When we started up ActiveHistory.ca way back in 2009 (!), we did it with a pretty simple vision in mind: historians were producing good scholarship, but it was inaccessible. It was inaccessible for a few reasons: sometimes we don’t exactly write for a general audience (we’ve been guilty of dropping jargon around this site too, […]
In the future, will platforms own our pasts? In February 2015, computer scientist Vint Cerf, known widely for developing the TCP/IP internet protocol standard, gave a lecture at Carnegie Mellon University’s Silicon Valley branch campus in which he spoke of a coming “digital dark age.” This sound bite was subsequently picked up by the BBC […]
At a recent talk at the University of Colorado Boulder I discussed various definitions of digital scholarship and how we might categorize digital scholarship. My forthcoming essay in the second edition of Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities deals with these questions in depth. This chart offers one way to consider a typology for digital scholarship […]
Last year we celebrated the Getty Trust’s accomplishments during its first thirty remarkable years, and again asked ourselves the difficult question: what should the Getty seek to accomplish in the long term, given our legacy of achievements, our unparalleled skills, and our unique resources? We again sought to establish meaningfully high strategic goals for all […]
Recently I attended the conference of a major learned society in the humanities. I was only there for a day, and attended only two sessions: one as a panelist and the other as an observer. Both sessions dealt with issues related to Open Access (OA), and in both of them I was deeply taken aback […]
I’ve been watching the developments with Matthew Jockers’s Syuzhet package and blog posts with interest over the last few months. I’m always excited to try new tools that I can bring into both the classroom and my own research. For those of you who are just now hearing about it, Syuzhet is a package for […]
My blog on February 2, about the Syuzhet package I developed for R (now available on CRAN), generated some nice press that I was not expecting: Motherboard, then The Paris Review, and several R blogs (Revolutions, R-Bloggers, inside-R) all featured the work. The press was nice, but I was not at all prepared for the focus to be placed on the one piece […]
Serious games for the serious work of history? ‘The culture at large’ as Katie Salen and Eric Zimmermann note ‘does not yet see games as a noble, or even particularly useful endeavour.’ Since those words were written in May 2003, there has been a marked transformation in the esteem with which digital games are regarded. […]
infrastructure |ˈɪnfrəstrʌktʃə| (noun) – the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise. – New Oxford American Dictionary Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures. We propose a […]
In his classic study Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam argues that we have lost our connection to friends, family, neighbors, and our democratic structures. He warns that our “social capital” has plummted, leaving us emotionally and socially impoverished. We’re working harder, going to more meetings, but spending less time iwth friends, neighbors, and others. His […]
