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 […]
“Digital historical culture” is part of the wider “digital culture” permeating our society through the Internet. The sociological concept of digital culture was developed by Manuel Castells[2] and Willard McCarty[3]. In Italy, Tito Orlandi theorized the emergence of a new Koine based on his further development of scientific and methodological concepts of humanities computing as […]
Though more and more outside groups are starting to adopt Bookworm for their own projects, I haven’t yet written quite as much as I’d like about how it should work. This blog is attempt to rectify that, and begin to explain how a combination of blogging software, interactive textual visualizations, and a exploratory data analysis […]
The role that data plays in our society is changing. Institutions and corporations collect vast amounts of information about us. Individuals contribute to this further by creating data about themselves on social media. One of the world’s largest corporations, Google, earned its status by collecting vast amounts of data that have enormous value to advertisers. […]
Recent calls for finding “public” audiences for scholarly work, engaging “the general public,” and for doing public digital humanities work are encouraging, but only when those calls are informed by the long history of “public” scholarly work with some understanding that the term is contested and changing. We should all acknowledge that is no “general […]
This past week in my Humanities Data Analysis class, we looked at mapping as data. We explored ggplot2’s map functions, as well as doing some work with ggmap’s geocoding and other things. One thing that we just barely explored was automatically extracting place names through named entity recognition. It is possible to do named entity […]
