Last month, I gave a presentation about paid crowdsourcing in the humanities at SDH-SEMI. Below are my notes. I The rhetorical model in the humanities is appreciation: we believe that by paying attention to an object of interest, we can explore it, find new dimensions within it, notice things about it that have never been […]
Interview with Aharon Varady New technologies are naturally and generally controversial, but perhaps nowhere more so than in religious communities. For many religious leaders (and their followers), recent digital technologies are corrosive solvents of community life: the old ways are surely best. For others, new technologies offer opportunities to extend the reach of religious bodies, to […]
To begin: One question and one metaphor. The question is, what use is visualization to historians? How does this method add value to the work we do? The metaphor is accretion, the term geologists use to describe the building up of new soils through deposits of materials eroded elsewhere. Accretion works to describe the process […]
What follows is a draft of a paper written in conjunction with Robert Blades concerning the Looted Heritage project. Introduction In his overview of what ‘open access’ might mean in the academy, Peter Suber draws attention to the salient features of what it means to call something ‘open’ – that it is digital, the cost (to […]
What is the theory that underpins our moocs? By George Siemens If you’re even casually aware of what is happening in higher education, you’ve likely heard of massive open online courses (MOOCs). They have been covered by NY Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TV programs, newspapers, and a mess or blogs. While MOOCs have been […]
Editors’ Note: Several recent pieces by Mia Ridge and Trevor Owens have been focused on Crowdsourcing and Cultural Heritage. Excerpts and links to the original pieces are below. Frequently Asked Questions about Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage By Mia Ridge ….What kind of cultural heritage stuff can be crowdsourced? I wrote this list of ‘Activity types […]
Editors’ Note: Two new publications using quantitative methods to study the literary and intellectual history of nineteenth century Britain have been released. The first by Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac from the Stanford Literary Lab, and the second from Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs. Excerpts and links to the original texts are included below. A […]
Why graph? And why, in particular, use innovative and unfamiliar graphing techniques? I started this blog without addressing these questions, but a recent blog post by Adam Crymble, critical of “shock and awe” graphs made me realize the need to explain EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis) and data visualization. Crymble wisely challenged data visualization practitioners to […]
Many exciting things here at ICCC-12 (the International Conference on Computational Creativity 2012) in Dublin, but here are those that come from MIT, Writing and Humanistic Studies, and Comparative Media Studies: I represented my lab, The Trope Tank, by presenting by the position paper “Small-Scale Systems and Computational Creativity” (PDF) by Nick Montfort and Natalia […]
Our schools and libraries are being radically re-imagined for the digital age, but what about our museums? The New York Public Library, for example, is bravely (and controversially) rethinking its Fifth Avenue flagship building. Last month, MIT and Harvard announced edX, a partnership to offer free online courses, and last fall, Stanford offered three massive […]
