My friends are generally optimistic, forward-looking people, but talking about AI makes many of them depressed. Either AI is scarier than other technologies, or public conversation about it has failed them in some way. Or both. I think the problem is not just that people have legitimate concerns. What’s weird and depressing about AI discourse […]
Hi, I’m Xe, and I fight bots in my free time. I’d love to do it full time, but that’s not financially in the cards yet. I made Anubis. Anubis is a web AI firewall utility that stops the bots from taking out your website. It’s basically the Cloudflare “Are you a bot?” page, but […]
The Marriott Reparative Metadata Assessment Tool (MaRMAT) is an open-source application created by librarians at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library to help metadata practitioners flag various terms and phrases within metadata records using pre-curated and custom lexicons. MaRMAT is schema agnostic and supports library and museum professionals in assessing metadata for harmful, outdated, and […]
This lesson demonstrates how to prepare a geographically accurate historical battle scene in the free and open source computer game 0̸ A.D. You will learn to use a multisensory, interactive environment for teaching or learning ancient history and pre-modern languages. See full post.
Interested in how women were portrayed in medieval chronicles of the Iberian Peninsula? Look no further! This open-access website provides structured information on every woman mentioned in the anonymous Crónica de Castilla (ca. 1300, Castile-León). The database was generated within the “FEMIber” project, which uses digital humanities methods to study Spanish and Portuguese medieval historiography […]
Rebecca Foote recently invited me to be a part of an ACH panel on publishing in digital humanities along with Jojo Karlin and Nat McGartland. My reflections on the conversation have led to a range of posts that you can find here. I recently wrote about the importance of public writing as a muscle. Exercising […]
Scholarship on Machine Learning/AI and Close Reading culled by Scott Newstok from his Close Reading Archive. Scott Newstok shared this list with Alan Liu on May 18, 2025, with permission to share publicly. See full post.
What follows is an introduction to that greater mass of information, and an invitation to others to take a look and use it. With lots of help, and trial and error, I’ve learned a bit about how to use ArcGIS software, and have crafted a story map that, I hope, introduces the data that I […]
We are pleased to announce the launch of Our Rightful Place in collaboration with the University of Iowa Libraries Iowa Women’s Archives. This digital collection of oral history interviews, data visualizations, archival stories, and more celebrates the history of women in Iowa politics. This project originally grew from the work of 50-50 in 2020, a nonpartisan […]
Since becoming a Data Fellow at the D-Lab, I have had the opportunity to assist many talented social scientists through the D-Lab’s Consulting service. A regular consulting request is to help with the research design for a new project. These requests are understandable. For empirical researchers, a high-quality research design makes or breaks a research […]
