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 […]
Early this summer, we (authors Brandon and Amanda!) planned a post about job search materials, but finishing up the draft got delayed by several weeks. In the intervening time, a small Twitter debate on the subject of academic job advice occurred, and we ended up holding off this post for a few months while discussing […]
Much of my work in digital manuscript studies has been informed by a simple question: is this something I can show to my parents? I am the only person among my family and childhood friends to pursue graduate studies in the humanities, and when others take an interest in my work, I try to provide […]
The majority of my students use social media in some fashion. Some are, to some extent, aware of how algorithms collect data and use it for advertising purposes. What they often don’t realize, however, is the trap of “assumed objectivity” that algorithms exude. A large part of this is understanding how algorithms work or, in […]
Embedded in the (digital) archive are structures of power. The Native American Petitions Dataverse shifts those structures by attributing authorship to tribal and Native individuals in hundreds of colonial and early American era petitions and memorials. However, is attributing authorship the sole responsibility of those curating digital collections? And even more simply, how does one […]
Today is the Global Climate Strike. I don’t know how anyone can look at the world around them and not be worried about how the climate is changing and how we are not taking action to prevent disaster. About a year and a half ago I started thinking more seriously about the relationship between libraries […]
This spring, I taught a new Freshman Seminar at Princeton ( FRS 154) called “Weird Data,” a CDH course sponsored by the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. The goal of the course was to provide a wide-ranging introduction to the world of data in all its forms, ideas, and, well, weirdness. A key idea […]
