[In lieu of readings for the final class meeting of UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar. Each student was to give a brief presentation on the digital humanities in their field.] As a field built around places, urban history has always been cognizant of space. Beginning with Phil Ethington’s Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge digital urban history has used the digital medium’s visual power to explore space. As an early digital history project, Ethington modeled the digital medium’s visual power for spatial analysis. Building on his Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge, Ethington developed HyperCities,…
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For my first “real” conference experience (read: first non-grad student conference as a grad student), HASTAC V was terrific. I met a ton of friendly, smart, and engaging people. I presented successfully (no major faux pas) and received many good questions, comments, and tips. I particularly enjoyed the format of the conference, which was essentially two days of lighting talks and keynote addresses. By keeping presentations very short, scholars (myself included) had to make sure they only selected the vital information. Audiences received the best, most provocative points of each presentation. Though I was often left wanting to discuss the…
Leave a Comment[This mostly serious look at the four stages of DH reflect my own journey in learning about the digital humanities/digital history. The experiences of others may vary and I reserve the right to add stages at a later date.] Practical-ist You see DH as another way to make yourself stand out as a job applicant. While not really knowing what DH means or how to go about practicing DH, there is curiosity. What you should do if you are a practical-ist: Learn more about DH. Some good starting places are Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s Digital History, Stephen Ramsay’s On…
3 Comments[This post is a reading reflection written for UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar. This week’s readings were Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality, Geoffery Rockwell’s “What is Text Analysis, Really?”, Steve Ramsay’s “Algorithmic Criticism“, and Matthew Kirschenbaum’s piece in the Companion to the Digital Humanities.] Perhaps tension is the wrong word, but there is an peculiar rhetorical tension between one of the driving questions behind Jerome McGann’s book and his answer. McGann, correctly, points out that “the general field of humanities education and scholarship will not take the use of digital technology seriously until…they expand our interpretational procedures” (xii). However, in order to…
3 Comments[This post is a reading reflection written for UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar. This week the reading was The Medium is the Massage] The pictures, unusual layouts, and other visual irregularities of The Medium is the Massage seek to shock the reader. In a book focused on examining the importance of new media, adhering to the traditions of old media, print, would have been irresponsible. Though occasionally employing what occasionally seem to be over the top measures, the book upsets the normal print media to drive home the point that the medium is the vital to the content. However, for all…
Leave a Comment[This post is the first of many reading reflections written for UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar. I will be posting my reflections each week. Jason Heppler and William Thomas will also be blogging about the class. This week the readings were Reinventing Knowledge and “As We May Think.”] Predicting the future is, unsurprisingly, difficult. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Vannevar Bush describes a future machine, the “memex,” which congregates, organizes, and dispenses information that bears remarkable similarities to the current technology. Writing over sixty years later, Ian McNeely looks backwards more so than forwards, though he seems comfortable projecting the laboratory’s…
Leave a CommentMark Sample: The promise of the digital is not in the way it allows us to ask new questions because of digital tools or because of new methodologies made possible by those tools. The promise is in the way the digital reshapes the representation, sharing, and discussion of knowledge. We are no longer bound by the physical demands of printed books and paper journals, no longer constrained by production costs and distribution friction, no longer hampered by a top-down and unsustainable business model. And we should no longer be content to make our work public achingly slowly along ingrained routes,…
Leave a CommentA few months ago, I checked up on a digital history project to which I was introduced in my introductory digital history course, Richmond’s Voting America project. It is a great project and a wonderful teaching resource, but I was really interested to see that it had been updated. In addition to some cosmetic changes, since the last time I had visited the project had added the presidential data for 2008 and more analysis of their maps. I had originally explored the website to review it for part of the DH course I was taking. In the review (in December…
Leave a Comment[Editor’s Note: This week’s post comes from my good friend Bill Briggs. Bill majored in Latin at the University of Michigan before moving onto law school, also at the University of Michigan. As someone not completely isolated within the ivory tower of graduate school and with experiences outside of history, I thought Bill could bring a new perspective, which I think he does quite nicely. To the chagrin of some, I will return to writing next week.] Could Better Utilization of the Digital Humanities save the Classics? Full disclosure: I know very little about the Digital Humanities. In fact, my…
Leave a CommentAlex Reid: How you should not think of DH How you should think of DH (His graphs, my words)
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