It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the “true” popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural perception of a given topic, such as time or gender. However, the Google Books corpus suffers from […]
Project Arclight began two years ago with an idea. If researchers can use Twitter analytics to study trends in discussions of contemporary media, then what if we treated historic trade papers and fan magazines like a giant Twitter stream and explored trends in film and media history? We worked on refining this idea, received a […]
We are educating new cohorts of students of the liberal arts, both graduate and undergraduate, perhaps best positioned to discover, interpret, and build upon a growing species of understanding—one that may be deeply uncomfortable, yet has been more deeply, fundamentally, and long desired in the humanities: the knowledge of relationships among the largest and smallest of […]
Currently, there is no global approach to rights statements that works for a broad set of institutions, leading to a confusing proliferation of terms. Simplifying the use and application of Rights Statements benefits both contributing organizations, which share their valuable collections online through aggregators such as Europeana and the DPLA, and the people who engage […]
Humanists know the subjects we study are complex. So on the rare occasions when we describe them with numbers at all, we tend to proceed cautiously. Maybe too cautiously. Distant readers have spent a lot of time, for instance, just convincing colleagues that it might be okay to use numbers for exploratory purposes. But the […]
I have been thinking about POWs and forced laborers lately. My article on digital memory of World War II came out with Memory Studies and in it I analyzed projects like the Russian governments OBD-Memorial, a huge database of Soviet soldiers who died in the war. I’ve also been working on a project on the […]
I was excited to be invited to participate in a panel discussion on Data Management and Curation in 21st Century Archives at SAA, given my perspective is not that of an archivist. I’ve been studying data reuse in academic communities and more recently I’ve been examining libraries’ role in e-research and data on their campuses. Given […]
I set out this summer to write a column for Places on mapping, informed by all the background work I did to develop my new “Maps as Media” grad studio. Today, my editors mercifully informed me that what I’ve written is not an article, but a pedagogical prospectus. Doh! I sort-of suspected that. Re-reading the piece again, after about […]
Last year I wrote a review of Peter de Bolla’s extraordinary book, The Architecture of Concepts: the Historical Formation of Human Rights (Fordham, 2013)… Since he wrote this book, de Bolla has spear-headed the at Cambridge, where he leads an interdisciplinary group of scholars devoted to precisely this project: developing a more sophisticated and rigorously theorized […]
It is now possible to measure and manage emotions through mobile apps and other digital devices. As part of my current research exploring the expert practices and knowledge base of the emerging field of “educational data science,” I have been gathering examples of educational technologies that are designed to both monitor learners’ emotions through data […]
