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 MaRMAT is schema agnostic and supports library and museum professionals in assessing metadata for harmful, outdated, and […]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 […]
There comes a time when using Word or PowerPoint or Excel is not going to be enough to create a visualization. There is simply too much to process or the envisioned result is too complex to do by hand. Then what? It’s time to learn a few more tricks. This is best done on something […]
In the past year or so I have been seeing and hearing an increasing amount about the capabilities of Google Docs to transcribe scans in PDF format into editable documents. In the Digital Orientalist, Editor for Syriac Studies, Ephrem Ishac, has explained how to perform OCR on Syriac texts using Google Docs and Editor for […]
