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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Insofar as any part of humanities academe can be said to be buoyant right now, the Digital Humanities is it. New avenues of research are opening up, positions are being created rather than eliminated … even the New York Times has taken an interest. And so, as a relatively long-in-the-tooth DigHum developer, it’s not surprising that […]
What is on the five-year horizon for academic and research libraries worldwide? Which trends and technologies will drive change? What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions? These questions and similar inquiries regarding technology adoption and transforming teaching and learning steered the collaborative […]
Big Data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterized as an informational or social network. We contribute to this line of inquiry through an investigation of digital humanities (DH) scholars’ uses and gratifications of Twitter. We conducted a thematic analysis of 25 semi-structured interview transcripts to learn about […]
In a previous post I suggested that historians should use quantitative methods less to answer existing questions than to pose new ones. Such a digital humanities (DH) approach would be the reverse of the older social science history approach, in which social science tools were use to “answer” definitively longstanding questions. This post offers another example […]
Following 20 hearings on copyright reform, the House Judiciary Committee could see substantive copyright reform legislation introduced before the end of the year. In advance of the renewed copyright reform conversation, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which has testified on the subject, released its latest whitepaper Tuesday “Copyright Reform For a Digital Economy” along […]
