In case you missed Jill Lepore has written a superb article for the New Yorker about the Internet Archive and archiving the Web in general. The story of the Internet Archive is largely the story of its creator Brewster Kahle. If you’ve heard Kahle speak you’ve probably heard the Library of Alexandria v2.0 metaphor before….
Welcome to A Digital Reading of Twentieth Century Demography. This website is a digital supplement to the dissertation I am preparing as a requirement of the Ph.D. program in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, titled “Prediction and Control: Global Population, Population Science, and Population Politics in the Twentieth Century.” …The dissertation…
If the Internet went down all historical software would cease to function, except for Microsoft Word. For an academic historian, a grant to build a high profile web-based project is likely the biggest pot of money he or she will ever receive during their career. That is, if they ever receive it, as few historians…
At their best, altmetrics tools are meant to encourage scholarly activity around published papers on line. It can seem, indeed, like a chicken-and-egg situation: without healthy, collegial, reciprocal cultures of scholarly interaction on the web, mentions of scholarly content will not be significant. Simultaneously, if publications do not provide identifiers like DOIs and authors, publishers…
I’m an archaeological impostor. It feels good to say that. When I go to conferences I feel like I don’t fit in – although that’s not why I can’t be with you bodily today. That’s another story that involves someone called “The Man.” But I’m sure that many of you felt that way at some…
At Temple University Libraries (TUL), librarian Fred Rowland began conducting interviews and sharing them as streaming audio through TUL’s website in 2007. The following interview transcript with digital humanities scholar Kathleen Fitzpatrick offers insight into her work and a discussion about the future of scholarly communication. An introduction has been added to the interview, which…
Yesterday I gave a talk over the internet on “What’s New is Old Again: Studying Interface with Perseus.” This talk was recorded and shared on via eHumanities Seminar – YouTube. The abstract I submitted for the talk was: [P]aradoxically, the primary effect of visual forms of knowledge production in any medium – the codex boo,…
[The following is the text of a talk I prepared for a panel discussion about authoring digital scholarship for history with Adeline Koh, Lauren Tilton, Yoni Appelbaum, and Ed Ayers at the 2015 American Historical Association Conference.] I’d like to start with a blog post that was written almost seven years ago now, titled “Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?”…
I am excited to finally release the digital component of my dissertation, Machines in the Valley. My dissertation, Machines in the Valley, examines the environmental, economic, and cultural conflicts over suburbanization and industrialization in California’s Santa Clara Valley–today known as Silicon Valley–between 1945 and 1990. The high technology sector emerged as a key component of economic…
There seems too often to be an explicit agreement that instructors lead and students respond, that instructors advise as students seek guidance, that when instructors talk about their pedagogy, it should be outside of earshot of the students they instruct. Open digital platforms can break these implicit rules to make spaces for joint inquiry among…