A week or so ago I travelled down from Dundee to York to do some structured light scanning of an artefact for a heritage company and while I was there I took the opportunity to catch up with the brilliant Tara Copplestone. If you’re up on your blogging archaeologists you may already know Tara as the ‘Gamingarchaeo’ […]
For most non-technical folks, “hacking” evokes the notion of using sophisticated technical skills to break through the security of a corporate or government system for illicit purposes. Of course, most folks who were engaged in cracking security systems weren’t necessarily in it for espionage and cruelty. In the 1990s, I grew up among teenage hackers […]
We humans have been mapping space for many centuries, and our maps have greatly improved over this time so that now they are very useful for navigating…Maps are for humans, but how do animals, which began navigating millions of years before parchment was invented, manage to find their way around? Do animal (and human) brains […]
The use of computational methods for ancient world geography are still very much dominated by the URI based gazetteer. These powerful and flexible reference lists, trail-blazed by projects such as the Pleaides and Pelagios projects, allow resources to be linked by common spatial referents they share. However, while computers love URIs unconditionally, the relationship they […]
One of the central and most far-reaching promises of the so-called Digital Humanities has been the possibility to analyse large datasets of cultural production, such as books, periodicals, and newspapers, in a quantitative way. Since the early 2000s, humanities 3.0, as Rens Bod has called it, was posited as being able to discover new patterns, […]
This talk departs from a seemingly simple question: “What is the story we tell about the origins of modern data visualization?” And as a set of follow-ups, “What alternate histories might emerge, what new visual forms might we imagine, and what new arguments might we make, if we told that story differently?” To begin to answer […]
This project aims to locate, digitalize, archive, and disseminate online photographs from the substantial holdings of images of modern China held mostly in private hands outside the country. These are often of even greater historic interest than might ordinarily be the case, as the destruction of materials in China through war and revolution in the twentieth […]
Recent portrayals of American slavery — from 12 Years a Slave and Django Unchained to Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton — have emphasized the brutal violence on cotton plantations in the years preceding the Civil War. What they miss is that during the same period, slaves that were […]
Strange as it now seems, it was not that long ago that scholarship was not digital. Writing a dissertation in the 1990s was done on a computer and took full advantage of the latest suite of word-processing tools available (that a graduate student could afford). And it certainly was a world away from the typewritten […]
“I don’t know a lot about philosophy,” says Grant Louis Oliveira, a data analyst and quantitative social sciences researcher with an undergraduate degree in political science. He continues: I’d like to change that and more rigorously explore my ideas, but I find the world of philosophy a bit impenetrable, and I don’t think I’m the only […]
