Every aspect of our social and economic lives. New data systems have tremendous potential to empower communities of color. Tools like statistical modeling, data visualization, and crowd-sourcing, in the right hands, are powerful instruments for fighting bias, building progressive movements, and promoting civic engagement. But history tells a different story — one in which data […]
As a first time attendee of MCN last week, I didn’t know entirely what to expect, other than all things digital plus museums. The program was really quite diverse, and ranged from relatively technical discussions (sometimes dry; sometimes hilarious) to more meta-professional sessions that really did function as a kind of group therapy. The latter sessions were […]
This white paper is the product of the Arguing with Digital History Workshop organized by Stephen Robertson and Lincoln Mullen of George Mason University, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The two-day workshop, which involved twenty-four invited participants at different stages in their careers, working in a variety of fields with a range […]
As part of the Digital Dialogues series at Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities (MITH), Walter Forsberg, Media Archivist for the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian, presented “an overview of the new museum’s audiovisual digitization programs and activities, in place since 2014.” Forsberg “discuss[ed] how NMAAHC established digital file-management workflows, […]
Language is a source of power that makes things happen in the world, and that is an important and challenging lesson to teach in college writing courses. Once students recognize the profound implications of our work with language, many of the skills instructors value — argumentation, organization, revision, editing, proofreading — become much easier to teach. […]
Wikipedia’s gender gap, which results in problems of representation attributed to the lack of women and non-male editors participating in the encylopedia’s production, is by now well-known and well-documented. A groundbreaking survey conducted in 2011, conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation, found that less than 10% of Wikipedia editors identify as women, and less than 1% […]
Below are my Skype remarks from the Colonial and Postcolonial DH roundtable at the College of William and Mary’s Race, Memory, and the Digital Humanities Conference. To my mind, the most significant contribution of digital humanities is to developing and sustaining the digital cultural record of humanity. We can debate about definitions and methods, but, […]
I’ve been struggling to write this post for a long, long time. Every time I see calls for teaching coding to young people or to girls or to minorities, I get frustrated. First off, the need for everyone to learn code may be inflated, as Audrey Watters has written. As someone with a bachelor’s degree […]
On October 15, 2017, the Chronicle of Higher Education posted a piece by Timothy Brennan entitled “The Digital-Humanities Bust.” The piece sparked a conversation on Twitter, including a thread by Ted Underwood and the #DHimpact hashtag. Instead of featuring a blog post as Editor’s Choice like usual, we have embedded the tweets below to capture […]
Quantitative research often begins with the humble process of counting. Historical documents are never as plentiful as a historian would wish, but counting words, material objects, court cases, etc. can lead to a better understanding of the sources and the subject under study. When beginning the process of counting, the first instinct is to open […]
