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THIS WORK IS BASED ON a single historical document: a slideshow made by commercial photographer Henry G. Peabody between 1899-1930 at the Grand Canyon of Arizona.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, […]
I have periodically described my experiences with text mining in this blog. Today I want to raise a significant point that has only recently become clear to me. It happened in the wake of my participation in the University of Michigan’s “Beyond Cntrl+F” workshop on February 1st of this year. This made something very apparent: text mining is in […]
If you claim computational approaches to history (“digital history”) lets historians ask new types of questions, or that they offer new historical approaches to answering or exploring old questions, you are wrong. You’re not actually wrong, but you are institutionally wrong, which is maybe worse. This is a problem, because rhetoric from practitioners (including me) is that we can […]
Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia’s recent article, “The LA Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities,” argues that digital humanities “most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university.” Below is a 2nd round-up of responses. The 1st round-up […]
Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia’s recent article, “The LA Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities,” argues that digital humanities “most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university.” Below is a round-up of responses. In Defense of DH […]
In October of 2015, Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Museum Studies Program convened a group of cultural heritage professionals to discuss digital curation, its integration into the art museum community, and the role the JHU Program in Digital Curation might play in this effort. Attendees included representatives from museums, libraries, archives, foundations, and the JHU Museum […]
In the academic libraries’ efforts to support digital humanities and social science, GIS service plays an important role. However, there is no general service model existing about how libraries can develop GIS services to best engage with digital humanities and social science. In this study, we adopted the action research method to develop and improve […]
