are designed to both monitor learners’ emotions through data […]
A vibrant discussion followed my March 15th post, “A Proposal for a Corpus Sharing Protocol.”. Carrie Schroeder, Allen Riddel and others on Twitter pointed out that, especially in non-English DH fields, many corpora are already on GitHub. These include texts from the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association, the Open Greek and Latin Project at Leipzig, […]
Back in September last year I blogged about the implications for cultural heritage and digital humanities crowdsourcing projects that used simple tasks as the first step in public engagement of advances in machine learning that mean that fun, easy tasks like image tagging and text transcription could be done by computers. (Broadly speaking, ‘machine learning’ […]
The topic of this conference (going on now!) at Utrecht University raises an issue similar to the one raised in my article at LSE’s Impact Blog: DH’ists have been brilliant at mining data but not always so brilliant at pooling data to address the traditional questions and theories that interest humanists. Here’s the conference description (it focuses specifically on DH […]
Quantitative data are crucial in the assessment of research impact in the academic world. However, as a young university created in 2009, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) needs to aggregate bibliometrics from researchers coming from diverse origins, not necessarily with the proper affiliations. In this context, the University has launched an institutional […]
