Is it possible to engineer the discovery of art? In 2013, two graduate students in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) set out to answer that question, and today, thanks to their work as research assistants — there’s an app for that! Artbot, developed by Desi Gonzalez and Liam Andrew in the […]
I’ve been working on an update to the small amount of work I did on the black woman suffrage database to present at Women’s History in the Digital World at the end of this month. Working with twice as many files (now 904 items) as I had for the first project (more details on corpus), […]
I am often asked about the digital humanities and how it can update, make relevant, and provide funding for many a beleaguered humanities department. Some faculty at underfunded institutions imagine DH is going to revitalize their discipline — it’s going to magically interest undergraduates, give faculty research funding, and exponentially increase enrollment. Well, the reality […]
What difference does an editor make? This was the question posed by a recent profile of the highly successful editor of young adult fiction, Julie Strauss-Gabel, who manages the imprint Dutton Children’s Books. Her titles have consistently performed well over recent years and it was a timely reminder of the impact that a good editor can […]
Emerson’s aphorisms provide useful reminders both for digital humanists surveying the field and for scholars observing it from its horizons. In today’s talk, I want to think through states of knowing in the digital humanities, situating our practices within larger histories of knowledge production. My talk has three parts: A discussion of a few approaches to text […]
Most web applications are fundamentally egocentric. YouTube only associates videos with the account that uploads it. WordPress and Drupal only let you acknowledge one author of a blog post unless you install third-party plugins. Github automatically credits anyone who contributes code but doesn’t easily acknowledge people who contribute ideas. Creative Commons licenses require you to […]
Emerson teaches us to be humble in the face of such knowledge. “Every action,” he writes, “admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen […]
Christopher Watts, from St. Lawrence University, created the following video for a New York Six event. The premise of the talk creatively explores how the obsession with quantifying information without qualitative considerations can lower the bar for what it means to be alive. If we increasingly value data points as the primary form of knowledge, but lose our […]
In this post, Chad Gaffield (University of Ottawa) reflects on the Association of Research Libraries’ 2014 Fall Forum. We do not live in a technologically-driven age but we do live in a technologically-enabled age that is proving to be paradigm-shifting, with DH often leading the way My perspective first situates the question of scholarly monographs […]
This post is intended to very briefly describe a project I am about halfway through – that seeks to experiment with the new permeability that digital technologies seem to make possible – to create a more usable ‘history from below’, made up of lives knowable only through small fragments of information.This particular project is called […]
