From the resource: I periodically write about Google Books here, so I thought I’d point out something that I’ve noticed recently that should be concerning to anyone accustomed to treating it as the largest collection of books: it appears that when you use a year constraint on book search, the search index has dramatically constricted…

Read More

From the resource: Pivoting between technology and tradition—between digital computers and acoustic guitars—in this interdepartmental course, we use tactics of digital analysis to investigate the US folk music revival, from its nineteenth-century origins to the 1960s “Great Folk Scare” to more recent modes of folk revivalism. Students acquire digital skills and fluencies by applying them to historical and contextual thinking about…

Read More

About the resource: The March is a documentary by filmmaker James Blue (1930-1980) about the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August of 1963. Blue filmed participants as they prepared for the March on Washington in their home cities, followed them as they traveled to Washington, and recorded their reactions as they listened…

Read More

About the resource: With each new technological development promising to “revolutionize education”, we need to start asking how…and at what cost. Platforms that provide services allegedly for free often do so in exchange for data about its users—forming a deep layer of surveillance over our online lives. Asking students to use online platforms and services…

Read More

About the resource: Back in June, I announced that we had completed an inventory of all serials with active copyright renewals made through 1977, based on listings in the Copyright Office’s Catalog of Copyright Entries.  At the time, I said we’d also be releasing a draft of suggested procedures for using the information there, along…

Read More

About the resource: The READ project is a big proponent of digitisation on demand using smartphones. A typical mobile phone camera can capture relatively high-quality images of historical documents, which can then be used for preservation, research and even as training data for Automated Text Recognition using our Transkribus platform. The Computer Vision Lab at…

Read More

About the resource: A comprehensive database tracking more than 2,000 of the earliest surviving music compositions using ‘canonic’ techniques has been developed by a team of Australian university researchers. Music teachers, students, performers, composers and music lovers can browse the online database to find these earliest examples of multipart music using techniques of pervasive melodic…

Read More

From the resource: In the mapping workshops that we offer, a recurrent question refers to where to get the data. Every time students attend one of these workshops, all the datasets are given to them, so it is understandable that many might wonder where the instructors get this information from. This is what inspired us…

Read More