Hundreds of thousands of artworks, objects, books, and records in the Getty’s collections have been photographed and posted online. But how do objects go from the physical world to your screen? People. Holly McGee is one of them. Here’s what a typical day in her life at work is like. Read full post here.
This fall quarter I am teaching my digital history course. You can find the draft of the syllabus here. While the title of the course hasn’t changed since the last time I taught it, I’ve made two substantial changes to the overall structure of the course. First, the course focuses more heavily on public history […]
In 1861, the census for the colony of New South Wales (as it was back then) recorded just one Chinese woman living in Balmain in Sydney. The historian Eric Rolls, writing in 1992, commented that this ‘lone woman is exceptional and inexplicable’. Inexplicable? My partner and collaborator Kate Bagnall is a historian of Chinese Australia and […]
In recent months we’ve been working on a couple of projects here in the Lab that are making use of the Extracted Features data set from HathiTrust. This is a fantastic resource, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to everyone at HTRC for putting it together and maintaining it. The extracted features are essentially […]
Digitized archival collections are going nowhere. Any historian conversant with archival debates will be aware of this. The pressure for “more product less process” and the backlogs in many repositories combined with the neo-liberal economy of higher education in which access for consumers often trumps all other concerns means that digitizing documents and putting them […]
There should be no need to mention in a blog about early American history that the digital turn is, perhaps, a fait accompli. However, over the past couple of years more and more articles have called into question the ways in which access to digital archives and digitized sources has changed both the questions historians […]
This is an update on SherlockNet, our project to use machine learning and other computational techniques to dramatically increase the discoverability of the British Library’s Flickr images dataset. Below is some of our progress on tagging, captioning, and the web interface. When we started this project, our goal was to classify every single image in […]
A new semester and the Networked and Global Learning course is running again. Apologies to those in the other courses I teach, but this course is consistently the most engaging and interesting. It’s a course in which I typically learn as much as the other participants. However, due to the reasons/excuses outlined in the last […]
Last week, an anonymous Ph.D. student published a Guardian op-ed under the headline “I’m a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer.” Among other complaints, the author (a laboratory scientist) condemned the practice of livetweeting academic conferences. Livetweeters care less about disseminating new knowledge, Anonymous wrote, than about making self-promotional displays: Look at me taking part in this […]
This post has been percolating for a while as a series of op-ed pieces and studies announcing that handwriting is better for learning or that laptops or other devices are ineffective or that tech shouldn’t be used in the classroom continue to emerge. I know I’ll get push back about this response, but I’ve needed to […]
