In truth, we don’t know how many Victorian gags have been preserved in the British Library’s digital collections. Type the word ‘jokes’ into the British Newspaper Archive or the JISC Historical Texts collection and you’ll find a handful of them fairly quickly. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more […]
In scientometrics, altmetrics are seen as an interesting possibility for measuring the broad impact of research. Whereas citation counts allow the measurement of the impact of research on research itself, an important role in the measurement of the impact of research on other parts of society is ascribed to altmetrics. The present study investigates the […]
Over the past few years we’ve seen an increasing number of projects that take the phrase ‘human-computer interaction’ literally (or perhaps turning HCI into human-computer integration), organising tasks done by people and by computers into a unified system. One of the most obvious benefits of crowdsourcing on digital platforms has been the ability to coordinate […]
There is only one car on the track at Silverstone, the prestigious home of British motor racing. The yellow Ford Focus begins its third lap around the circuit. The engine’s constant drone is the only thing breaking the silence surrounding the place. This may be a video game simulation, but there are no win or […]
According to these reviews from a popular apartment-sharing site, I am someone who is “nice” and “respectful” in person. Perhaps a more substantive question — for my future as an academic and scholar — might be what kind of a person I appear to be online. “Respectful” and “nice” can actually be contentious terms, I […]
Every day, people from around the world upload photos to share on a range of social media sites and web applications. The results are astounding; collections of billions of digital photographs are now stored and managed by several companies and organizations. In this context, Yahoo Labs recently announced that they were making a data set […]
The folks at the New York Public Library have a workflow and python script for translating historical maps into Minecraft. It’s a three-step (quite big steps) process. First, they generate a DEM (digital elevation model) from the historical map, using QGIS. This is saved as ‘elevation.tiff’. Then, using Inkscape, they trace over the features from […]
A Ferguson Twitter Archive Much has been written about the significance of Twitter as the recent events in Ferguson echoed round the Web, the country, and the world. I happened to be at the Society of American Archivists meeting 5 days after Michael Brown was killed. During our panel discussion someone asked about the role […]
Recently Latour outlined his understanding of the digital in an interesting way as part of his plenary lecture at Digital Humanities 2014 conference. He was honest in accepting that his understanding may itself be a product of his own individuation and pre-digital training as a scholar which emphasised close-reading techniques and agonistic engagement around a […]
How should digital humanities scholars develop research questions? Spurred on by this recent conversation on twitter, I figured I would lay out a few different ways to go about answering this question about questions. The gist of the dialog is that Jason Heppler suggested that one should “Fit the tool to the question, not the […]
