I have been seeing an enormous amount of momentum in the library industry toward “linked data”, often in the form of a fairly ambitious collective project to rebuild much of our infrastructure around data formats built on linked data. I think linked data technology is interesting and can be useful. But I have some concerns about how it […]
These are some remarks I made at the Web Archives conference at the University of Michigan, on November 12th, 2015. I didn’t have any slides other than this visual presentation. To some extent I think the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and similar centers, conferences and workshops like ThatCamp have been so successful at […]
Who remembers Home Improvement? Tim the “Tool Man” Taylor was always trying to show the “Tool Time” audience how to build things, make repairs and of course, demo new tools made by the show’s sponsor, Binford. In true sitcom fashion, he broke more things than he fixed, thanks to his “more power” mantra. But I’m […]
The PressForward team is excited to announce the release of PressForward 3.7, an update to our WordPress plugin that helps you collect, discuss, and share content from the web. In addition to numerous bug fixes, this update brings refinements to the Subscribed Feeds panel and new features to the feed submission and management process. This update […]
The following is a position paper for an upcoming workshop on the dissertation convened by the Council of Graduate Schools. I’ll be speaking on a panel focusing on what new technologies enable us to do with this critical milestone in graduate study. My main argument is that while the affordances of specific technologies can be exciting, more important is the […]
Reproducibility is one of the cornerstones of science. Made popular by British scientist Robert Boyle in the 1660s, the idea is that a discovery should be reproducible before being accepted as scientific knowledge. For most of the history of science, researchers have reported their methods in a way that enabled independent reproduction of their results. But, since […]
In episode 23 we talk with David Mimno of Cornell University about his work in the digital humanities (and explore what machine learning can tell us about lady zombie ghosts and huge bodies of literature) Ryan introduces us to probabilistic programming and we take a listener question about knowledge transfer between math and machine learning. Listen to podcast here.
A number of problems in digital history/humanities require one to calculate the similarity of documents or to identify how one text borrows from another. To give one example, the Viral Texts project, by Ryan Cordell, David Smith, et al., has been very successful at identifying reprinted articles in American newspapers. Kellen Funk and I have […]
Today, a number of companies are investing heavily in AR and beginning to deploy consumer-facing devices and applications. These systems have the potential to deliver enormous value, including to populations with limited physical or other resources. Applications include hands-free instruction and training, language translation, obstacle avoidance, advertising, gaming, museum tours, and much more. This whitepaper—which […]
As the only historian in my immediate family, I’m responsible for our genealogy, saved in a massive GEDCOM file. Through the wonders of the web, I now manage quite the sprawling tree: over 100,000 people, hundreds of photos, thousands of census records & historical documents. The majority came from distant relations managing their own trees, with whom I share. Such […]
