The University of Victoria Libraries started archiving websites in 2013, and it quickly became apparent that many scholarly websites being produced by faculty, especially in the digital humanities, were going to prove very challenging to effectively capture and play back. This article will provide an overview of web archiving and explore the considerable legal and…
This essay is written in response to a colleague who, for the sake of anonymity, I will simply refer to as Dr. X (or perhaps, as @wallacetim dubs him, Professor Glasses). During the first ever #mapTimeLEX—an event inspired by @alyssapwright, and here in Lexington, largely an ode to @lyzidiamond and @mappingmashups—Dr. X graciously posed the…
This map visualizes the text-mined data produced by the Trading Consequences project. We queried the database to identify all the commodities with a strong relationship to London and then found every other location where the text mining pipeline identified a relationship those commodities at least 10 times in a given year. I will present this…
Too bad we can’t put to work the delicious usage data gathered by libraries. Research libraries may not know as much as click-obsessed Amazon does about how people interact with their books. What they do know, however, reflects the behavior of a community of scholars, and it’s unpolluted by commercial imperatives. But privacy concerns have…
In her fantastic series of lectures on early modern England, Emma Smith identifies an interesting feature that differentiates the tragedies and comedies of Elizabethan drama: “Tragedies tend to have more streamlined plots, or less plot—you know, fewer things happening. Comedies tend to enjoy a multiplication of characters, disguises, and trickeries. I mean, you could partly…
There are a few adages that go with comments on the Internet. Among them: “if you don’t have the energy to read something, you shouldn’t have the hubris to comment on it” and, simply put, “never read the comments.” It’s rare that comments and forums on the Internet are seen as something positive. Ian Milligan…
Over the last few months I have become increasingly interested obsessed with creative reuse of digitised cultural heritage content. We live at a time when most galleries, libraries, archives and museums are digitising collections and putting them up online to increase access, with some (such as the Rijksmuseum, LACMA, The British Library, and the Internet…
Linguists try to understand the nuances of languages, and how they relate to one another. A computer scientist says the English mistakes of non-native speakers can reveal something about languages. Anything you write or say has two parts to it – what you say and how you say it. Computers can now pay attention to…
If your image of a computer programmer is a young man, there’s a good reason: It’s true. Recently, many big tech companies revealed how few of their female employees worked in programming and technical jobs. Google had some of the highest rates: 17 percent of its technical staff is female. It wasn’t always this way….
From the abstract: Increasingly powerful computational methods are important for humanists not simply because they make it possible to ask new research questions but especially because computation makes it both possible — and arguably essential — to transform the relationship between humanities research and society, opening up a range of possibilities for student contributions and…