Research into the visualisation of large cultural heritage collections has emphasised that search is only one way of representing a collection. By focusing on the stylish minimalism of the search box, we discard opportunities for traversing relationships, for fostering serendipity, for seeing the big picture. By creating experimental interfaces, by playing around with our expectations, […]
The following is a talk I’ve revised over the past few years. It began with a post on “curricular incursion”, the ideas of which developed through a talk at DH2013 and two invited talks, one at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities in March 2014 and another at the Freedman Center for Digital […]
How do you organize large numbers of people for a common purpose? For millenia, the answer has been some sort of hierarchical organization. An army, or a feudal system topped with a king. To reach global scale, these hierarchies propagated customs and codes for behavior: laws, religions, ideology. Most of what you read in history […]
The Patron Privacy Technologies Interest Group was formed in the fall of 2014 to help library technologists improve how well our tools protect patron privacy. As the first in a series of posts on technical matters concerning patron privacy, please enjoy this guest post by Alison Macrina. When using the web for activities like banking […]
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation –Plato From the beginning of the year, the Praxis cohort recognized ‘play’ as one of the key aspects of the Ivanhoe experience. Yet, how does play shape Ivanhoe? What are the effects of this play? In previous years, […]
In case you missed Jill Lepore has written a superb article for the New Yorker about the Internet Archive and archiving the Web in general. The story of the Internet Archive is largely the story of its creator Brewster Kahle. If you’ve heard Kahle speak you’ve probably heard the Library of Alexandria v2.0 metaphor before. […]
Welcome to A Digital Reading of Twentieth Century Demography. This website is a digital supplement to the dissertation I am preparing as a requirement of the Ph.D. program in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, titled “Prediction and Control: Global Population, Population Science, and Population Politics in the Twentieth Century.” …The dissertation […]
If the Internet went down all historical software would cease to function, except for Microsoft Word. For an academic historian, a grant to build a high profile web-based project is likely the biggest pot of money he or she will ever receive during their career. That is, if they ever receive it, as few historians […]
At their best, altmetrics tools are meant to encourage scholarly activity around published papers on line. It can seem, indeed, like a chicken-and-egg situation: without healthy, collegial, reciprocal cultures of scholarly interaction on the web, mentions of scholarly content will not be significant. Simultaneously, if publications do not provide identifiers like DOIs and authors, publishers […]
I’m an archaeological impostor. It feels good to say that. When I go to conferences I feel like I don’t fit in – although that’s not why I can’t be with you bodily today. That’s another story that involves someone called “The Man.” But I’m sure that many of you felt that way at some […]
