Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Digital Public Humanities

Here’s the talk I gave as the keynote for the New England American Studies Association. Or, rather, here are four versions of it, a cubist interpretation. There’s the notes I used, the slides I showed, the twitter stream that resulted, and, in the background, the collection of syllabi I used for evidence. View Post with […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: What can topic models of PMLA teach us about the history of literary scholarship?

Of all our literary-historical narratives it is the history of criticism itself that seems most wedded to a stodgy history-of-ideas approach—narrating change through a succession of stars or contending schools. While scholars like John Guillory and Gerald Graff have produced subtler models of disciplinary history, we could still do more to complicate the narratives that […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: CBC Spark Interview – The Future of Digital Mapmaking with Andrew Turner

Earlier this week I was fortunate to interview on CBC Spark with Nora Young about the “Future of Digital Mapmaking”. We discussed a wide range of topics on the state and future of map making. Open data communities such as Openstreetmap, location ads, Google and Apple’s new platforms, augmented reality and more. I truly enjoy thought provoking […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: “Living Will” by Mark Marino

This next generation hypertext fiction and game shortlisted for the 2012 New Media Writing Prize is a wonderful example of how contemporary HTML and JavaScript can bring in multiple nodes into the same page to produce a seamless new document— a testament to the paths taken by the reader. Powered by two JavaScript libraries, Undum and JQuery, this work uses a scoring […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: The moment of digital art history?

2012 has proven to be a significant year as art history continues its transition into the sphere of the digital humanities. The following post aims to provide a summary of discussions around “digital art history”, which at present describes a mode of practise without a fully articulated definition. This summary will also extend beyond the […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians” Report from Ithaka S+R

This study, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, uncovers the needs of today’s historians and provides guidance for how research support providers can better serve them. We explore areas such as content discovery, information management, scholarly analysis, collaboration, library use, the writing process, professional interactions, and publication, among others. Our interviews of faculty […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: On Digital Ethnography: mapping as a mode of data discovery (Part 2 of 4)

In my last post, I introduced the idea of using webscraping for the purpose of acquiring relevant ethnographic data. In this second post, I will concentrate on the next step of the ethnographic process: data processing and interpreting. Remember The Hsu-nami, the band that I talked in the last post? The image above is a screenshot of […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: A Text-Mining and Visualization Roundup

Editors’ Note: There were a number of recent posts discussing the use of text-mining and visualizations in humanities research. A few, offering a variety of perspectives, are presented below. Lev Manovich, the meaning of statistics and digital humanities  “Given that production of summaries is the key characteristics of human culture, I think that such traditional summaries […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: “Can I Use This?” How Museum and Library Image Policies Undermine Education

Is the discipline of art history (together with museums and libraries) squandering the digital revolution? We’re not the only ones with this concern. Just last week James Cuno wrote a short article, “How Art History is Failing the Internet” and WIlliam Noeltweeted, “Calling on all other great libraries; follow @britishlibrary‘s example. Free your images!” …Although eight years have passed […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Getting to the Stuff: Digital Cultural Heritage Collections, Absence, and Memory

This is the rough script of my Digital Dialog given at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. Keynote slides and a recording of my talk are available on the Digital Dialogues site, and the slides are available on SlideShare. Many thanks go to my wonderful hosts at MITH for inviting across the river […]