Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Gone Home and Its Hidden Objects

Gone Home is a graphic adventure game in which the player takes on the role of Katie Greenbriar, returning to her family home after a year abroad in Europe. It is a dark and stormy night, the door is locked, no one is home and there’s a cryptic note on the door from your sister, […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Ethnography in Communities of Big Data

Across the field of health and wellness there is a lot of talk about data, from consumer self-tracking and Quantified Self data, to data-driven, personalized health care, to data-intensive, crowd sourced, scientific discovery. But what are these different stakeholders talking about when they talk about data and are they talking about the same thing? At […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Do Historians Need Scientists?

The long answer is that historians don’t necessarily need scientists, but that we do need fresh scientific methods. Perhaps as an accident of our association with the ill-defined “humanities”, or as a result of our being placed in an entirely different culture (see: C.P. Snow), most historians seem fairly content with methods rooted in thinking […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Digital Professionalism for Graduate Students

Some reasons graduate students (and any scholars) should maintain an online presence, with an emphasis on using Twitter and blogging to develop intellectually and professionally: Blogging is magic (I’m blogging right now!). Blogging can help you develop content for your dissertation, article, or future conference paper, without the same constraints of sitting down to produce […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Using Computer Vision to Increase the Research Potential of Photo Archives

The application of computer vision to art photo archives has largely been unexplored up to this point. Lev Manovich has explored ways of analyzing images of artworks while looking for trends in an artists oeuvre or entire artistic movements. However, most institutions have used large scale image analysis primarily for cases of copyright enforcement, face […]

Editors' Choice

Editor’s Choice: Crowd-Frauding: Why the Internet is Fake

Power in human societies derives from the ability to get people to act together. Armies, religions, governments, and businesses have dominated societies using weapons, beliefs, laws and money to exert collective effort. In modern societies, mass media have emerged as a similar organizing power.A new kind of collective organization, mediated by the internet, code and […]

Editors' Choice

Editor’s Choice: Topic Modeling French Crime Fiction

For some reason I can’t explain, I have had for many years a very keen interest in crime fiction, especially French crime fiction written since the 1950s, roughly. Some of my favorite authors are Léo Malet, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Sébastien Japrisot and Didier Daeninckx. And it is not for no reason that I was drawn to […]

Editors' Choice

Editors Choice: Play the Past E-Book

We’ve got a lot of great scholarship here on Play the Past. I’m continually astounded by these authors – their insights, their wit, and their ability to surprise and delight. In the interest of making something tangible in the off-line world, I’ve been experimenting with Pressbooks. I’ve examined our page views, our shares, the pingbacks, the […]

Editors' Choice

Editors Choice: Interface, Exhibition & Artwork

Archive Team collected the data and made the dataset available for bulk download. If you like, you can also just access the 51,000 MIDI music files from the data set from the Internet Archive. Beyond that, because the data was available in mass, the corpus of personal websites became the basis for other works. Taking the […]