Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Topic Modeling for JDH

Topic modeling is a catchall term for a group of computational techniques that, at a very high level, find patterns of co-occurrence in data (broadly conceived). In many cases, but not always, the data in question are words. More specifically, the frequency of words in documents. In natural language processing this is often called a […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Thoughts on feminism, digital humanities and women’s history

The digital age and the tools it provides allow for a different mediation of knowledge than standard forms of scholarly communications. As noted by Abby Smith Rumsey these new methods have brought “fundamental operational changes and epistemological challenges [that] generate new possibilities for analysis, presentation, and reach into new audiences”.[2] The exhibit format in Omeka […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The Poetics of Non-Consumptive Reading

“Non-consumptive research” is the term digital humanities scholars use to describe the large-scale analysis of a texts—say topic modeling millions of books or data-mining tens of thousands of court cases. In non-consumptive research, a text is not read by a scholar so much as it is processed by a machine. The phrase frequently appears in […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’s Choice: RDF: Resource Description Failures and Linked Data Letdowns

Thinking about modeling your data using Resource Description Framework (RDF)? As with any choice of technology, there are benefits and downsides, appropriate situations for Linked Data and use cases that would be fulfilled more effectively by other frameworks. This presentation will focus on the pitfalls to avoid and the challenges of using graphs that are […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Metadata Games

Metadata Games is an online game system for gathering useful data on photo, audio, and moving image artifacts, enticing those who might not visit archives to explore humanities content while contributing to vital records. Furthermore, the suite enables archivists to gather and analyze information for image archives in novel and possibly unexpected ways. Check out […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Big Data Needs Thick Data

Big Data can have enormous appeal. Who wants to be thought of as a small thinker when there is an opportunity to go BIG? The positivistic bias in favor of Big Data (a term often used to describe the quantitative data that is produced through analysis of enormous datasets) as an objective way to understand our […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Does This Post Make Me a Tool?

My response to OPEN THREAD: THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES AS A HISTORICAL “REFUGE” FROM RACE/CLASS/GENDER/SEXUALITY/DISABILITY?, http://dhpoco.org/2013/05/10/open-thread-the-digital-humanities-as-a-historical-refuge-from-raceclassgendersexualitydisability/#comment-1907: This is a rich and multifaceted discussion. I just want to add one observations that it has made me ponder. The discussion has made me think about the metaphor of “tools” in digital humanities work. This makes sense, because the word […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Open Thread: The Digital Humanities as a Historical “Refuge” from Race/Class/Gender/Sexuality/Disability?

Read David Golumbia’s post on the “Dark Side of the Digital” conference yesterday? Consider this: In 2007, Martha Nell Smith observed: When I first started attending humanities computing conferences in the mid-1990s, I was struck by how many of the presentations remarked, either explicitly or implicitly, that concerns that had taken over so much academic work in literature—of gender, race, […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Saving Face

Museums and the Web 2013 wrapped up a couple weeks ago. The Cooper-Hewitt won an award for the work we’ve done on the collections website this year, which was nice. I was also part of a panel about Humour as an Institutional Voice. I asked Heather Champ to join me to talk about the subject […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: What’s Next for Digital Memory Banks?

As I watched the news on April 15 and thought about another April tragedy, at Virginia Tech, I wondered if it made sense to create an online collecting site. I have some experience building and managing online collecting sites/digital memory banks, now referred to as crowdsourced collections, at RRCHNM including the April 16 Archive. A […]