Several months ago, some of my colleagues in Japan launched an online portal through which it is possible to explore from one’s own office the complex of the Mamluk sultan Qalawun (d. 1290), in Cairo (see: Qalawun VR Tour or the project’s site). In this post, I will present a brief overview of the portal…
An important pillar of the ethos of the GCDI community is collective, collaborative inquiry. With this in mind, the GC Digital Fellows lead a number of different working groups that nurture interdisciplinary conversations, learning, and feedback. Building these kinds of communities of practice is especially important at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has limited…
Sometimes it takes days or even weeks to be able to read and decipher a word in manuscripts. This problem, which can be experienced in every language, is a problem frequently encountered by Ottoman historians in the process of reading words in Ottoman Turkish manuscripts. At this point, LexiQamus, an online resource that makes it…
In Part 1 of this exercise we went over how you may import a digitized image, georeference it and record administrative boundary information contained in the map. The shapefiles that we created now have geographic information ascribed to them. Yet, this is all they have. In Part 2, I will go over how one might…
Sometimes your GIS project needs some extra oomph. Maybe finding the data you need to understand deforestation in Brazil is giving you a headache. Or, you need to run a machine learning algorithm on 50 gigabytes of weather station data and your poor laptop is melting the finish off of your dining room table. Google…
As we start to settle into the rhythms of our new normal, many of us have taken this opportunity to also think about the different ways to disseminate information. There has been a renewed interest in exploring digital sound and audio as this has become key to our means of communication. From teaching and learning…
This year I have had the pleasure of being involved in the “Tackling Pandemics in Early Modern Japan” transcription project organized by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the AI platform Minna de honkoku みんなで翻刻. During the project, participants have been posting resources useful for engaging with historical Japanese documents and cursive Japanese to…
In this webinar we will focus on using the Plumber package as a tool for integrating R with other frameworks and technologies. Plumber is a package that converts your existing R code to a web API using unique one-line comments. Example use cases will be used to demonstrate the power of APIs in data science…
The Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, in connection with the Information Science + Studies Program and the Wired! Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Culture, offers an 18-month Master of Arts in Digital Art History/Computational Media. The Computational Media track is designed for graduate students focused on the…
As a scholar who has spent nearly a decade working on a variety of digital humanities projects, my contributions to the Digital Orientalist present an opportunity to reflect on what I’ve learned through working and teaching in the field. Largely self-taught, I have had plenty of experience of building things that don’t work, or…