A man walks into a museum. He shares a story. He creates a visual representation of his story. He puts it on the wall. How do you measure the value of that experience? Two years ago, we mounted one of our most successful participatory exhibits ever at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History:…
One of the things that’s struck me as I’ve looked into (the so-called) digital humanities in the last year or two – most intensely in the last six months – is how very little there is about the aspect of computing that most attracted me some four decades or so ago, the computer as model…
Disruption, as a term and theory, has been the subject of much discussion in both mainstream and social media – a level of interest that has only increased as a result of Jill Lepore’s June 2014 article for The New Yorker, ‘The Disruption Machine’. In this article Lepore debunks some of the myths surrounding Clayton…
As more and more scholars experiment with building digital humanities (DH) resources, how are their host institutions approaching the challenge of supporting these diverse projects over time? In this study, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ithaka S+R explored the different models colleges and universities have adopted to support DH outputs on their…
With all kinds of digital technologies becoming available, the uptake of digital research methods by the humanities might have been inevitable. How the humanities can incorporate digital tools, and contribute to the development of technology aimed at the humanities were questions central at the DHBenelux conference (12&13 June 2014, The Hague, the Netherlands). Around 180 attendees…
To accomplish their work, academic researchers increasingly rely on digital tools and large data sets, such as data visualization in the environmental sciences, data mining a large corpora of texts in the humanities, and developing GIS or other geolocation data representations in the social sciences. Librarians and information technologists often provide consultation or might even…
At DHSI 2014, participants requested an unconference session on how to turn a digital humanities project from an idea into a reality, and I offered to lead it. Here, roughly, are the steps that I recommended. A few are relevant chiefly to graduate students; most are applicable to academics at nearly any level. Some of…
This talk was delivered as the closing keynote before the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, B.C. on June 6, 2014. We are a small, if albeit visible, band of hackers and pirates charged with an impossible, but ever so crucial mandate. To reach the promised land, we must not fall into facile Us vs….
The KNAW, UvA, VU and IBM are developing a long-term strategic partnership to be operationalized as the Center for Humanities and Technology (CHAT). The members and partners of CHAT will create new analytical methods, practices, data and instruments to enhance significantly the performance and impact of humanities, information science and computer science research. As a…
This is the crux of what I plan to say—or hope to say—at my professorial inaugural lecture at UCL on the 27th May 2014…I decided to call my inaugural lecture “A Decade in Digital Humanities” for three reasons. 1. The term Digital Humanities has been commonly used to describe the application of computational methods in…