Editors’ Note: In February the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum at the Smithsonian Institution released their collection metadata on GitHub using the CC0 Creative Commons license. Mia Ridge explores the shape of Cooper-Hewitt collections. Or, “what can you learn about 270,000 records in a week?” by Mia Ridge Museum collections are often accidents of history, the […]
Last week, the Library of Congress Archives Forum hosted a talk by Kate Theimer of the popular blog ArchivesNext. Theimer is a prominent voice in the archival community, frequently writing and speaking about archival advocacy issues as well as the challenges and opportunities that technology and the Internet offer for cultural heritage institutions. Theimer spoke on […]
In this Blogpost we describe how we improved the accuracy of the process by which we aligned Arachne to Pleiades. The fact that the first Arachne-Pleiades matching was strictly string-based brought several problems with it. (See previous posts 1, 2.) In a place matching process, each usable context can reduce the prospect of making errors, especially when […]
Last month, I gave a presentation about paid crowdsourcing in the humanities at SDH-SEMI. Below are my notes. I The rhetorical model in the humanities is appreciation: we believe that by paying attention to an object of interest, we can explore it, find new dimensions within it, notice things about it that have never been […]
Interview with Aharon Varady New technologies are naturally and generally controversial, but perhaps nowhere more so than in religious communities. For many religious leaders (and their followers), recent digital technologies are corrosive solvents of community life: the old ways are surely best. For others, new technologies offer opportunities to extend the reach of religious bodies, to […]
To begin: One question and one metaphor. The question is, what use is visualization to historians? How does this method add value to the work we do? The metaphor is accretion, the term geologists use to describe the building up of new soils through deposits of materials eroded elsewhere. Accretion works to describe the process […]
What follows is a draft of a paper written in conjunction with Robert Blades concerning the Looted Heritage project. Introduction In his overview of what ‘open access’ might mean in the academy, Peter Suber draws attention to the salient features of what it means to call something ‘open’ – that it is digital, the cost (to […]
What is the theory that underpins our moocs? By George Siemens If you’re even casually aware of what is happening in higher education, you’ve likely heard of massive open online courses (MOOCs). They have been covered by NY Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TV programs, newspapers, and a mess or blogs. While MOOCs have been […]
Editors’ Note: Several recent pieces by Mia Ridge and Trevor Owens have been focused on Crowdsourcing and Cultural Heritage. Excerpts and links to the original pieces are below. Frequently Asked Questions about Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage By Mia Ridge ….What kind of cultural heritage stuff can be crowdsourced? I wrote this list of ‘Activity types […]
Editors’ Note: Two new publications using quantitative methods to study the literary and intellectual history of nineteenth century Britain have been released. The first by Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac from the Stanford Literary Lab, and the second from Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs. Excerpts and links to the original texts are included below. A […]
