In a post in August, I opened a discussion of how analyzing the meta-discourse surrounding MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas) may help us describe the relationship between player-performance in these games and bardic performance in ancient epic in a more interesting way. The point of such an analysis is not merely be to demonstrate that […]
Videogames have an amazing potential for modeling societal processes. At the same time, videogames also embody the worldview of their creators on a procedural level. As such, it is a rare thing when a game is able to move beyond popular understandings of the world and approach it from a new and interesting direction. As […]
I watched Twitter and the CBC while the prosecutor was reading his statement. I watched the live feeds from Ferguson, and other cities around the US. Back in August, when this all first began, I was glued to my computer, several feeds going at once. A spectator. Yesterday, Mitch Fraas put the grand jury documents […]
Reproducibility of published research results is increasingly coming into question. Efforts from funding agencies and publishers are calling for more and more transparency around research data, but so far, little attention seems to have been paid to a crucial aspect of experimental reproducibility: publication of detailed methodologies. A new NIH-led effort seems a first step […]
Speculative Computing and the Centers to Come by Bethany Nowviskie But the founding and sustaining and continual renewal of a DH center is itself an active form of hope for the future. And some of this future-orientation is not, itself, new. It stems from a long interest in History and other disciplines in counter-factualism, alternate imaginings, in […]
Beneath our cities lies vast, labyrinthine sewer systems. These have been key infrastructures allowing our cities to grow larger, grow more densely, and stay healthy. Yet, save for passing interests in Urban Exploration (UrbEx), we barely think of them as ‘beautifully designed systems’. In their time, the original sewer systems were critical long term projects […]
In recent months there has been a lot of talk about big stuff. Between ‘Big Data’ and calls for a return to ‘Longue durée’ history writing, lots of people seem to be trying to carve out their own small bit of ‘big data’. This post represents a reflection on what feels to me to be […]
The World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) is an initiative by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to improve humanitarian action. The Summit, which is to be held in 2016, stands to be one of the most important humanitarian conferences in a decade. One key pillar of WHS is humanitarian innovation. “Transformation through Innovation” is the WHS Working Group dedicated to […]
Topic modeling is very popular at the moment in the digital humanities. A recent tutorial on getting started with this tool explains them as tools for extracting topics or injecting semantic meaning into vocabularies: “Topic models represent a family of computer programs that extract topics from texts. A topic to the computer is a list […]
The digital contexts of our scholarly practice impact not only the kind of work that we may do as humanists, but also how we represent changes in theory and methods over time. Whether we are preserving, analyzing, or representing cultural heritage collections, interpreting digital media, or communicating through open repositories or social media, our activities […]
