Category: Editors’ Choice

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 […]

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’ 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

A friend of mine, Lindsay Bontoft, recently started working at the Museum of Inuit Art (MIA). It is a very small museum in Toronto, Canada with three full-time and one part-time staff as well as an Executive Director. Yet they have managed what many larger museums have not – a wide array of both online and onsite […]

Turning everything into data, and using algorithms to process is analyze it has a number of major consequences for what it means to know something. It creates new strategies which together make up software epistemology. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy which asks questions such as what is knowledge, how it can acquired, and to what […]

Computer Scientist: “You can’t do that with Topic Modeling.” Humanist: “No, I can because I’m not a scientist. We have this thing called Hermeneutics.” Computer Scientist: “…” Humanist: “No really, we get to do what we want, we read texts against each other, and then there is this hermeneutic circle grounded in intersubjectivity.” Computer Scientist: “Ok, but you still […]

Two years ago I was preparing for a semester in which all of my classes involved “multimodal” student work — that is, theoretically-informed, research-based work that resulted in something other than a traditional paper. For years I’d been giving students in my classes the option of submitting, for at least one of their semester assignments, a media […]

In the central post in my whaling series, I argued data presentation offers historians an appealing avenue for historical argumentation, analogous in importance to the practice of shaping personal stories into narratives in more traditional histories. Both narratives and data presentations can appeal to a broader public than more technical parts of history like historiography; and […]