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 […]

Editors' Choice

Editors Choice: The Height of Fashion

Along with the less-than-romantic scenes of butchery and betrayal, murder and mayhem (see our previous post Sex and Death in the Roman de la Rose), there are of course many miniatures in Harley MS 4425 which depict an idealised courtly world and its inhabitants.  As well as serving as a narrative accompaniment to the text, these […]

Editors' Choice

Editors Choice: It’s History, Not a Viral Feed

For months now I’ve been stewing about how much I hate @HistoryInPics and their ilk (@HistoryInPix, @HistoricalPics, @History_Pics, etc.)—twitter streams that do nothing more than post “old” pictures and little tidbits of captions for them.1 And when I say “nothing more” that’s precisely what I mean. What they don’t post includes attribution to the photographer […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Excavating Age of Empires

In…Age of Empires, we see that an easy to grasp, difficult to master theory can sit inside an equally easy to play, difficult to master strategy game, a point where complex historical modelling – even if those models are incomplete or overturned – has a positive influence on the development on a style of gameplay. […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Digital Historiography and the Archives

The following series of blog posts by Joshua Sternfeld, Katharina Hering, Kate Theimer, and Michael Kramer is based on our session at the AHA meeting in 2014 on Digital Historiography and the Archives. We conceptualized the session as an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion. Short presentations by each panelist led to a rich and multifaceted discussion with the audience. […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Algorithms are Not Enough: Lessons Bringing Computer Science to Journalism

There are some amazing algorithms coming out the computer science community which promise to revolutionize how journalists deal with large quantities of information. But building a tool that journalists can use to get stories done takes a lot more than algorithms. Closing this gap has been one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Interface Critique

I’m writing a new piece for Places on “interfaces to the smart city” — or points of human contact with the “urban operating system.” As I explained to the editors, I’d like to consider these urban interfaces‘ IxD — with outputs including maps, data visualizations, photos, sounds, etc.; and inputs ranging from GUIs and touchscreens […]