“Game changing” is a term we hear a lot in digital humanities. I have used it myself. But try, as I was asked to do for a recent talk at Brown University’s Ancient Religion, Modern Technology workshop, to name a list of truly game-changing developments wrought by digital humanities. I come up short. Struggling with this problem,…
I chanced across an discussion last night on twitter which aligns with a problem I have been considering – how can the digital humanities include social sciences and science, if at all? This relates to the question of creating an undergraduate curriculum of some sort in Digital Humanities which would be truly interdisciplinary, that would work for…
Digital Humanities Now is pleased to announce the Journal of Digital Humanities (ISSN 2165-6673), forthcoming in March 2012. In this comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal we will feature the best scholarship, projects, and tools produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter. The Journal of Digital Humanities will offer expanded coverage of the digital humanities in three…
It strikes me that there are two, somewhat overlapping, reasons that we do visualization. They are a method of communication and a method of discovery. Visualization for Communication Visualizations are methods of communication, ways of communicating something that we already understand. In this case, things like Tuftee’s work on presenting data and information is squarely about communicating known…
When thinking about our session on ways to visualize the past through cultural heritage collections, I found that my ideas fell into two broad categories: how institutions might visualize individual objects and collections; and how researchers might want to use those objects and data for their own research. What follows in this post are some…
I’ve increasingly felt that digital journalism and digital humanities are kindred spirits, and that more commerce between the two could be mutually beneficial. That sentiment was confirmed by the extremely positive reaction on Twitter to a brief comment I made on the launch of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, including from Jon Christensen (of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford, and…
Is there or should there be a Digital Humanities? My very short answer to both questions is “no” and “no.” In a slightly longer answer I concede that a phrase must be about something if it is gaining currency. For me the something of the term is about the trouble that the humanities have had…
Interview of Bryan Alexander by Howard Rheingold What does it mean to read on a Kindle, to read on an iPad, to read on a phone? Are we in the era of social reading, where you and I can read the same book, and then share annotations through the web or through mutual devices? Trying…
Courses of study will place much more emphasis on the analysis of data. Gen. George Marshall famously told a Princeton commencement audience that it was impossible to think seriously about the future of postwar Europe without giving close attention to Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War. Of course, we’ll always learn from history. But the capacity…
Though I usually work with the Bookworm database of Open Library texts, I’ve been playing a bit more with the Google Ngram data sets lately, which have substantial advantages in size, quality, and time period. Largely I use it to check or search for patterns I can then analyze in detail with text-length data; but…