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 […]
[This is a talk I gave at Loyola University Chicago on November 8th, 2012.] In January of this year, Stanley Fish published a series of online essays for The New York Times on digital humanities (this, then this, then this). To summarize: He doesn’t like it so much. And for those of us who like […]
And now, why will you ask us to deny the humanity of the slave? And estimate him only as the equal of the hog? Why ask us to do what you will not do yourselves? Why ask us to do for nothing, what two hundred million of dollars could not induce you to do? This […]
In “Notes towards a Deformed Humanities,” Mark Sample writes, “I want to propose a theory and practice of a Deformed Humanities. A humanities born of broken, twisted things. And what is broken and twisted is also beautiful, and a bearer of knowledge. The Deformed Humanities is an origami crane—a piece of paper contorted into an […]
One reason I’m interested in ship logs is that they give some distance to think about problems in reading digital texts. That’s particularly true for machine learning techniques. In my last post, an appendix to the long whaling post, I talked about using K-means clustering and k-nearest neighbor methods to classify whaling voyages. But digital humanists […]
I’m giving a talk today at the POD Network conference in Seattle titled “Social Pedagogies: Motivating Students through Authentic Audiences.” Here’s the Prezi for my talk. You can move through the Prezi by clicking the forward button, or you can use your mouse to pan and zoom freely through the Prezi. See Prezi Here
Changing my form of communication reminds me of my audience. The challenges of communicating through the digital highlight the corresponding issues faced by readers of this non-traditionally presented content. My master’s thesis involved a user study evaluating the use of well-established digital humanities archives by a wider audience, a group I still refer to as […]
