In September of 1861, the U.S. Coast Survey published a large map, just under three feet square, titled a “Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States.” Based on the population statistics gathered in the 1860 census, and certified by the superintendent of the Census Office, the […]
How Games Can Help With the Burden of Digitizing Archived Material The British Library warned: by 2020, legacy content will remain undigitized and in danger of becoming inaccessible to future generations. Universities, libraries, museums and archives own large amounts of undigitized material in the form of photographs, audio recordings and films that are at serious […]
It’s much, much easier to see patterns and to make visualizations that make sense when you filter out all the messy bits. In my data set of creative works cited by dissertations on electronic literature between 2002 and 2013 the messy bits are all the works that are only cited once. The dissertations cite 467 […]
Over the past few weeks there has been a sudden increase in the amount of financial data on scholarly communications in the public domain. This was triggered in large part by the Wellcome Trust releasing data on the prices paid for Article Processing Charges by the institutions it funds. The release of this pretty messy […]
January 2014 saw the launch of Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3), which was the first major disciplinary or field-specific shift toward open access. Considerable numbers of journals and publishers are moving to embrace open access, exploring a variety of business models, but SCOAP3 represents a significant and new partnership between libraries, […]
What can we learn from the creation and exploration of a virtual world? The impulse to create imagined spaces occupies a longstanding tradition in the humanities. Whether it be Plato’s Cave or Mount Olympus or Yoknapatawpha, virtual landscapes hold out the promise to expand our human capacities to create, to imagine, and to analyze beyond […]
The recent issue of J19 dedicated a section to “Evidence and the Archive” without engaging at all with much of the work done in the digital humanities. This absence is of profound importance to me, because I believe that this kind of lack of collaboration inhibits the critical work humanists can undertake when considering the […]
At the end of the first season of Downton Abbey in a scene that is exemplary of the series’ greatness, the Dowager Countess of Grantham (Maggie Smith) exclaims that “Sometimes I feel as if I were living in an HG Wells novel.” The Countess is responding to the unsettling arrival of the telephone, only months […]
What if we build a digital edition and everyone (millions of scholars, first-time readers, book clubs, teachers and their students) shows up and annotates the text with their infinite interpretations, questions, and contextualizations? The “Infinite Ulysses” project pursues this speculative experiment, and today I’m going to talk about how this unlikely hypothetical is helping me […]
Next weekend I’ll be participating in a symposium honoring architect Lebbeus Woods, who passed away on the night of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. “Lebbeus Woods: A Celebration,” which takes places at the Cooper Union, begins Friday April 25 at 6:30 pm, and continues through 5pm on Saturday April 26. I’m on the “Politics” panel on […]
