Have you ever read a book and felt healed by it? Most readers can think of a novel that offered some comfort, a poem that presented direction, or even a biography that provided inspiration. The notion that books can heal is as old as reading itself but, during World War I, doctors and librarians joined together […]
It smelled like popcorn on April 16, 2007. I had just begun projecting a movie at the Lyric Theatre in sleepy downtown Blacksburg, Virginia. It was an early morning show geared towards moms with small children and special needs patrons. I can no longer remember the title of the film. Just the smell of popcorn […]
When it started almost 15 years ago, it also seemed impossibly ambitious: An upstart tech company that had just tamed and organized the vast informational jungle of the web would now extend the reach of its search box into the offline world. By scanning millions of printed books from the libraries with which it partnered, […]
Recent budget proposals by the Trump administration have allocated zero funding to a number of independent federal agencies concerned with education, democracy, cultural preservation, and public-facing scholarship. Among them are the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which supports NPR and […]
When I was asked to come speak at Keene it was due, in part, to a presentation I gave last summer at Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute at Mary Washington. My presentation was titled Making & Breaking: Rethinking the Web in Higher Education, and the purpose of that talk was to disentangle a bit of the history of the […]
Aquay (Hello), I am a PhD student in Comparative Public Policy in the Department of Political Science focusing on Indigenous water security and its climatic, territorial and governance underpinnings. I am an enrolled citizen of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, a federally-recognized Tribal Nation located on the southern shores of Paumanok (Long Island, NY). Shinnecock means […]
For me, co-teaching is the ultimate teaching experience. I’ve been fortunate to find several opportunities for it over the years. During graduate school, I co-taught a number of short courses, several DH classes, and a couple workshops. Here at W&L I’ve been able to teach alongside faculty from the history department and the Library. Each […]
In this short post I want to think about the limits of computation, not the limits theoretically of the application or theorisation of computation itself, but actually the limits to which computation within a particular context should be contained. This is necessarily a normative position, but what I am trying to explore is the limit […]
The second Archaeogaming Virtual Unconference Biennial was held today, in the misty realms of cyberspace. Or at least, that corner of it that can be found at the MIT Unhangouts project. I meant to take some screenshots of the unconference in action, but I forgot to ask the others if that would be ok and in […]
The history of redlining matters. For decades, the government sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation created maps that defined African American neighbourhoods as high risk, which resulted in people not having access to a Federal Housing Administration insured mortgage in these districts. Ta-Nehisi Coates used the research…to develop the case for reparations in his 2014 cover story in the Atlantic. He convincingly argued […]
