Over the past two years I’ve been noticing a rise in what I like to call “shock and awe” graphs in digital humanities, designed to overwhelm their audience and perhaps even to evoke doubt in one’s own abilities to compete in the same scholarly conversation. These graphics are both incredibly complex representations of data, and…
One of the most prevalent debates within the Digital Humanities (DH) is the idea that practitioners should just go about doing rather than talking, or to practice “more hack, less yack.” In other words, instead of pontificating and problematizing, DH scholars should be more concerned with making stuff, and making stuff happen. The “more hack,…
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…