The Center for Digital Scholarship recently completed a NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to create a set of experimental tools for analyzing TEI texts using the SEASR framework. SEASR lets users arrange and manipulate small computational “components” in series to allow data to be ingested, analyzed, transformed, and visualized. CDS produced about three dozen of…
Yesterday, my HeritageCrowd project website was annihilated. Gone. Kaput. Destroyed. Joined the choir. It is a dead parrot. This is what I think happened, what I now know and need to learn, and what I think the wider digital humanities community needs to think about/teach each other. HeritageCrowd was (may be again, if I can…
I have written before about some issues relating to RDA and RDF. Today I want to actually consider some things we should consider that should cause us to question the concept of “RDA in RDF.” For many decades we have been using relational databases to store our bibliographic data, bibliographic data that we create and exchange…
There seems to be a lot of topic modelling going on at the moment. Any why not? Projects like Mining the Dispatch are demonstrating the possibilities. Tools like Mallet are making it easy. And generous DHers like Ted Underwood and Scott Weingart are doing a great job explaining what it is and how it works. I’ve talked briefly about using topic modelling to explore…
It has been six months since Digital Humanities Now relaunched in version 2.0 through the support of the PressForward Project, funded by the Sloan Foundation. The first version, run between 2009 and 2010, was an automated survey of Twitter. Version 1.5 was a one-man operation by Dan Cohen to vet the material using traditional methods of…
There is no Frigate like a book To take us lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of Prancing Poetry This Traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of Toll How frugal is the Chariot That bears a human Soul. –Emily Dickinson, www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19730 Alexandria is a port, the busiest seaport in Egypt. Of course…
What is the role of design in modeling digital humanities? Can we imagine new forms of argument and platforms that support interpretative work? So much of the computationally driven environment of digital work has been created by design/engineers that humanistic values and methods have not found their place in the tools and formats that provide…
In the last few years, I’ve noticed a certain kind of job ad appearing with more and more frequency. I think of it as the “make digital humanities happen” postdoctoral fellowship. Often based in a library, these positions’ descriptions include some combination of “liaison,” “catalyst,” and “hub,” with a heavy dose of coordinator syndrome thrown in. The…
Introduction by Dene Grigar Associate Professor and Director, The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program, Washington State University Vancouver. The Electronic Literature Exhibit at the 2012 Modern Language Association Convention was a watershed moment for both the MLA and for e-literature. Never before in its 129 year history had the organization held an exhibit in…
It’s pretty obvious that one of the many problems in studying history by relying on the print record is that writers of books are disproportionately male. Data can give some structure to this view. Not in the complicated, archival-silences filling way–that’s important, but hard–but just in the most basic sense. How many women were writing…