A few months ago, I noticed a plethora of posts on social media about the discovery of the hidden library of a former ISIS member who had stolen dozens of Syriac manuscripts from Churches and hidden them in the kitchen of his house in the city of Mosul, Iraq. This discovery and reactions to it…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
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…
This year, scholars and students across the globe have been forced to conduct research and gather materials for their projects and classes through the internet. Luckily for the field of Korean Studies, a huge amount of primary and secondary source material is available online, much of it for free. A concerted effort by the Korean…
In 2017, I began compiling a three-part guide, intended for beginners with next to no technical knowledge, on how to create the sorts of data-driven, visual stories that we publish at The Pudding. This was going to consist of introductions and surveys of data analysis, design, and writing, and while I thought that the first…
ClioVis software combines the best features of digital timeline and mind-mapping software for use by researchers, students, or instructors. The software allows users to chart events chronologically and map them conceptually, illustrating connections along the way through the use of visualization software. ClioVis helps users better understand the materials they are studying, provides an intuitive…