Category: Digital Humanities
-
AHA and DH
Anthony Grafton: Lieberman-Aiden and Michel [of the Google N-Gram/”culturomics” research project] immediately saw the force of this objection [lack of any humanists on their research team]. Over time, they will find historians and other humanists to work with, and historians will test and use their method. More significant than this glitch are the two larger…
-
Future of Academic Editing
The Aporetic: But peer review is a crushingly slow, turgid process. Established in the age when mail was delivered in horse cars, and no one expected or anything like fast communication, it coasts along on an earlier generation’s low expectations. Peer review is hard work for the reviewer, and more important, it’s both uncompensated and,…
-
Citations via Phone
Wired Campus at The Chronicle: Quick Cite, which costs 99 cents and is available for both iPhones and Android-based phones, uses the camera on a smartphone to scan the bar code on the back of a book. It then e-mails you a bibliography-ready citation in one of four popular styles—APA, MLA, Chicago, or IEEE.
-
Watson
Cathy Davidson: Jeopardy operates on far clearer linguistic rules than ordinary speech and ordinary conversation. A 5th grader, even a smart one, doesn’t have Watson’s data base so cannot begin to know all those answers to all those clearly formulated, explicit questions. However, Watson doesn’t remotely have a 5th grader’s life-long “data base” of language…
-
Classic Literature and Video Games
The Atlantic: Last year, I talked to Dante’s Inferno producer Jonathan Knight about what drew them to the Divine Comedy to adapt into a game. He said that a film adaptation wants simple narratives, but games thrive on complexity. Dante didn’t just tell a story—he built a world to explore. And as luck would have…
-
Review: The Flint Sit-Down Strike
One of the first major labor conflicts following the passage of the Wagner Act of 1935, the 1936-1937 Flint sit-down strike holds an important place in the American labor history. A group of faculty and students at the University of Michigan-Flint, led by political scientist Neil Leighton preserved many precious details of the strike in…
-
On Sustainability
Though sustainability may seem like a problem unique to digital projects, print materials have had issues (acidity, humidity, fire, etc.) of sustainability throughout their existence. Over time archivists, publishers, scholars, and others have developed ways to prolong the lives of print materials (acid-free paper, climate control, fire departments, etc.). As more and more “stuff” is…
Brian Sarnacki 