This paper explores pragmatic approaches that might be employed to document the behavior of large, complex socio-technical systems (often today shorthanded as “algorithms”) that centrally involve some mixture of personalization, opaque rules, and machine learning components. Thinking rooted in traditional archival methodology — focusing on the preservation of physical and digital objects, and perhaps the […]
I recently gave a talk at Brown University on “Institutionalizing Digital Scholarship,” and upon reflection it struck me that the lessons I tried to convey were more generally applicable. Everyone prefers to talk about innovation, rather than institutionalization, but the former can only have a long-term impact if the latter occurs. What at first seems […]
In their 2005 article in First Monday, Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig recount the story of a remarkably prescient colleague, Peter Stearns, who “proposed the idea of a history analog to the math calculator, a handheld device that would provide students with names and dates to use on exams—a Cliolator, he called it, a […]
This past week, I had the opportunity to give a talk as part of Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage’s new US Latina/o Digital Humanities (#usLdh) Incubator series. If you missed it, you can access our group notes on Google Drive or Storify. I’ve also started a Zotero Group with a growing bibliography related to […]
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% […]
