In separate “big data” presentations at the Digital Preservation 2012meeting, Myron Guttmann of the National Science Foundation andLeslie Johnston of the Library of Congress described scenarios that seemed futuristic and fantastic but were in fact present-day realities. Both presenters spoke about researchers using powerful new processing tools to distill information from massive pools of data. Imagine, say, a researcher…
In a posting to his blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education, William Pannapacker identified the Digital Humanities as an emerging trend at the 2009 Modern Language Association Convention. Amid all the doom and gloom of the 2009 MLA Convention, one field seems to be alive and well: the digital humanities. More than that: Among all the…
Crowdsourcing could be a silver bullet for integrating digital humanities methods into the undergraduate curriculum. Why? Crowdsourcing means getting the general public to do tasks. Jeff Howe explains the phenomenon in “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” (Wired Magazine, June 2006) by analogy with outsourcing. This method of labor is growing for scholarly and cultural heritage projects, and…
In May, 2007, Facebook was generating over 40 billion page views a month by providing its users with carefully constructed and controlled services. Yet on May 24, 2007 Mark Zuckerberg took the company in a new direction: developers outside of the company would be given access to many of the services and data at the…
The prompt for this project is the Modern Language Association’s New Variorum Shakespeare Digital Challenge. The MLA Committee on the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare is sponsoring a digital challenge and is seeking the most innovative and compelling uses of the data contained within its recently published volume, The Comedy of Errors. The MLA has…
A collection of scholarly reflections from doctoral candidates working within the digital humanities at University College Cork (PDF).
As part of our efforts to produce a crowdsourced digital humanities publication, volunteer Editors-at-Large helped us publish Digital Humanities Now over the summer. They did such a great job that we are currently recruiting additional Editors-at-Large for the rest of 2012. Editors-at-Large monitor the work of the digital humanities community by reviewing aggregated RSS feeds…
“Technology has had most of the attention in digital preservation but it is the least of our concerns,” said Anne R. Kenney. That’s a bold declaration. But Kenney has earned the right to make it, based on her 25 years at Cornell University Library, conducting ground-breaking digital research, creating award-winning training resources and fostering national and…
The following is a guest post from Meg Phillips, Electronic Records Lifecycle Coordinator for the National Archives and Records Administration. “What’s the bare minimum I can responsibly do with my electronic stuff?” was one of the central questions on the table at CurateCamp Processing. The unconference, focused onProcessing Data / Processing Collections, was a great way for a group…
Speaker: Piotr Adamczyk, Metropolitan. Moderator: Noel Jackson. Abstract: Museums are increasingly adopting open data policies, both for easy internal reuse of data sets and as a way of building community engagement online. While the opening up of data is a welcome development, too often key audiences see too little of this information through too small a…