While I’m a pretty big fan of strategy games in general, historical strategy games are particularly interesting, especially from a pedagogical standpoint. As I and many of the other Play the Past authors have previously discussed, these games allow us to look at the past through a different lens than we typically get through other…
This Guide is part of a series that reflects on three years of research on sourcing and circulating scholarly communication on the open web. In the coming weeks we will share our discoveries, processes, and code developed through rapid prototyping and iterative design: the PressForward plugin for WordPress; the collaboratively-edited weekly publication Digital Humanities Now; and the experimental overlay Journal of Digital Humanities. We hope…
1. The Differences between Digital History and Digital Humanities by Stephen Robertson For the last nine months I’ve spent much of my time exploring digital history. Part of becoming director of RRCHNM involved familiarizing myself with areas of work about which I had only passing knowledge despite almost twenty years of reading, teaching and creating digital history. Moreover,…
Today, I’m going to provide a brief update on federal initiatives targeted toward making federally funded research articles and data publicly accessible. There have been four primary federal actions in the last 12-18 months addressing public access to federally funded research. The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act was introduced in both the…
A few weeks ago, I presented to the UNL DH community about a project that I’m beginning while a fellow at the CDRH’s Digital Scholarship Incubator. The project is an effort to utilize digital tools to visualize business and organizational records related to my dissertation on industrialization in small cities. During my talk, I noted…
What does a critical data studies look like, and why do we care? Seven points for a critical approach to ‘big data.’ There is a need for a critical data studies “The benefits to society will be myriad, as big data becomes part of the solution to pressing global problems like addressing climate change, eradicating…
In September of 1861, the U.S. Coast Survey published a large map, just under three feet square, titled a “Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States.” Based on the population statistics gathered in the 1860 census, and certified by the superintendent of the Census Office, the…
How Games Can Help With the Burden of Digitizing Archived Material The British Library warned: by 2020, legacy content will remain undigitized and in danger of becoming inaccessible to future generations. Universities, libraries, museums and archives own large amounts of undigitized material in the form of photographs, audio recordings and films that are at serious…
It’s much, much easier to see patterns and to make visualizations that make sense when you filter out all the messy bits. In my data set of creative works cited by dissertations on electronic literature between 2002 and 2013 the messy bits are all the works that are only cited once. The dissertations cite 467…
Over the past few weeks there has been a sudden increase in the amount of financial data on scholarly communications in the public domain. This was triggered in large part by the Wellcome Trust releasing data on the prices paid for Article Processing Charges by the institutions it funds. The release of this pretty messy…