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 […]
Yesterday, my colleagues and I at RRCHNM launched a great new public history site, Histories of the National Mall, mallhistory.org. It is built in Omeka with a beautiful responsive design that displays on a phone, tablet, or laptop. (Read full announcement on the RRCHNM blog.) We have been thrilled with the positive response we have […]
Mozilla Science Lab, GitHub and Figshare team up to fix the citation of code in academia Academia has a problem. Research is becoming increasingly computational and data-driven, but the traditional paper and scientific journal has barely changed to accommodate this growing form of analysis. The current referencing structure makes it difficult for anyone to reproduce the […]
Episode 79: Paul Lovejoy, Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History at York University, discusses building an international database of biographical information on all enslaved Africans. He outlines this digital history project’s contribution to the study of slavery, race, and broader themes in global history. This is the first part of a two-part series recorded […]
….Although the Big Data Initiative only includes scientific agencies, it turns out that the humanities have been involved for just as long. In 2009, when Data.Gov was being launched, the first Digging into Data Challenge was held. Sponsored by the NEH and comparable organizations in the UK and Canada, the eight winning Digging into Data […]
Short answer: learning management systems. ….I’ve been working on a broader narrative for contextualizing the work we’re doing at University of Mary Washington with Domain of One’s Own. This initiative offers students and faculty a domain and web hosting so that they can more deeply inhabit and interrogate the web. For some, it’s most easily […]
The official description of today’s panel, “Literary texts and the library in the digital age,” reads as follows: Digital technologies are opening up new possibilities for the investigation of literary and historic texts. They are also changing library spaces and reconfiguring relationships between librarians and researchers. This program investigates new roles for European and American […]
….“Close reading” is not a method per se. Rather, it’s an attitude, I think, where “close” actually means “closely,” implying an extra degree of care, attention to detail, expertise, etc. When we ask someone “to pay close attention” to something, we’re not asking them to invade our personal space; we use it as an intensifier, […]
