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 […]
Bob Ross was a consummate teacher. He guided fans along as he painted “happy trees,” “almighty mountains” and “fluffy clouds” over the course of his 11-year television career on his PBS show, “The Joy of Painting.” In total, Ross painted 381 works on the show, relying on a distinct set of elements, scenes and themes, and […]
Social network sites, websites and text increasingly serve as a conduit for political information and a major public arena where citizens express and exchange their political ideas, raise funds and mobilize others to vote, protest and work on public issues. In “Youth, New Media, and the Rise of Participatory Politics,” a working paper authored by […]
As a member of a research team investigating the skills and competencies important to digital scholarship, I’ve become interested in what “digital scholarship” means in different disciplines, particularly the social sciences and humanities. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’m finding some significant points of intersection between digital humanities and digital social sciences. For example, the Digging into […]
In her excellent statement of digital humanities values, Lisa Spiro identifies “collegiality and connectedness” and “diversity” as two of the core values of digital humanities. I agree with Lisa that digital humanists value both things—I certainly do—but it can be hard to *do* both things at the same time. The first value stresses the things […]
So, what do finding aids do? Why do we create them? OK, so we can start by looking at finding aids as a way to address the practical problem of giving potential researchers access to unique or rare material that can only be found in a single location, behind a locked door in a closed […]
What do historians need to do good digital research? Well, they need skills that help them get at data, wrangle data (Open Refine perhaps), organise data (in machine readable, human readable, platform agnostic ways), chop up data (perhaps a splash of Unix), get that data into a form that tools for geo-referencing, text mining, topic […]
We, as memory organizations, have the wealth of human knowledge and experience within our collections and it is our responsibility to share that with the world – we should seek to educate, to enlighten and to entertain. And increasingly, our ability to share is becoming ever more feasible because, just like a candle’s flame, when we […]
