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 […]

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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 […]

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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) […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Digital Humanities at MLA 2014

This is a list of digitally-inflected sessions at the 2014 Modern Language Association Convention (Chicago, January 9-12). These sessions in some way address digital tools, objects, and practices in language, literary, textual, cultural, and media studies. The list also includes sessions about digital pedagogy and scholarly communication. The list stands at 77 entries, making up […]

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Editors’ Choice: History Spaces

I can think of several reasons why right now, today, historians need to be not only thinking critically about the kinds of spaces we’re in, but also advocating as loudly as possible for change in those spaces. At the top of my list are three prominent contenders: the growing importance of digital in the history […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Highlights from a Year of DHNow

While taking stock of the year in Digital Humanities Now statistics for last week’s PressForward post, I made a list of some of the individual pieces that were well-received, much-discussed, or frequently-visited on our site in 2013. I’ve divided them into categories and listed them in reverse chronological order, rather than rank them. It’s hard […]

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Editors’ Choice: Gephi and The (Mis)Adventures of a Newbie DHer

The week we discussed data visualizations in seminar, some of our classmates took a look at data visualization programs and reported back to us. The steps below roughly approximate my first experiment with Gephi, and, though they do not produce anything nearly as complex as the Les Miserables visualization, are enough to get a novice […]

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Editors’ Choice: Tagging the Digital Edition

How do you conduct a speculative experiment around a digital humanities tool, while also creating something that’s useful to readers and scholars right now? I’ve been using a site policy on tagging to test the differences between my speculative design and the probable reality of my site’s use. Read the full post here.

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Editors’ Choice: JDH 2.3 Local Programs, Global Audiences

In the scholarly communication ecosystem, lectures and conference roundtables offer valuable opportunities to share one’s on-going research and reflections with an engaged audience. Although social media, online conference programs, and slideshare sites now boost the signal of scholarly work, talks at conferences are still often limited by the time and place of their delivery. Even […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Copyleft, IP Rights, and Digital Humanities Dissertations

Who holds the intellectual property (IP) rights to your digital dissertation? In my case, the answer is complicated, involving multiple licenses and stakeholders. Digital humanities productions brings new licensing concerns to the humanities. Our pre-digital discussions around IP usually centered around book contracts and open-access journals; rights claims from any agency that funds you during […]