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 […]
These are the slides and notes from the lightning talk I gave at the CAA 2015 session “Doing Digital Art History: Reflections on the Field”, an overview of the work done at the 2014 summer institutes sponsored by the Kress and Getty Foundations. See the underlying data and processing code here. This project is an […]
I recently collaborated on a project a little outside the ordinary for me: a case study for a chapter in a forthcoming textbook for, well, cops and spooks. (Cue performative outrage and sub-tweeting about digital humanities’ complicity with our modern security state–which I will address in a moment.) The book is the infelicitously-titled Application of […]
MicroMappers combines crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence to make sense of “Big Data” for Social Good. Why artificial intelligence (AI)? Because regular crowdsourcing alone is no match for Big Data. The MicroMappers platform can already be used to crowdsource the search for relevant tweets as well as pictures, videos, text messages, aerial imagery and soon satellite imagery. The next step is therefore to add […]
Hoping to remedy pervasive and often crippling uncertainty among artists and art professionals over how and when to invoke fair use when dealing with copyrighted materials, the College Art Association (CAA) has released a “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use.” Spearheaded by American University professors and copyright law experts Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, […]
