Below is my closing keynote, “Libraries Meet the Second Machine Age” given for the 2015 Library Technology Conference on March 19, 2015 at St. Paul, MN. I want to send big thanks to the conference steering committee who invited me and those who watched and shared my keynote either on-site or online and their thoughts […]
We were chatting last week with Brian Norberg, the Digital Humanities Technology Analyst for Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, who wanted to know what makes DC3 tick. I’m not sure we’ve ever been asked that directly before, and the conversation helped crystallize for me some of the basic operating principles we’ve evolved. Think big. […]
The Digital Humanities are actively being invented in this very moment. They have not taken shape as a concrete thing, but evolve as an ongoing and collaborative process still taking shape. This can be seen in how the Digital Humanities are being negotiated as a debate between building and breaking. What’s being built: word clouds, […]
In my earlier post “Digital Collections and Accessibility”, I touched upon the considerations we would need to address when building or creating digital collections (or other things that rely heavily on utilizing images such as data visualization) for public use. Here are the questions I put down in that post: “Given the ubiquitous nature of […]
Showing data isn’t always about trying to convey an insight, or giving people the means to understand the intricacies of data. It can also be a tool to communicate a fact, an amount, or an issue beyond just the sheer numbers. Data illustration is poorly understood, but it can be very powerful. About a year ago, […]
One of the things that I keep coming back to in our digital library system are the states that an object can be in and how that affects various aspects of our system. Hopefully this post can explain some of them and how they are currently implemented locally. Hidden vs Non-Hidden Our main distinction once […]
What can we take away from this transversal reading of feminist new materialism, critical and media theory, and remix studies, with respect to cutting as an affirmative material-discursive practice—especially where this reading concerns how remix and the cut can performatively critique the established humanist notions such as authorship, authority, quality and fixity underlying scholarly book […]
When we started up ActiveHistory.ca way back in 2009 (!), we did it with a pretty simple vision in mind: historians were producing good scholarship, but it was inaccessible. It was inaccessible for a few reasons: sometimes we don’t exactly write for a general audience (we’ve been guilty of dropping jargon around this site too, […]
In the future, will platforms own our pasts? In February 2015, computer scientist Vint Cerf, known widely for developing the TCP/IP internet protocol standard, gave a lecture at Carnegie Mellon University’s Silicon Valley branch campus in which he spoke of a coming “digital dark age.” This sound bite was subsequently picked up by the BBC […]
At a recent talk at the University of Colorado Boulder I discussed various definitions of digital scholarship and how we might categorize digital scholarship. My forthcoming essay in the second edition of Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities deals with these questions in depth. This chart offers one way to consider a typology for digital scholarship […]
