Digital history is coming to York University in Fall 2016. That is to say, I finally got around to organizing and preparing to teach digital history. As I get ready to teach this course, I am surveying the landscape of digital history teaching in Canada, looking for ideas. Readers of this article, I hope, will […]
All of us who saw Jurassic Park as kids, no matter how much skepticism we’d precociously developed, surely spent at least a moment wondering if science could actually bring dinosaurs back to life by pulling the DNA out of their blood trapped in amber-preserved mosquitoes. It turns out that it can’t — at least not yet! — but even so, […]
Digital history’s promise is not big. By which I mean that the potential of the field is not ultimately to be found in big data, big scale, big history, or the return to cliometrics or some computational mode of the longue durée (or as spellcheck would have me write it, the tongue puree). Rather, the promise of digital history […]
On 11 February 2013, Rick Anderson, a librarian and columnist for the blog The Scholarly Kitchen, posted a detailed story of his most recent interaction with the president of the Edwin Mellen Press, a scholarly publisher that had recently accused another librarian, Dale Askey, of libel. The company had filed a civil case against both Askey and his […]
Wikipedia is an open encyclopedia that anyone can edit. As Doc Searls recently put it, Wikipedia is, like the protocols of the Net, “a set of agreements”. A Web protocol defines the way in which computers communicate with each other and make decisions to ensure successful transactions. Wikipedia policies have the same purpose, but instead […]
I recently wrote about the wave of digital history reviews currently washing over print journals like the American Historical Review, The Western Historical Quarterly, and The Journal of American History. This wave brings into focus the odd reticence of digital historians to substantively review digital history projects in open, online venues. I ended the post […]
Is leadership for a digital organization any different than any other kind of leadership? I think so, and that is the topic I chose to address when the National Federation of Advanced Information Systems (NFAIS) named me the 2016 Miles Conrad Memorial Lecturer last month. At this late stage in my career, I have the […]
There was a definite buzz in the room on an otherwise ordinary Friday morning. Faculty, administrators, librarians, and educational technologists had gathered to hear future plans for our university’s classrooms. A communication professor described an assignment in which students reflected on their semester working through issues of race and class by using Comic Life to […]
I invoke Victor’s first words to start my talk because he offers us some insight into the Romantic Digital Humanities today. Victor is myopically focused on chasing something that he’s made, his creature, and it is no longer his experiment but a living, thriving body with a life of its own. I suggest that most […]
Are online discussions really discussions? I’ve been wondering this since I started teaching online. Many of my students, friends, and colleagues get a sour look on their face when it comes to discussion online, whether it be synchronous or asynchronous. They express, sometimes implicitly and others explicitly, a common sentiment that online discussion is not […]
