Many if not most contemporary historians would probably agree with the statement that “the typical mode of explanation used by historians [is] narrative.” (Roberts 2001) Storytelling, then, is not the difference between history and fiction. Instead, we could say, the scope of the story is what differentiates historical and fictional writing. For the past four months, […]
Digital Humanities Now is taking the week off. We’ll be back with new featured posts on June 2!
Abstract: Digital preservation is fundamental to information stewardship in the 21st century. Although much useful work on preservation strategies has been accomplished, we do not yet have an adequate conceptual framework that articulates precisely and formally what preservation actually is. The intention of the account provided here is to bring us closer to this goal. […]
Abstract: Semantic description and annotation of digital images is key to the management and reuse of images in humanities computing. Due to the lack of domain-specific hierarchical description schema and controlled vocabularies for digital images, annotation results produced by current methods, such as machine annotation based on low-level visual features and human annotation based on […]
If you read my last post, you know that this semester I engaged in building a Bookworm using a government document collection. My professor challenged me to try my system for parsing the documents on a different, larger collection of government documents. The collection I chose to work with is the Official Records of the […]
Is it possible to engineer the discovery of art? In 2013, two graduate students in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) set out to answer that question, and today, thanks to their work as research assistants — there’s an app for that! Artbot, developed by Desi Gonzalez and Liam Andrew in the […]
I’ve been working on an update to the small amount of work I did on the black woman suffrage database to present at Women’s History in the Digital World at the end of this month. Working with twice as many files (now 904 items) as I had for the first project (more details on corpus), […]
I am often asked about the digital humanities and how it can update, make relevant, and provide funding for many a beleaguered humanities department. Some faculty at underfunded institutions imagine DH is going to revitalize their discipline — it’s going to magically interest undergraduates, give faculty research funding, and exponentially increase enrollment. Well, the reality […]
What difference does an editor make? This was the question posed by a recent profile of the highly successful editor of young adult fiction, Julie Strauss-Gabel, who manages the imprint Dutton Children’s Books. Her titles have consistently performed well over recent years and it was a timely reminder of the impact that a good editor can […]
Emerson’s aphorisms provide useful reminders both for digital humanists surveying the field and for scholars observing it from its horizons. In today’s talk, I want to think through states of knowing in the digital humanities, situating our practices within larger histories of knowledge production. My talk has three parts: A discussion of a few approaches to text […]
