Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: How we used math to explore racial segregation in Pennsylvania public school districting

American life is based on American thought. American thought is based on American values. And American values have a foundation in the public school system. So what happens when the American public school system is flawed? Although the “separate but equal” school system was deemed unconstitutional in the 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education, […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Social Scientific Applications of Historical GIS

In a previous piece in the Digital Orientalist, Giulia Buriola went over geo-referencing examples in QGIS. Here I would like to introduce readers to another common geographic analysis software they might encounter on the market: ArcGIS, and show how this software might be applied to social scientific historical research. Readers may be familiar with this […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Mapping the Effects of COVID-19

In March 2020, when the COVID-19 virus started to spread throughout New York City, former Digital Fellow Javier Otero Peña and I got together to think about the ways mapping could be used to identify some of the challenges produced by the pandemic. At the time we were co-coordinating the GIS /Mapping Working Group on […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Personal Art Map with R

Map art makes beautiful posters. You can find them all over the internet and buy them even framed for your favorite city, area or country. Those posters’ beauty relies on the intricate and beautiful pattern of roads, buildings, parks, rivers, etc., which shape our cities and our mobility. In my research I constantly use those […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Data visualization in virtual reality

Virtual reality puts you in a digital world that can feel like a real world when it’s done right. Research from Benjamin Lee, et al. explored some of the possibilities in work they’re calling data visceralation. As a proof of concept, shown in the video above, the researchers recreated popular works for virtual reality. Watch […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: History Slam Episode 164: Words Have a Past

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Jane Griffith about the book Words Have a Past: The English Language, Colonialism, and the Newspapers of Indian Boarding Schools. We talk about why schools published newspapers, who the intended audiences were, and the information they did not include. We also discuss the power of […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Digitizing the Mongolian Language

The Online Dictionaries and Full-text Search of Mongolian Languages and Written Manchu モンゴル諸語と満洲語の資料検索システム (Mongoru shogo to Manshūgo no shiryō kensaku shisutemu) is an online database of digitalized dictionaries and texts for Inner and East Asian languages. It was created by Dr. Hitoshi Kuribayashi (栗林均) and his team at the Center for Northeast Asian Studies (東北アジア研究センター) […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Teaching Digital Curation

I’m lucky to be teaching a class about digital curation for undergraduate information studies students this semester. I struggled a bit over the summer with how to structure the class. Of course it is important to focus on the concepts and theories of digital curation. But I think it’s also important to provide practical exercises that […]