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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
Crowdsourcing can build virtual community, engage the public, and build large knowledge databases about science and culture. But what does it take, and how fast can you grow? For some insight, we look at a crowdsourced history site: Historypin is an appealing database of historical photos, with dates, locations, captions, and other metadata. It’s called History […]
Hah! I tricked you. I don’t intend to define digital humanities here—too much blood has already been spilled over that subject. I’m sure we all remember the terrible digital humanities / humanities computing wars of 2004, now commemorated yearly under a Big Tent in the U.S., Europe, or in 2015, Australia. Most of us still […]
