How is humanities and social science knowledge impacted by the introduction of three-dimensional visualization technologies? While 3D visualization may seem far removed from the everyday work of scholars in the social sciences and humanities, it has great potential to change how we conduct and communicate our work. Three-dimensional visualizations can be used for creating models,…
[Delivered as part of the “Mid-Range Reading: Manifesto Edition” panel, organized by Alison Booth, of the DH2018 Conference in Mexico City] A great deal of digital humanities work over the past decade or so has employed scale as the concept that distinguishes it from other methods of literary and cultural study. Quantitative scholars in particular have…
One thing we digital methods people like to harp on about is the fact that quantitative methods are brilliant for dealing with huge amounts of text that are quite frankly incomprehensible at the level of literary-linguistic detail we would like to be able to study them at. The ability to observe frequency at a level…
Reposted from Torn Apart / Separados website. You can find the Spanish version titled, “Triple D: Desmantelando a la mafia, desestabilizando mecanismos y documentando la memoria histórica”, at http://xpmethod.plaintext.in/torn-apart/reflections/sylvia_fernandez.html Ever since I begin my university studies in 2009, a concern arose in me; it derived from the frustration generated from taking courses related to the…
The following is a version of my talk for DH2018 that will be given as a part of a roundtable on Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Praxis. Participants on the panel responded to a CFP marking five years since we launched the Praxis Network. I am Brandon Walsh, the Head of Graduate Programs at the Scholars’…
Torn Apart aggregates and cross-references publicly available data to visualize the geography of Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy in 2018 and immigration incarceration in the USA in general. We also draw attention to the landscapes, families, and communities riven by the massive web of immigrant detention in the United States. Working nimbly and remotely…
This week over at Hyperallergic, I wrote about new exhibits at the British Library and the Victoria & Albert Museum which both engage with the cultural heritage of ancient and medieval Ethiopia. An examination of the Ethiopian cultural heritage held in the libraries and museums of Britain can perhaps demonstrate a seminal point about digitization and…
Matthew Lincoln recently put up a Twitter bot that walks through chains of historical artwork by vector space similarity. https://twitter.com/matthewdlincoln/status/1003690836150792192. The idea comes from a Google project looking at paths that traverse similar paintings. This reminds that I’d meaning for a while to do something similar with words in an embedding space. Word embeddings and image…
[The following is the text of a talk I gave (with changes) as “Reconstitute the World: Machine-Reading Archives of Mass Extinction,” in two different contexts last week. First, I opened the summer lecture series at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, where I’m privileged to be a faculty member and supporter. Next, I closed…
I finally got the chance to push through a little idea about walking through visual time with a new Twitter bot I’m calling @MechaKubler. Inspired by Google Cultural Institute’s “X Degrees of Separation”, I was curious to see if it was possible to recreate that app by hand using a more focused collection of works,…