Below is some crazy, uninformed ramblings about the least-complex possible way to trick someone into thinking a computer is a human, for the purpose of history research. I’d love some genuine AI/Machine Intelligence researchers to point me to the actual discussions on the subject. These aren’t original thoughts; they spring from countless sci-fi novels and AI research […]
In the wild west of the World Wide Web, if you compose a hilarious joke, provide a simple solution to a complex problem or break a major new story, it is almost certain that your work will be copied. Although intellectual property laws exist, they are inconsistently enforced because of the sheer number of sites […]
Thinking about the structure of the digital humanities, it is always helpful if we can visualise it to provide some sort of map or overview. Here, I am exploring a way of representing the digital humanities through the common computer science technique of a software “stack“. This is the idea that a set of software […]
This past year, I’ve taught three digital history/humanities classes at Carleton. HIST3907o, Crafting Digital History, HIST5702w Digital History Methods as Public History Performance, and DIGH5000 Introduction to Digital Humanities. A fourth course was the open-access version of HIST3907o, but that is not counted in my tally, unfortunately. Finally, my MA student, Rob Blades, completed his […]
Dr. Terri Nelson shares results from student testing of Paris Occupé, a role-playing game she created. Students progressed in linguistic production, complex reasoning and empathy over the course of the game, in which players take on fictional identities of characters living in Nazi-occupied Paris. The combination of historical information learned through the game, as well as […]
Despite a century’s worth of women’s rights movements since then, male (and sometimes female) writers still talk about female authors through the lens of “The Lady Writer.” We examined a collection of 10,287 reviews from the Sunday Book Review of The New York Times published since 2000. We labeled the genders of the reviewer and the author under […]
Digital history is coming to York University in Fall 2016. That is to say, I finally got around to organizing and preparing to teach digital history. As I get ready to teach this course, I am surveying the landscape of digital history teaching in Canada, looking for ideas. Readers of this article, I hope, will […]
All of us who saw Jurassic Park as kids, no matter how much skepticism we’d precociously developed, surely spent at least a moment wondering if science could actually bring dinosaurs back to life by pulling the DNA out of their blood trapped in amber-preserved mosquitoes. It turns out that it can’t — at least not yet! — but even so, […]
Digital history’s promise is not big. By which I mean that the potential of the field is not ultimately to be found in big data, big scale, big history, or the return to cliometrics or some computational mode of the longue durée (or as spellcheck would have me write it, the tongue puree). Rather, the promise of digital history […]
On 11 February 2013, Rick Anderson, a librarian and columnist for the blog The Scholarly Kitchen, posted a detailed story of his most recent interaction with the president of the Edwin Mellen Press, a scholarly publisher that had recently accused another librarian, Dale Askey, of libel. The company had filed a civil case against both Askey and his […]
