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 […]
It’s interesting that Jacobs and Piper offer different explanations for the diminished role of textual commentary in intellectual life. Jacobs traces it to a shift in cultural attitudes, particularly our recent, post-Romantic embrace of self-expression and originality at the expense of humility and receptiveness. Tacitly, he also implicates the even more recent, post-modern belief that the written word is something to be […]
Alan Jacobs has written seventy-nine theses on technology for disputation. A disputation is an old technology, a formal technique of debate and argument that took shape in medieval universities in Paris, Bologna, and Oxford in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In its most general form, a disputation consisted of a thesis, a counter-thesis, and a string […]
C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures (1959) began a critical debate about the role of the humanities in an increasingly scientific world. It was also the receipt of such enormous criticism that Snow later wrote The Two Cultures: A Second Look (1963). In the last few months David Armitage and I have experienced a technologically-accelerated version […]
Language and storytelling is a stubborn trait of human nature, and, as we will see, an inherent part of History, if not science. Begin by squinting your eyes and peering just ahead: everywhere at the extremities of the Big Data space, storytelling rears its ugly, incarnate head. The signs of it are legion. Big Bang […]
Open access (OA) is a longstanding and important discussion within librarianship. As Peter Suber explains, the “basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers.” For a good grounding in the basics of open access, I refer the interested reader to Suber’s book Open Access; […]
Sentiment analysis – mining text to see what people are talking about and how they feel about it – is based on algorithms and software libraries that were created and configured by people who’ve made a series of small, accumulative decisions that affect what we see. You can think of sentiment analysis as a sausage […]
Knowing how much resource to allocate to managing your digital assets is one of the big questions facing digital curation practitioners today. Making sure that your digitised collections and research data (or indeed any ‘assets’ your organisation looks after) are reusable in the future requires investment throughout their lifecycle, but ensuring that this is done in a […]
