Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Digital Activism – Strategic, Inessential, and Inenarrable Alliances for an Ethical and Political Imperative

After my panel presentation at #4C2019 on “Critical Digital Archiving Against the Grain: Precarities, Negotiations, and Possibilities,” one of the attendees came up to me, appreciated my research area, and asked me enthusiastically, “Have you ever imagined how the platform for digital archive built by Non-Westerners would look like?” I just couldn’t answer this question […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Indigenous Language and Culture Visibility in the Digital Age – Examples from Zapotec Activism

Languages and cultures evolve as fast as the new technologies. However, while the wide digital space is a part of our daily lives as a way to interact with the world, there is still scarce representation of a minority population already using the new technologies, that is to say, the indigenous peoples. As a member […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The Geospatial West – Georectifying Historical Native American Space

Earlier this week I came across an unusual map in the Library of Congress’ digitized collections. Part of what made this map such a fascinating find was the addendum of metadata about the map’s creation. A Blackfoot man referred to as “Ackomak-Ki” or “The Feathers” sketched this birds-eye view of the upper Missouri River and […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Breaking Bandersnatch – Using Twine to Teach Digital Project Development

In the press that followed the December 2018 release of the Netflix interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, several references were made to the use of Twine in the project’s development process. While early stages of planning utilized Post-it notes and whiteboards, the Bandersnatch team eventually turned to Twine, “which is often used to design video […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: On Virtual Auras – The Cultural Heritage Object in the Age of 3D Digital Reproduction

We’re really pleased to see the release of a new book, The Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites, Edited by Hannah Lewi, Wally Smith, Dirk vom Lehn, Steven Cooke (2019). Which has a book chapter from me and my colleagues in it! Based on the PhD […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Makandal Text Network

As a 2018–2019 NULab Fellow, I worked with the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) to investigate disability and slavery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts, studying how we can read, represent, and understand this complex history. The ECDA focuses on decolonizing the archive through remix and reassembly, using the affordances of a digital archive to create […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Sorry for all the Drupal – Reflections on the 3rd anniversary of “Drupal for Humanists”

When I finished writing Drupal for Humanists on July 15, 2015, my Magic-the-Gathering-playing, arithmetic-doing kindergartener was a barely-verbal toddler. The night I finished the manuscript was memorable in more ways than one: I was four months pregnant with my second kid, and it was the first time I felt him kick. When I sent in that […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Speculative Surveillance with Ring™ Log

Over the weekend I launched Ring Log, which is simultaneously a critique of surveillance culture and a parody of machine vision in suburbia. In the interactive artist statement I call Ring Log an experiment in speculative surveillance. “Speculative” in this context means what if? What if Amazon’s Ring doorbell cams began integrating AI-powered object detection […]