infrastructure |ˈɪnfrəstrʌktʃə| (noun) – the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise. – New Oxford American Dictionary Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures. We propose a […]
In his classic study Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam argues that we have lost our connection to friends, family, neighbors, and our democratic structures. He warns that our “social capital” has plummted, leaving us emotionally and socially impoverished. We’re working harder, going to more meetings, but spending less time iwth friends, neighbors, and others. His […]
These are the slides and notes from the lightning talk I gave at the CAA 2015 session “Doing Digital Art History: Reflections on the Field”, an overview of the work done at the 2014 summer institutes sponsored by the Kress and Getty Foundations. See the underlying data and processing code here. This project is an […]
I recently collaborated on a project a little outside the ordinary for me: a case study for a chapter in a forthcoming textbook for, well, cops and spooks. (Cue performative outrage and sub-tweeting about digital humanities’ complicity with our modern security state–which I will address in a moment.) The book is the infelicitously-titled Application of […]
MicroMappers combines crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence to make sense of “Big Data” for Social Good. Why artificial intelligence (AI)? Because regular crowdsourcing alone is no match for Big Data. The MicroMappers platform can already be used to crowdsource the search for relevant tweets as well as pictures, videos, text messages, aerial imagery and soon satellite imagery. The next step is therefore to add […]
Hoping to remedy pervasive and often crippling uncertainty among artists and art professionals over how and when to invoke fair use when dealing with copyrighted materials, the College Art Association (CAA) has released a “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use.” Spearheaded by American University professors and copyright law experts Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, […]
Much of the hype surrounding MOOCS has faded and as Steve Kolowich shows in a recent Chronicle piece, “Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education.” As the Babson Survey Research Group (that Kolowich cites) shows, higher ed leaders are less certain that MOOCs […]
I’m trying to tackle a topic that I’ve been mulling over more or less since the Center opened: Why I think every edtech group should have a student support organization like the DKC. There’s a long history of how we ended up where we are with our Center, and there’s a lot of unpacking that […]
The Internet Archive is mostly known for archiving the web, a task the San Francisco-based nonprofit has tirelessly done since 1996, two years before Google was founded. The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years, the largest archive of the web. Earlier this month, the Archive made headlines with the […]
For the past few years, I have been exploring the relationship between sentiment and plot shape in fiction. Earlier today I posted an R package titled “syuzhet” to github. The package is designed to extract sentiment and plot information from prose. Methods for text import, sentiment extraction, and plot arc modeling are described in the […]
