So, what do finding aids do? Why do we create them? OK, so we can start by looking at finding aids as a way to address the practical problem of giving potential researchers access to unique or rare material that can only be found in a single location, behind a locked door in a closed […]
What do historians need to do good digital research? Well, they need skills that help them get at data, wrangle data (Open Refine perhaps), organise data (in machine readable, human readable, platform agnostic ways), chop up data (perhaps a splash of Unix), get that data into a form that tools for geo-referencing, text mining, topic […]
We, as memory organizations, have the wealth of human knowledge and experience within our collections and it is our responsibility to share that with the world – we should seek to educate, to enlighten and to entertain. And increasingly, our ability to share is becoming ever more feasible because, just like a candle’s flame, when we […]
This video discusses current developments in U.S. copyright law and how they push us in unanticipated directions. Read full post here.
Wikipedia welcomes expert contributions, and is one of the most direct ways to promote public understanding of a subject area, but it isn’t always in researchers’ personal interest to contribute. It may seem as though any time spent writing for Wikipedia is less time to write the research papers which will advance their careers. One […]
At the intersection of digital preservation, art conservation and folklore you can find many of Dragan Espenschied’s projects. After receiving feedback and input from Dragan for a recent post on interfaces to digital collections and geocities I heard that he is now stepping into the role of digital conservator at Rhizome. To that end, I’m […]
“Thirty goons break into your office and confiscate your computers, your hard drives, your files.. and with them, a big chunk of your institutional memory. Who you gonna call?” These were the words Bob Garfield used in a recent episode of On the Media, to address the storming of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism. On […]
The following is the rough notes for a talk I gave at the University of Pittsburgh’s iSchool. I’ll likely come back later to iron out any kinks in them, but figured I would get them up sooner rather than later so here they are. Thanks to Alison Langmead for the invitation. You can review all the sides here. […]
The internet is an archive, but it may not be all that great at it. Sure, it saves any media we can imagine (text, photographs, films, etc). But what about that stuff FROM the network? Status updates, tweets, image macros… they seem to disappear into the ether. Are they not worth as much to us […]
We’ve seen digital humanities in terms of “projects” since Roberto Busa indexed Thomas Aquinas. But lately it seems to me that the imperative to continuously produce something is getting in the way of how people actually think and grow. What if we viewed digital methods as a contribution to the long arc of a scholar’s […]
