As earlier reports on historians’ use of technology demonstrated, most historians are gathering materials, analyzing their findings, and writing their scholarship in digital form. Curiously, however, a national survey in fall 2015 found that much of the profession remains skeptical about the value of disseminating their scholarship electronically (aside from digital versions of their print publications). As […]
Led by Unicode Consortium member Michel Suignard, the proposed Hieroglyphs will add over 2,000 new glyphs to the current Unicode standards. It will also provide greater global standardization and ease of use for Egyptologists through a searchable Hieroglyphs database. Over 2,000 new Hieroglyphs may soon be available for use on cell phones, computers, and other […]
Editors Note: This is the second post in a two-part post exploring a digital history course taught at Carleton University in Winter 2018. Part one explains the premise behind #hist3812. In part one, Graham explained the rationale and unfurling of HIST3812, Critical Making in Digital History. At the end of the course, he invited the students […]
This is the transcript of the talk I gave this evening at the CUNY Graduate Center. …I do want to talk a little bit this evening about the work I’ve been doing as a Spencer Fellow. That’s not what it says in my title and abstract, I recognize. And that’s the curse of making up […]
Two Directions in AI In the inaugural issue of AI & Society, published in 1987, Ajit Narayanan identified two directions that propelled the discipline of artificial intelligence. The first was “Implement and be damned” whereby programs are produced to replicate tasks performed by humans with relevant expertise (p. 60). Motivated by efficiency, these programs might […]
[At Jeff McClurken’s invitation, I was recently part of a panel focused on reviewing digital history at Organization of American Historian’s annual meeting. My portion of the discussion was to focus on reviewing digital public history projects, which have their own particularities that make them different that some other genres of digital history. I welcomed […]
I have been chewing on a topic and I could use others’ help. I, like many others, am frustrated by the enormous time gap between scholarly understanding of the privacy issues in digital media technology here in the U.S. and public and political awareness. This is an area of research and teaching for me, so I’ve […]
If you know me, the topic of this first post may come as unsurprising but also a bit eyebrow-raising. “Sharon, you’ve been working on the Old Bailey Online project (OBO) since forever. Aren’t you bored with it yet?” Meanwhile, those who don’t know me might more likely be asking, “What are the Old Bailey Proceedings?” […]
Last year, I wrote about my early impressions of the possible uses of virtual reality technology for public history and history education. I also led a session in my fourth-year digital history class on virtual reality and its potential for generating a sense of historical presence, an ability to simulate the sensation of standing in […]
Open Source and copyright are intimately related. It was Richard Stallman’s clever hack of copyright law that created the General Public License (GPL) and, thus, free software. The GPL requires those who copy or modify software released under it to pass on the four freedoms. If they don’t, they break the terms of the GPL […]
