(This post is based on “Improving Software Sustainability: Lessons Learned from Profiles in Science“, an interactive paper (pdf) at the Society for Imaging Science and Technology’s Archiving 2013 conference, April 2-5, 2013.) This story begins in the early 1990s at the National Library of Medicine, when our group experimented with arranging, describing and digitizing historical manuscript collections to make […]
When I was asked to participate on this panel about digital humanities and the alternative publishing needs of faculty, I felt obliged to temper my delighted acceptance of the invitation with a caveat that “ scholarly publishing” (and its associated challenges) is not something I usually see as central to the work I do. One […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
