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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Vox data journalist Alvin Chang, an alum of the Boston Globe and ESPN, has been writing stories about segregation for most of his career. Earlier this year, Chang looked at segregation in both the workplace and the home in his story “American segregation, mapped at day and night.” Using data provided by researchers at Cornell […]
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 […]
[“The Media Archaeology Lab as Platform for Undoing and Reimagining Media History” appears in Hands on Media History: A new methodology in the humanities and social sciences (Routledge 2019), edited by Nick Hall and John Ellis.] It is hard not to notice the rapid proliferation of labs in the arts and humanities over the last […]
Given the years, the money, expertise and energy we’ve spent on creating and managing archaeological data archives, the relative lack of evidence of reuse is a problem. Making our data open and available doesn’t equate to reusing it, nor does making it accessible necessarily correspond to making it usable. But if we’re not reusing data, […]
To mark the launch of the African American Writers Corpus 1892-1912 (AAW; beta release), this guest post by Dr Jimmy Packham introduces one of the key authors of the AAW corpus, Charles W. Chesnutt. Jimmy is a Lecturer in North American Literature at the University of Birmingham and is a specialist in gothic fiction, including […]
