There is only one car on the track at Silverstone, the prestigious home of British motor racing. The yellow Ford Focus begins its third lap around the circuit. The engine’s constant drone is the only thing breaking the silence surrounding the place. This may be a video game simulation, but there are no win or…
According to these reviews from a popular apartment-sharing site, I am someone who is “nice” and “respectful” in person. Perhaps a more substantive question — for my future as an academic and scholar — might be what kind of a person I appear to be online. “Respectful” and “nice” can actually be contentious terms, I…
Every day, people from around the world upload photos to share on a range of social media sites and web applications. The results are astounding; collections of billions of digital photographs are now stored and managed by several companies and organizations. In this context, Yahoo Labs recently announced that they were making a data set…
The folks at the New York Public Library have a workflow and python script for translating historical maps into Minecraft. It’s a three-step (quite big steps) process. First, they generate a DEM (digital elevation model) from the historical map, using QGIS. This is saved as ‘elevation.tiff’. Then, using Inkscape, they trace over the features from…
A Ferguson Twitter Archive Much has been written about the significance of Twitter as the recent events in Ferguson echoed round the Web, the country, and the world. I happened to be at the Society of American Archivists meeting 5 days after Michael Brown was killed. During our panel discussion someone asked about the role…
Recently Latour outlined his understanding of the digital in an interesting way as part of his plenary lecture at Digital Humanities 2014 conference. He was honest in accepting that his understanding may itself be a product of his own individuation and pre-digital training as a scholar which emphasised close-reading techniques and agonistic engagement around a…
How should digital humanities scholars develop research questions? Spurred on by this recent conversation on twitter, I figured I would lay out a few different ways to go about answering this question about questions. The gist of the dialog is that Jason Heppler suggested that one should “Fit the tool to the question, not the…
The following is a guest post from Euan Cochrane, Digital Preservation Manager at Yale University Library. This piece continues and extends exploration of the potential of emulation as a service and virtualization platforms. Increasingly, the intellectual productivity of scholars involves the creation and development of software and software-dependent content. For universities to act as responsible stewards…
There has been a great deal of buzz lately about “making” and production-centered learning. As a professor of literature and writing, I have been enthusiastic about the role “making” might play in the classroom. (Even those classrooms or courses that don’t inherently seem to lend themselves to making in the most obvious sense.) But the…
When most people think about the kind of super-high-performance games people build custom PCs for, they probably imagine some first-person shooter with fast action, huge explosions, and millions of polygons being rendered to the screen at real time. Few people would think of Dwarf Fortress, a game that is rendered with simple ASCII characters and…