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 Historical documents are never as plentiful as a historian would wish, but counting words, material objects, court cases, etc.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 […]
At the 2017 Australian Historical Association Conference, in a panel about digital history, Professor Victoria Haskins discussed what she described as a “replica archive.” Haskins’ research is concerned with Indigenous domestic servants in Australia and the United States – women whose lives, she rightly notes, are often difficult to uncover in the archives. Technology, however, […]
While storytelling can take on many forms and span several disciplines, the techniques and methods we use to tell good stories are fairly similar. Understanding those similarities and what makes a particular story effective on a particular medium can help us become better storytellers. There are certain tricks to improv comedy, for example, that can help […]
Earlier this year, Neil Bedi, a reporter and developer on the Tampa Bay Times’ data and investigations team, produced “If You’re Black,” an interactive story exploring more than 800 officer-involved shootings that occurred in Florida between 2009 and 2014. The piece was part of a larger project named “Why Cops Shoot.” Bedi and his colleague […]
would you like some help with that? I’m not being snarky. Right now, I have several friends writing articles that are largely or partly a critique of interrelated trends that go under the names “data” or “distant reading.” It looks like many other articles of the same kind are being written. This is good news! I […]
