Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: When and how did “archive” become a verb?

Archives are places. They are institutions. But to archive is also an action. Web Archiving is a process that produces web archives and personal digital archiving is a set of practices for working to ensure longterm access to personal digital content. When and how did archive become a verb? Webster’s dates the noun usage to 1603 and the verb […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: How a University Can Sell Its Soul

HASTAC’s Stanford Origins and the University’s Current Decision on Stanford University Press … For HASTAC, this story has particular relevance since we were founded with the conviction that the technologies emerging from Silicon Valley had to have ethical and social dimensions, including ones based on access and equity. HASTAC has deep roots in a scholarly […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Transforming TEI for the Web

Last month, I led a workshop for the GC Digital Initiatives on “Getting Started with TEI.” For those who don’t know, TEI (short for Text Encoding Initiative) is a method for encoding, or “tagging,” texts in such a way that both humans and computers can make sense of them. It is a set of guidelines used […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Thesis

a simple assignment for students to explore iteration & revision. When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. — Wallace Stevens How might we encourage students to embrace revision more fully? I ask my students to draw inspiration from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Gender, institutions and the changing uses of petitions in 18th-century London

When and Why do Petitions Matter? This post is an extended version of my paper for the April 2019 workshop held by the AHRC Research Network on Petitions and Petitioning from the Medieval Period to the Present, on the theme Petitioning in Context: when and why do petitions matter? The network is explicitly interdisciplinary, international and […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Using Voyant Tools in the Undergraduate Research Classroom

This semester I have partnered with Dr Marissa Nicosia (Penn State Abington) on an undergraduate research course she runs on Early Modern recipes in collaboration with my colleague Christina Riehman-Murphy as part of the larger Early Modern Recipes Online Collective initiative. In this course, students transcribe recipes from a 17th century recipe book using Dromio (transcribe.folger.edu), learn […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The Cathedral and the Simulacrum

… I suddenly felt the urge to imagine Notre Dame as it had always stood: tall, splendid and unmoved. At the center of the Old City. Battered yet unscathed, as Victor Hugo had seen it, through so many troubles and troubling times. Notre Dame had survived the French Revolution. How did I know this? I […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Thomas Paine and the Conflicting Ideologies of the Digital Revolution

This post is part of a joint series entitled “Digital Research, Digital Age: Blogging New Approaches to Early American Studies,” hosted at the Panorama and the Junto. This joint series stems from  stemming from a conference entitled “Revolutionary Texts in a Digital Age: Thomas Paine’s Publishing Networks, Past and Present,” organized by Nora Slonimsky at Iona College in October 2018. This series will […]