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 […]
That was the topic discussed recently by OCLC Research Library Partners metadata managers, initiated by Naun Chew of Cornell and Joan Swanekamp of Yale. As libraries have increased collecting commercial electronic resources, instituted local or shared digitization programs, and moved to cloud-based services, more bibliographic and inventory information is being managed outside the traditional catalog, […]
[This—more or less—is the text of a keynote talk I delivered last week in Atlanta, at the 2014 DLF Forum: the annual gathering of the Digital Library Federation. DLF is one among several stellar programs at CLIR, the Council on Library and Information Resources, where I have the honor to serve as a Distinguished Presidential […]
The 21st century will be the century of temperature. As global temperatures rise, polar ice melts, and drought becomes a permanent way of life, temperature has become the single greatest challenge to human life on the planet. Temperature is also a media problem in many ways: from the heat generated by new media—whether in our […]
In all the GamerGate stories, an interesting move by Newsweek as to commission a study of GamerGate tweets. Taylor Wofford reported about the results in an article from October 25th, 2014 that is titled, Is GamerGate About Media Ethics or Harassing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows. The study was run by BrandWatch and they looked at […]
Being a “public intellectual” in 2014 typically involves using social media. This brings many advantages for scholars, journalists, and other public thinkers. For example, sharing one’s writing on social media tends to increase readership, and being active on a service like Twitter can lead to the forging of many new, mutually beneficial professional relationships. I […]
I’ve been seeing how deeply we could integrate topic models into the underlying Bookworm architecture a bit lately. My own chief interest in this, because I tend to be a little wary of topic models in general, is in the possibility for Bookworm to act as a diagnostic tool internally for topic models. I don’t think simply plotting description absent […]
In terms of knocking down accepted historiographies, the results around sphere seemed most well received. Woman’s sphere is such an entrenched concept in the historiography of women’s history that the fact that female authors in the History of Woman Suffrage used sphere less than the male authors did is more than a little surprising.* The […]
