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 […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: How to Theorize with a Hammer and an Oven: Steampunk & Critical Making

The emerging field of “critical making” is one way to frame a more nuanced approach to Latour’s conundrum. For Matt Ratto, critical making “signals a desire to theoretically and pragmatically connect two modes of engagement with the world that are often held separate — critical thinking, typically understood as conceptually and linguistically based, and physical […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Geographics

ORBIS is nearly two years old, and the ongoing update to the site has me once again in conversation with a cartographers, geographers, designers, and digital humanists…And so one of my major goals in updating ORBIS is to dramatically improve the cartogram functionality, as well as provide mechanisms to improve the use and understanding of […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: On the Origin of “Hack” and “Yack”

 One of the least helpful constructs of our “digital humanities” moment has been a supposed active opposition, drawn out over the course of years in publications, presentations, and social media conversation, between two inane-sounding concepts: “hack” and “yack.” The heralding of DH as the academy’s “next big thing” has been (depending on whom you ask) […]