This post is intended to very briefly describe a project I am about halfway through – that seeks to experiment with the new permeability that digital technologies seem to make possible – to create a more usable ‘history from below’, made up of lives knowable only through small fragments of information.This particular project is called…
“Digital historical culture” is part of the wider “digital culture” permeating our society through the Internet. The sociological concept of digital culture was developed by Manuel Castells[2] and Willard McCarty[3]. In Italy, Tito Orlandi theorized the emergence of a new Koine based on his further development of scientific and methodological concepts of humanities computing as…
Though more and more outside groups are starting to adopt Bookworm for their own projects, I haven’t yet written quite as much as I’d like about how it should work. This blog is attempt to rectify that, and begin to explain how a combination of blogging software, interactive textual visualizations, and a exploratory data analysis…
The role that data plays in our society is changing. Institutions and corporations collect vast amounts of information about us. Individuals contribute to this further by creating data about themselves on social media. One of the world’s largest corporations, Google, earned its status by collecting vast amounts of data that have enormous value to advertisers….
Recent calls for finding “public” audiences for scholarly work, engaging “the general public,” and for doing public digital humanities work are encouraging, but only when those calls are informed by the long history of “public” scholarly work with some understanding that the term is contested and changing. We should all acknowledge that is no “general…
This past week in my Humanities Data Analysis class, we looked at mapping as data. We explored ggplot2’s map functions, as well as doing some work with ggmap’s geocoding and other things. One thing that we just barely explored was automatically extracting place names through named entity recognition. It is possible to do named entity…
It’s interesting that Jacobs and Piper offer different explanations for the diminished role of textual commentary in intellectual life. Jacobs traces it to a shift in cultural attitudes, particularly our recent, post-Romantic embrace of self-expression and originality at the expense of humility and receptiveness. Tacitly, he also implicates the even more recent, post-modern belief that the written word is something to be…
Alan Jacobs has written seventy-nine theses on technology for disputation. A disputation is an old technology, a formal technique of debate and argument that took shape in medieval universities in Paris, Bologna, and Oxford in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In its most general form, a disputation consisted of a thesis, a counter-thesis, and a string…
C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures (1959) began a critical debate about the role of the humanities in an increasingly scientific world. It was also the receipt of such enormous criticism that Snow later wrote The Two Cultures: A Second Look (1963). In the last few months David Armitage and I have experienced a technologically-accelerated version…
Is it Research or is it Spying? Thinking-Through Ethics in Big Data AI and Other Knowledge Sciences has just been published online. It was written with Bettina Berendt and Marco Büchler and came out of a Dagschule retreat where a group of us started talking about ethics and big data. Here is the abstract: “How to…