Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Are We Gaming or Just Simulating?

As we Praxis Program fellows embark on just what exactly we want our version of the Ivanhoe Game to accomplish we’ve been doing some “research” – good old fashion game playing. However, I’ve noticed a sense of frustration within our play, or perhaps it is just me that becomes a bit frustrated with the games […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Digital Humanists Should Be Copyright Activists

In a recent blog post for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, Ben Alpers argues that iBooks Author is not very well suited for humanities learning. I have written before about problems with iBooks Author’s Terms of Service, but Alpers critiques the program’s authoring tools, arguing that its bias towards the presentation of “concepts and […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Turning Art Class into a Creative MMORPG

In this review, we feature Mike Skocko, a visual-arts educator at Valhalla High School in California. We had first heard of Mike through an esteemed recommendation from Adobe’s Tacy Trowbridge on Mike’s awesome gamification initiatives. Listen to Mike’s story below to learn about the questing system he adopted into his visual-art class to deliver curriculum in […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Toward a New Deal

Today, some 20 years after its first formulation, there is little question of the validity of Jerome McGann’s core and repeated argument: that we humanities scholars and publics stand before the vast, near-wholesale digital transformation of our various and shared cultural inheritance. This transformation – more properly, these remediations – are fully underway. They open new avenues for the work of the […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Race in DH – Transformative Asian/American Digital Humanities

I’ve primarily delivered a version of this talk to digital humanities or plain old humanities or language and literature crowds (my own background being in English). Often times it evolves into a joint effort for the panelists to argue for the importance of injecting critical race/class/gender/queerness/ability into dh, but today, my goal is not to […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Alex McDowell on “World Building” (Media Systems)

In this video from the Media Systems gathering at UC Santa Cruz, Alex McDowell — one of the most influential designers in the world today — talks about how computational media are transforming storytelling. We are moving from the linear, auteur-oriented storytelling model of the printing press and industrialized film production to a collaborative, non-linear […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Just Google It—Digital Research Practices of Humanities Scholars

The transition from analogue to digital archives and the recent explosion of online content offers researchers novel ways of engaging with data. The crucial question for ensuring a balance between the supply and demand-side of data, is whether this trend connects to existing scholarly practices and to the average search skills of researchers. To gain […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Computational Linguistics and Literary Scholarship

At the Association of Computational Linguistics conference in Bulgaria last month, researchers from CMU presented a model for cinematic archetypes: “Learning Latent Personas of Film Characters.” The model uses the descriptive language of Wikipedia entries along with personal data of actors in films to automatically induce a set of character personas: the traitor, the flirt. As […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The Art of Live-Tweeting

My purpose here, following in the spirit of Kathleen Fitzpatrick, is to consider how to cultivate good habits of live-tweeting in academic contexts… The guiding principle that should animate the live-tweeting of a lecture is the attempt to use public words to create a supportive community of thoughts, ideas, and people related to the theme under […]