Urban Portal catalogs seemingly every resource available online to urban scholars. The project’s main sections, emerging research and resources boast a large number of links with impressive search functions. Emerging research has two sections, “Issues” and “New & Noteworthy.” Issues are short scholarly examinations of socially relevant topics, like Does racial segregation hurt the poor?. [...]
Archive | October, 2011
Writing History in the Digital Age
by Brian Sarnacki on October 27, 2011 in Digital Humanities
[In lieu of readings this week, our digital humanities seminar chose sections of Writing History in the Digital Age on which to comment during their open peer review stage. You can find my contributions under my name here, or when you read through the two essays on which I commented (I have a feeling these [...]
What am I looking for in a dissertation?
by Brian Sarnacki on October 21, 2011 in Research
Well it’s been a couple of months and a dissertation topic has still not fallen from the sky into my lap. No worries. I hear dissertations take a long time. Instead of trying to locate a specific topic, I have begun thinking about what I want in a dissertation topic. Two things have particularly stuck [...]
Bruno Latour
by Brian Sarnacki on October 20, 2011 in Digital Humanities
[This post is a reading reflection written for UNL's Digital Humanities Seminar. This week's reading was Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.] Something tells me Bruno Latour would not like the analysis of “social networks” in my research. Latour breaks down both “social” and “networks,” as well as several other terms in [...]
UNL Grad Students
by Brian Sarnacki on October 14, 2011 in Academia
This week I am eagerly recommending the blogs of some of my fellow UNL grad students. I would be remiss not to mention the original UNL grad blogger, Jason Heppler. His blogging helped convince me to begin my own blog. From his blog posts, he has published an electronic book on beginning to code, The [...]
Make New Media, but Keep the Old
by Brian Sarnacki on October 13, 2011 in Digital Humanities
Make New Media, but Keep the Old: Replacing Media’s “Old” vs “New” Dichotomy While universities devote whole departments to the study of New Media, focusing on “newness” overlooks the crucial charaterstics of media. Obviously, some media have come later than others. The book came before film and the television came before the computer. However, all [...]
The App Project
by Brian Sarnacki on October 8, 2011 in Digital Humanities
For the Digital Humanities Seminar that I am taking, the instructor, William G. Thomas (who has blogged about the class), assigned us a project in which we, as a class, were to build an iPad/iPhone App during the first month of class. From the beginning the project was intimidating, exciting, and occasionally terrifying. Two Thursdays [...]
SpecLab and Great Design
by Brian Sarnacki on October 6, 2011 in Digital Humanities
[In place of a reflection, this week for the Digital Humanities Seminar we were instructed to pick out three examples of great design after reading Johanna Drucker's SpecLab] What Middletown Read: A project I found a few month’s back, I really enjoy this project from a theoretical and practical stand point. From a design perspective, [...]
