With all of the excitement about new interfaces to visualize the past, it’s easy to forget the old standby: the timeline. It has the power of simplicity, the challenge of over-simplifying. And in museums it has a visceral appeal: walk through history!

Timeline as interface, in the museum and on the web

For most public visitors to history, whether in school, in museums, or online, the timeline seems a natural, intuitive, way to present and understand the past. After all,what simpler metaphor for the past could there be than a timeline, with its suggestion of a direct connection between history and physical or virtual space?

A certain amount of knowledge is required for players to navigate video games, whether this means remembering the weak points of the different splicers in BioShock, or remembering the buttons to press to play Epona’s song in Ocarina of Time. This knowledge is gained throughout play, rather than presented to the individual to quiz them,…

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A few days ago, Gao, Hu, Mao, and Perc posted a preprint of their forthcoming article comparing social and natural phenomena. The authors, apparently all engineers and physicists, use the google ngrams data to come to the conclusion that “social and natural phenomena are governed by fundamentally different processes.” The take-home message is that words describing…

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When we compare groups of texts, we’re often interested in characterizing the contrast between them. But instead of characterizing the contrast, you could also just measure the distance between categories. For instance, you could generate a list of word frequencies for two genres, and then run a Spearman’s correlation test, to measure the rank-order similarity…

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from platform as presentation to platform as research workshop (as presentation). I’ve been thinking a lot about and tinkering with the emerging platforms for digital humanities publication such as Omeka and Scalar. They are marvelous and promising platforms for presentation, but what worries me is that they are imagining digital humanities projects as, in the end, simply new…

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Computational processes generate lists: lists of numbers, lists of words, lists of coordinates, lists of properties. We transform these lists into more exalted forms — visualizations, maps, information systems, software tools — but the list remains the fundamental data structure of computing, from which most other structures are derived. Whenever we treat the world as…

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Interview with Janet Murray by Henry Jenkins I first met Janet Murray when I arrived at MIT almost 25 years ago. At the time, she was working on her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, while I was working on Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Murray, along with…

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Todd Presner (Duke ’94), gave the following presentation at Duke on January 24 entitled “Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities: From Berlin to Los Angeles and Beyond.” Presner, Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at UCLA, where he is the Director of UCLA’s Center for Jewish Studies and Chair of the Digital Humanities Program,…

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In last December’s NITLE Digital Scholarship Seminar, Teaching DH 101, I presented my experience designing and proposing a new digital humanities course at St. Norbert College. In that talk, I found myself arguing, somewhat to my surprise, for interdisciplinarity—by which I mean clear association with one of the humanities disciplines that converge under the digital…

in Editors' Choice  

In the very useful survey of the “history web” in their 2005 book Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web , Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig identify the range of genres that encompassed the historical content on the web: archival sites, exhibits and scholarly essays, teaching and learning sites, and discussion forums…

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