Wikipedia welcomes expert contributions, and is one of the most direct ways to promote public understanding of a subject area, but it isn’t always in researchers’ personal interest to contribute. It may seem as though any time spent writing for Wikipedia is less time to write the research papers which will advance their careers. One […]
At the intersection of digital preservation, art conservation and folklore you can find many of Dragan Espenschied’s projects. After receiving feedback and input from Dragan for a recent post on interfaces to digital collections and geocities I heard that he is now stepping into the role of digital conservator at Rhizome. To that end, I’m […]
“Thirty goons break into your office and confiscate your computers, your hard drives, your files.. and with them, a big chunk of your institutional memory. Who you gonna call?” These were the words Bob Garfield used in a recent episode of On the Media, to address the storming of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism. On […]
The following is the rough notes for a talk I gave at the University of Pittsburgh’s iSchool. I’ll likely come back later to iron out any kinks in them, but figured I would get them up sooner rather than later so here they are. Thanks to Alison Langmead for the invitation. You can review all the sides here. […]
The internet is an archive, but it may not be all that great at it. Sure, it saves any media we can imagine (text, photographs, films, etc). But what about that stuff FROM the network? Status updates, tweets, image macros… they seem to disappear into the ether. Are they not worth as much to us […]
We’ve seen digital humanities in terms of “projects” since Roberto Busa indexed Thomas Aquinas. But lately it seems to me that the imperative to continuously produce something is getting in the way of how people actually think and grow. What if we viewed digital methods as a contribution to the long arc of a scholar’s […]
Yesterday, my colleagues and I at RRCHNM launched a great new public history site, Histories of the National Mall, mallhistory.org. It is built in Omeka with a beautiful responsive design that displays on a phone, tablet, or laptop. (Read full announcement on the RRCHNM blog.) We have been thrilled with the positive response we have […]
Mozilla Science Lab, GitHub and Figshare team up to fix the citation of code in academia Academia has a problem. Research is becoming increasingly computational and data-driven, but the traditional paper and scientific journal has barely changed to accommodate this growing form of analysis. The current referencing structure makes it difficult for anyone to reproduce the […]
Episode 79: Paul Lovejoy, Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History at York University, discusses building an international database of biographical information on all enslaved Africans. He outlines this digital history project’s contribution to the study of slavery, race, and broader themes in global history. This is the first part of a two-part series recorded […]
….Although the Big Data Initiative only includes scientific agencies, it turns out that the humanities have been involved for just as long. In 2009, when Data.Gov was being launched, the first Digging into Data Challenge was held. Sponsored by the NEH and comparable organizations in the UK and Canada, the eight winning Digging into Data […]
