A new empirical and peer-reviewed study provides “the first evidence that online networks are able to produce social capital. In the case of bonding social capital, online ties are more effective in forming close networks than theory predicts.” Entitled, “Tweeting Alone? An Analysis of Bridging and Bonding Social Capital in Online Networks,” the study analyzes Twitter data generated…
Remaking Victorian Miniatures: The Speculative Stitches between 2D and 3D In both digital humanities and popular culture, there is a rapidly growing interest in big data. How not to read a million books? How to wrangle petabytes of data? How to discover and express patterns across thousands of images? Frequently, this research is framed as…
In a post in August, I opened a discussion of how analyzing the meta-discourse surrounding MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas) may help us describe the relationship between player-performance in these games and bardic performance in ancient epic in a more interesting way. The point of such an analysis is not merely be to demonstrate that…
Videogames have an amazing potential for modeling societal processes. At the same time, videogames also embody the worldview of their creators on a procedural level. As such, it is a rare thing when a game is able to move beyond popular understandings of the world and approach it from a new and interesting direction. As…
I watched Twitter and the CBC while the prosecutor was reading his statement. I watched the live feeds from Ferguson, and other cities around the US. Back in August, when this all first began, I was glued to my computer, several feeds going at once. A spectator. Yesterday, Mitch Fraas put the grand jury documents…
Reproducibility of published research results is increasingly coming into question. Efforts from funding agencies and publishers are calling for more and more transparency around research data, but so far, little attention seems to have been paid to a crucial aspect of experimental reproducibility: publication of detailed methodologies. A new NIH-led effort seems a first step…
Beneath our cities lies vast, labyrinthine sewer systems. These have been key infrastructures allowing our cities to grow larger, grow more densely, and stay healthy. Yet, save for passing interests in Urban Exploration (UrbEx), we barely think of them as ‘beautifully designed systems’. In their time, the original sewer systems were critical long term projects…
In recent months there has been a lot of talk about big stuff. Between ‘Big Data’ and calls for a return to ‘Longue durée’ history writing, lots of people seem to be trying to carve out their own small bit of ‘big data’. This post represents a reflection on what feels to me to be…
The World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) is an initiative by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to improve humanitarian action. The Summit, which is to be held in 2016, stands to be one of the most important humanitarian conferences in a decade. One key pillar of WHS is humanitarian innovation. “Transformation through Innovation” is the WHS Working Group dedicated to…
Topic modeling is very popular at the moment in the digital humanities. A recent tutorial on getting started with this tool explains them as tools for extracting topics or injecting semantic meaning into vocabularies: “Topic models represent a family of computer programs that extract topics from texts. A topic to the computer is a list…