Every scholarly community has its disagreements, its tensions, its divides. One tension in the digital humanities that has received considerable attention is between those who build digital tools and media and those who study traditional humanities questions using digital tools and media. Variously framed as do vs. think, practice vs. theory, or hack vs. yack,… Continue reading The digital humanities is not about building, it’s about sharing
Tag: digital humanities
The Poetics of Metadata and the Potential of Paradata (Revised)
[This is the text, more or less, of the talk I delivered at the 2011 biennial meeting of the Society for Textual Scholarship, which took place March 16-18 at Penn State University. I originally planned on talking about the role of metadata in two digital media projects—a topic that would have fit nicely with STS's… Continue reading The Poetics of Metadata and the Potential of Paradata (Revised)
CFP: Digital Humanities Quarterly Special Issue: The Literary
This special issue of DHQ invites essays that consider the study of literature and the category of the literary to be an essential part of the digital humanities. We welcome essays that consider how digital technologies affect our understanding of the literary— its aesthetics, its history, its production and dissemination processes, and also the traditional… Continue reading CFP: Digital Humanities Quarterly Special Issue: The Literary
Digital Humanities Sessions at the 2011 MLA
Revised: This is a comprehensive list of digital humanities sessions at the 2011 MLA in Los Angeles. Many of the speakers posted the text of their talks online, and you'll find links here to those online versions. If yours isn't linked yet, please reply in the comments with the URL of your presentation, and I'll… Continue reading Digital Humanities Sessions at the 2011 MLA
One Week, One Tool, Many Anthologies
Many of you have already heard about Anthologize, the blog-to-book publishing tool created in one week by a crack team of twelve digital humanists, funded by the NEH's Office of Digital Humanities, and shepherded by George Mason University's Center for History and New Media. Until the moment of the tool's unveiling on Tuesday, August 3,… Continue reading One Week, One Tool, Many Anthologies
Tactical Collaboration: or, Skilfull in both parts of War, Tactick and Stratagematick
[Note: See also the MLA 2011 version of this post, which I gave at panel discussion on "The Open Professoriat(e)"] "Skilfull in both parts of War, Tactick and Stratagematick." From Herodians of Alexandria: his imperiall history of twenty Roman cæsars & emperours of his time. First writ in Greek, and now converted into an heroick… Continue reading Tactical Collaboration: or, Skilfull in both parts of War, Tactick and Stratagematick
Forget Unconferences, Let’s Think about Underconferences
In a few days the latest iteration of THATCamp will convene on the campus of George Mason University, hosted by the Center for History and New Media. Except "convene" really isn't the right word. Most of my readers will already know that The Technology and Humanities Camp is an "unconference," which as Ethan Watrall explains… Continue reading Forget Unconferences, Let’s Think about Underconferences
On the Death of the Digital Humanities Center
Two or three years ago it'd be difficult to imagine a university shuttering an internationally recognized program, one of the leading such programs in the country. Oh, wait. Never mind. That happens all the time. My own experience tells me that it's usually a marginalized field, using new methodologies, producing hard-to-classify work, heavily interdisciplinary, challenging… Continue reading On the Death of the Digital Humanities Center
Loud, Crowded, and Out of Control: A New Model for Scholarly Publishing
Yesterday Dan Cohen, the director of the Center for History and New Media and my colleague at George Mason University, posted a thoughtful piece describing a major problem of scholarly publishing (and of book publishing more generally). Dan suggests that while the "supply" of written work has changed with the advent of digital collaborations, academic… Continue reading Loud, Crowded, and Out of Control: A New Model for Scholarly Publishing
A Tale of Two MLA Bibliographies
Last month I questioned the Modern Language Association's decision, handed down in the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook, to exclude URLs (i.e. web addresses) from bibliographies and Works Cited lists. My readers seemed to be divided, and Rosemary Feal, the Executive Director of the MLA, joined the conversation by outlining some of the reasons… Continue reading A Tale of Two MLA Bibliographies
The MLA in Tweets
I've learned from following several digital humanities conferences from afar the past year (including Digital Humanties 2009 and THATcamp 2009) that the Twitter archive of a conference back-channel can be unreliable. Twitter's default search stream for any hashtag is extremely ephemeral, and that impermanence poses a problem for conference participants and observers, as well as… Continue reading The MLA in Tweets
Digital Humanities Sessions at the 2009 MLA
Below are all of the upcoming 2009 MLA sessions related to new media and the digital humanities. Am I missing something? Let me know in the comments and I'll add it to the list. You may also be interested in following the Digital Humanities/MLA list on Twitter. (And if you are on Twitter and going… Continue reading Digital Humanities Sessions at the 2009 MLA
The Digital Humanities and Literary Scholarship
Here's the skeleton of a presentation I gave for our ENGL 701 grad students. This is a research methods class and I offered an overview of the ways that technology can either enhance or downright transform literary scholarship. Engl 701 (Spring 2009)View more presentations from samplereality.