So, you might guess by this image (from @LegoAcademics!) that I’m something of a linked open data pessimist. I’ve just come off of a dissertation that relied for half of its data on a large RDF museum database that was open, rich in complex and nuanced historical information, and rigorously structured… but lacked any real […]
This is the first of a series of blog post applying text mining and other DH techniques to the evolving student protest movement demanding racial equality. What can DH techniques tell use about student demands and administration responses? Are faculty and students talking to each other or at each other? This project is a collaborative […]
I came to the Doing Sport History in the Digital Present workshop last week as an American Studies scholar and may have left a sport historian. This proclamation only becomes relevant in the context of the aims of the DSH workshop, in which 15 participants from a variety of scholarly approaches and interests came together at Georgia […]
Caution: pot stirring ahead I’m coming up on my first sabbatical. It’s been six years since I first came to Carleton – terrified – to interview for a position in the history department, in this thing, ‘digital humanities’. The previous eight years had been hard, hustling for contracts, short term jobs, precarious jobs, jobs that […]
This article is part one of a four-part series on the future of quantification in history. For the thematic introduction to the series, please click here. At face value, it might appear to the casual reader of Play the Past, that the main focus of this blog is the treatment of historical experience in the […]
New ideas about artificial intelligence and cognitive computing systems in education have been advanced this year by major computing and educational businesses, including Pearson and IBM. Pearson’s promotion of AI reflects its growing interests in data analytics and other digital methods while IBM is seeking to extend its existing R&D on cognitive computing into the […]
This will be an old-fashioned, shamelessly opinionated, 1000-word blog post. Anyone who has tried to write literary history using numbers knows that they are a double-edged sword. On the one hand they make it possible, not only to consider more examples, but often to trace subtler, looser patterns than we could trace by hand. On the […]
THIS WORK IS BASED ON a single historical document: a slideshow made by commercial photographer Henry G. Peabody between 1899-1930 at the Grand Canyon of Arizona. The project reconstructs Peabody’s slideshow in a web-based medium, allowing readers to see beyond the photographer’s presentation of his forty-three individual image-objects. Enchanting the Desert, instead, uses the photographs […]
I briefly considered leaving for what we would nowadays call an alt-ac job. John Unsworth convinced me to stay, and finish, which I did, just as Johanna Drucker was arriving in 1999. My first tenure-track job was at the University of Kentucky in response to an ad for “humanities computing.” Kentucky was a pretty interesting […]
This new essay published in Post45 is about the relationship between prizewinning novels and their economic counterparts, bestsellers. It is about the ways in which social distinction is symbolically manifested within the contemporary novel and how we read social difference through language. Not only can we observe very strong stylistic differences between bestselling and prizewinning writing, […]
