Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Gaps in the Map

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 […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The Arithmetic of Concepts

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 […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Feeling Machines: The Psychopedagogies of Emotion-maximizing Media

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 […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Introducing Git-Lit

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, […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Ecosytems of People + Machines Can Help Crowdsourcing Projects

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’ […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Structuralist Methods in a Post-Structuralist Humanities

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 […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Connecting the Pieces: Using ORCIDs to Improve Research Impact and Repositories

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 […]

Editors' Choice

Editor’s Choice: 5 things we’ve learned about Digital Humanities in the last 5 years

At the end of May, 2015, it will be exactly five years since the formal launch of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. Our mission is “is to champion, catalyse, promote, facilitate, undertake, advise and publicise activities in Digital Humanities (with as wide an interpretation of that phrase as possible) throughout the founding Faculties and UCL, […]

Editors' Choice

Editor’s Choice: Digital humanities might never be evenly distributed

In an eloquent and pragmatic blog post about building the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, Melissa Terras stresses the importance of rooting a DH center in local institutional culture, in order to “link people” across the whole spectrum from arts and humanities to computer science and engineering. It’s an impressive achievement that has clearly fostered […]