302 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. Sarah is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, and Director of the Dictionary Lab at Oxford. She specializes in lexicography, endangered languages, language revitalization, the history of dictionaries, and the interface of technology with the Social Sciences and Humanities (digital humanities). Her research includes work on Australian Aboriginal and American Indian languages, especially relating to language documentation and revitalization. She is the Director of the new MSc in Digital Scholarship.

      What a fascinating set of areas she's working in... I want to do this...

  2. Jan 2024
  3. Dec 2023
  4. Nov 2023
    1. Eco was aware of this predicament. As a university profes-sor, he knew that the majority of students in Italian univer-sities seldom attended classes, that very few of them wouldcontinue to write and do research, and that the degree theyeventually earned would not necessarily improve their socialconditions. It would have been easy to call for the system tobe reformed so as not to require a thesis from students ill-equipped to write one, and for whom the benefit of spendingseveral months working on a thesis might be difficult to jus-tify in cold economic terms.

      Some of the missing piece here is knowing a method for extracting and subsequently building. Without the recipe in hand, it's difficult to bake a complex cake.

      Not mentioned here as something which may be missing, but which Adler & Van Doren identify as strength and ability to read at multiple levels including inspectionally, analytically, and ultimately syntopically.

      To some extent, the knowledge of the method for excerpting and arranging will ultimately allow the interested lifelong learner the ability to read syntopically even if it isn't the sort of targeted exercise it might be within creating a thesis.

    1. The example of maps he shows here discusses a social interaction component which allows for an interdisciplinary approach to the knowledge scaffolding (especially if students shared their work with each other).

      Are there other non-social affordances in this system? Affordances that would let an individual go further/faster by themselves?

  5. Oct 2023
    1. reply to Our Journey, Day 84 by Dan Allosso at https://danallosso.substack.com/p/our-journey-day-84

      There's already a movement afoot calling for schools who are dramatically cutting their humanities departments to quit calling what they're offering a liberal education. This popped up on Monday and has a long list of cuts: https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/10/23/liberal-education-name-only-opinion I was surprised that Bemidji wasn't listed, but then again there may be several dozens which have made announcements, but which aren't widely known yet. The problem may be much larger and broader than anyone is acknowledging.

      Cutting down dozens of faculties into either "schools" or even into some sort of catch all called "Humanities" may be even more marginalizing to the enterprise.

      Apparently, the Morlocks seem to think that the Eloi will be easier to manage if there isn't any critical thinking?

    1. “Annotating Austen” is an ongoing digital humanities project that aims to create multi-media annotated electronic editions of Jane Austen’s six published novels. The project engages undergraduate students in researching and writing scholarly explanatory annotations using the web annotation tool Hypothesis (www.hypothes.is).
  6. Aug 2023
    1. Imagine the younger generation studying great books andlearning the liberal arts. Imagine an adult population con-tinuing to turn to the same sources of strength, inspiration,and communication. We could talk to one another then. Weshould be even better specialists than we are today because wecould understand the history of our specialty and its relationto all the others. We would be better citizens and better men.We might turn out to be the nucleus of the world community.

      Is the cohesive nature of Hutchins and Adler's enterprise for the humanities and the Great Conversation, part of the kernel of the rise of interdisciplinarity seen in the early 2000s onward in academia (and possibly industry).

      Certainly large portions are the result of uber-specialization, particularly in spaces which have concatenated and have allowed people to specialize in multiple areas to create new combinatorial creative possibilities.

    2. I should like to add that specialization, instead of makingthe Great Conversation irrelevant, makes it more pertinentthan ever. Specialization makes it harder to carry on anykind of conversation; but this calls for greater effort, not theabandonment of the attempt.

      The dramatic increase in economic specialization of humanity driven by the Industrial Revolution has many benefits to societies, but it also has detrimental effects when the core knowledge and shared base of the society is lost.

      Certainly individuals have a greater reliance on specialists for future outcomes (think about the specialization of areas like climate science which can have destructive outcomes on all of humanity or public health outcomes with respect to vaccines and specialized health care delivery), but they also need to have a common base of knowledge/culture and the ability to think critically for themselves to be able to effect necessary changes, particularly when the pace of those changes is more rapid than humans have generally been evolved to accept them.

    3. Do science, technology, industrialization, and specializa-tion render the Great Conversation irrelevant?
    1. Sample, Mark. “Notes towards a Deformed Humanities.” Academic blog. SampleReality (blog), May 2, 2012. https://samplereality.com/2012/05/02/notes-towards-a-deformed-humanities/.

    2. Carpentry aspires to build from scratch, whereas the Deformed Humanities tears apart existing structures and uses the scraps.

      I'm reminded of Jeremy Mayer's work of deconstruction old, non-functioning typewriters to create sculptures.

      Intriguing that he uses the word "scraps" here which plays directly into the practice of the zettelkasten within the ars excerpendi!

    3. This is an argument that Steve Ramsay makes in Reading Machines. Computers let us practice deformance quite easily, taking apart a text—say, by focusing on only the nouns in an epic poem or calculating the frequency of collocations between character names in a novels.

      Isn't this the sort of analysis that William Gladstone did on Homer, or Milman Parry subsequently? Hasn't the practice of ars excerpendi always been a form of deformance? Excerpt, mix, remix, repeat...

      How far can one deform a text, subject, topic, and come up with something useful?

  7. Jun 2023
    1. How might humanists adopt STEM-oriented norms around data sharing

      This seems to be a fairly packed sentence. Why should they?

    2. the “Nelson memo” requires all publications and supporting data produced with federal funds be made freely and publicly available without an embargo period and points towards future mandates that would require all data generated with federal funds (not just data associated with publications) to be made public.

      This is the first problem: what does it mean. If I write a book on Middlemarch, what is my data? My notes? The quotations I use (note the non-exemption of publications only).

  8. May 2023
    1. You will talk with people from hundreds and thousands of years ago from places and ways of life that are long gone or are simply impossible for you to know any other way. And this is not just a cheap alternative to traveling – this is how you become more human.

      Example of a teacher talking about the great conversation in the framing of the humanities....

  9. Apr 2023
  10. Mar 2023
    1. Structures and Transformations of the Vocabulary of the Egyptian Language: Text and Knowledge Culture in Ancient Egypt. “Altägyptisches Wörterbuch: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften 1999,” 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20180627163317/https://aaew.bbaw.de/wbhome/Broschuere/index.html.

    2. Ausgangspunkt und Zentrum der Arbeit am Altägyptischen Wörterbuch ist die Anlage eines erschöpfenden Corpus ägyptischer Texte.

      In the early twentieth century one might have created a card index to study a large textual corpus, but in the twenty first one is more likely to rely on a relational database instead.

    1. things to do to understand text:

      • visualize single texts
      • measure features of text
      • identify distinctive words
      • find or organize works
      • model literay forms
      • model social boundaries
      • unsupervised modeling
  11. Feb 2023
    1. 1478-1518, Notebook of Leonardo da Vinci (''The Codex Arundel''). A collection of papers written in Italian by Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452, d. 1519), in his characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left), including diagrams, drawings and brief texts, covering a broad range of topics in science and art, as well as personal notes. The core of the notebook is a collection of materials that Leonardo describes as ''a collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place according to the subjects of which they treat'' (f. 1r), a collection he began in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli in Florence, in 1508. To this notebook has subsequently been added a number of other loose papers containing writing and diagrams produced by Leonardo throughout his career. Decoration: Numerous diagrams.

    1. Francesco Erspamer

      Interestingly Erspamer doesn't mention any prior history or traditions of this sort of practice, just that it works for creating theses within the humanities very well. How does he miss this as motivation?

      Presumably for him it's a "cultural practice" and Eco delineates it well. Erspamer learned from Eco and it's just what he does... The only questioning done is how 90s technology fit into the picture and that was only surface level questioning...

      There's definitely something off about this as a recommendation for the overall system.

    2. The humanities are the process of pres-ervation and appropriation of that pastness, a process thatrequires specific skills acquired through practice, as all skillsare.
    1. https://pair.withgoogle.com/

      People + AI Research (PAIR) is a multidisciplinary team at Google that explores the human side of AI by doing fundamental research, building tools, creating design frameworks, and working with diverse communities.

    1. Stettler, Lucia. “Geheime Gästekartei überlebt Hotelbrand – und birgt Zündstoff.” Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF), April 8, 2021, sec. Kultur. https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/brisanter-fund-geheime-gaestekartei-ueberlebt-hotelbrand-und-birgt-zuendstoff.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>ManuelRodriguez331</span> in Advantages of Analog note taking : Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>02/07/2023 08:33:25</time>)</cite></small>

    2. https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/brisanter-fund-geheime-gaestekartei-ueberlebt-hotelbrand-und-birgt-zuendstoff

      cc: @remikalir: Interesting example here of a historical collection of business files annotated by hotel staff used in a digital humanities perspective for semantic shift and tracking antisemitism over time.

      Published book:<br /> Hechenblaikner, Lois, Andrea Kühbacher, and Rolf Zollinger. Keine Ostergrüsse mehr!: Die geheime Gästekartei des Grand Hotel Waldhaus in Vulpera. 3rd ed. Zürich: Edition Patrick Frey, 2021.

    3. Lois Hechenblaikner, Andrea Kühbacher, Rolf Zollinger (Hrsg.): «Keine Ostergrüsse mehr! Die geheime Gästekartei des Grandhotel Waldhaus in Vulpera». Edition Patrick Frey, 2021.Der reich bebilderte Band bietet eine spannende Reise in ein Stück Schweizer Tourismusgeschichte: Die Herausgeber haben die 20'000 Karteikarten aus den Jahren 1920-1960 sehr sorgfältig kuratiert, nach Themen gegliedert und in einen grösseren, gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhang gestellt.Die Leserinnen und Leser erfahren viel über die Klientel im Hotel Waldhaus, zum Teil sogar in kleinen biografischen Porträts; und sie können an konkreten Beispielen verfolgen, wie sich der Sprachgebrauch der Concierges im Laufe der Zeit verändert – gerade zum Beispiel im Zusammenhang mit jüdischen Gästen.

      Google Translate:

      Lois Hechenblaikner, Andrea Kühbacher, Rolf Zollinger (editors): «No more Easter greetings! The secret guest file of the Grandhotel Waldhaus in Vulpera". Edition Patrick Frey, 2021.

      The richly illustrated volume offers an exciting journey into a piece of Swiss tourism history: the editors have very carefully curated the 20,000 index cards from the years 1920-1960, structured them by topic and placed them in a larger, social context.

      The readers learn a lot about the clientele in the Hotel Waldhaus, sometimes even in small biographical portraits; and they can use concrete examples to follow how the concierge's use of language has changed over time - especially in connection with Jewish guests, for example.

  12. Jan 2023
    1. 3.1 Guest Lecture: Lauren Klein » Q&A on "What is Feminist Data Science?"<br /> https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15631

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7HmG5b87B8

      Theories of Power

      Patricia Hill Collins' matrix of domination - no hierarchy, thus the matrix format

      What are other broad theories of power? are there schools?

      Relationship to Mary Parker Follett's work?

      Bright, Liam Kofi, Daniel Malinsky, and Morgan Thompson. “Causally Interpreting Intersectionality Theory.” Philosophy of Science 83, no. 1 (January 2016): 60–81. https://doi.org/10.1086/684173.

      about Bayesian modeling for intersectionality


      Where is Foucault in all this? Klein may have references, as I've not got the context.


      How do words index action? —Laura Klein


      The power to shape discourse and choose words - relationship to soft power - linguistic memes

      Color Conventions Project


      20:15 Word embeddings as a method within her research


      General result (outside of the proximal research) discussed: women are more likely to change language... references for this?


      [[academic research skills]]: It's important to be aware of the current discussions within one's field. (LK)


      36:36 quantitative imperialism is not the goal of humanities analytics, lived experiences are incredibly important as well. (DK)

    1. Panofsky's quote that "“Thus, while science endeavours to transform the chaotic variety of natural phenomena into what may be called a cosmos of nature, the humanities endeavour to transform the chaotic variety of human records into what may be called a cosmos of culture.”

      check quote and original source

    1. https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15625

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZklLt80wqg

      Looking at three broad ideas with examples of each to follow: - signals - patterns - pattern making, pattern breaking

      Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913

      Jane Kent for witchcraft

      250 years with ~200,000 trial transcripts

      Can be viewed as: - storytelling, - history - information process of signals

      All the best trials include the words "Covent Garden".

      Example: 1163. Emma Smith and Corfe indictment for stealing.

      19:45 Norbert Elias. The Civilizing Process. (book)

      Prozhito: large-scale archive of Russian (and Soviet) diaries; 1900s - 2000s

      How do people understand the act of diary-writing?

      Diaries are:

      Leo Tolstoy

      a convenient way to evaluate the self

      Franz Kafka

      a means to see, with reassuring clarity [...] the changes which you constantly suffer.

      Virginia Woolf'

      a kindly blankfaced old confidante

      Diary entries in five categories - spirit - routine - literary - material form (talking about the diary itself) - interpersonal (people sharing diaries)

      Are there specific periods in which these emerge or how do they fluctuate? How would these change between and over cultures?

      The pattern of talking about diaries in this study are relatively stable over the century.

      pre-print available of DeDeo's work here

      Pattern making, pattern breaking

      Individuals, institutions, and innovation in the debates of the French Revolution

      • transcripts of debates in the constituent assembly

      the idea of revolution through tedium and boredom is fascinating.

      speeches broken into combinations of patterns using topic modeling

      (what would this look like on commonplace book and zettelkasten corpora?)

      emergent patterns from one speech to the next (information theory) question of novelty - hi novelty versus low novelty as predictors of leaders and followers

      Robespierre bringing in novel ideas

      How do you differentiate Robespierre versus a Muppet (like Animal)? What is the level of following after novelty?

      Four parts (2x2 grid) - high novelty, high imitation (novelty with ideas that stick) - high novelty, low imitation (new ideas ignored) - low novelty, high imitation - low novelty, low imitation (discussion killers)

      Could one analyze television scripts over time to determine the good/bad, when they'll "jump the shark"?

    1. Operationalization   Turning ideas into something we can measure off a data set.
    2. What it means to be a member of this or that class is a complex, interpretative matter; but tracking how many times a person has been to the opera is not. You can count the latter, and (the bargain goes) facts about those numbers may illuminate facts about the deeper concepts. For example, counting opera-going might be used to measure how immigrants move up the social class ladder across generations. Crucially, operationalization is not definition. A good operationalization does not redefine the concept of interest (it does not say "to be a member of the Russian intelligentsia is just to have gone to the opera at least once"). Rather, it makes an argument for why the concept, as best understood, may lead to certain measurable consequences, and why those measurements might provide a signal of the underlying concept.

      This is a good example of the fuzzy sorts of boundaries created by adding probabilities to individuals and putting them into (equivalence) classes. They can provide distributions of likelihoods.

      This expands on: https://hypothes.is/a/3FVi6JtXEe2Xwp_BIaCv5g

    3. Signal relationships are (usually) symmetric: if knowledge of X tells you about Y, then knowledge of Y tells you about X.

      Reframing signal relationships into probability spaces may mean that signal relationships are symmetric.

      How far can this be pressed? They'll also likely be reflexive and transitive (though the probability may be smaller here) and thus make an equivalence relation.

      How far can we press this idea of equivalence relations here with respect to our work? Presumably it would work to the level of providing at least good general distribution?

    1. Transcriptions taken from Goitein’s publications were corrected according to handwrittennotes on his private offprints. The nature of Goitein’s “typed texts” is as follows. Goitein tran-scribed Geniza documents by hand from the originals or from photostats. These handwrittentranscriptions were later typed by an assistant and usually corrected by Goitein. When Goiteindied in 1985, the transcriptions were photocopied in Princeton before the originals were sentto the National Library of Israel, where they can be consulted today. During the followingdecades, the contents of most of these photocopies were entered into a computer, and period-ically the files had to be converted to newer digital formats. The outcome of these repeatedprocesses of copying and conversion is that transcription errors and format glitches are to beexpected. As the Princeton Geniza Project website states: “Goitein considered his typed texts‘drafts’ and always restudied the manuscripts and made revisions to his transcriptions beforepublishing them.” See also Goitein, “Involvement in Geniza Research,” 143. It is important tokeep in mind that only the transcriptions that were typed were uploaded to the project website.Therefore, e.g., Goitein’s transcriptions of documents in Arabic scripts are usually not foundthere. The National Library of Israel and the Princeton Geniza Lab also hold many of Goitein’sdraft English translations of Geniza documents, many of which were intended for his plannedanthology of Geniza texts in translation, Mediterranean People.

      Much like earlier scribal errors, there are textual errors inserted into digitization projects which may have gone from documentary originals, into handwritten (translated) copies, which then were copied manually via typewriter, and then copied again into some digital form, and then changed again into other digital forms as digital formats changed.

      As a result it is often fruitful to be able to compare the various versions to see the sorts of errors which each level of copying can introduce. One might suppose that textual errors were only common when done by scribes using manual techniques, but it is just as likely for errors to be inserted between digital copies as well.

    2. Fried-berg Judeo-Arabic Project, accessible at http://fjms.genizah.org. This projectmaintains a digital corpus of Judeo-Arabic texts that can be searched and an-alyzed.

      The Friedberg Judeo-Arabic Project contains a large corpus of Judeo-Arabic text which can be manually searched to help improve translations of texts, but it might also be profitably mined using information theoretic and corpus linguistic methods to provide larger group textual translations and suggestions at a grander scale.

    3. More recent ad-ditions to the website include a “jigsaw puzzle” screen that lets users viewseveral items while playing with them to check whether they are “joins.” An-other useful feature permits the user to split the screen into several panelsand, thus, examine several items simultaneously (useful, e.g., when compar-ing handwriting in several documents). Finally, the “join suggestions” screenprovides the results of a technologically groundbreaking computerized anal-ysis of paleographic and codiocological features that suggests possible joinsor items written by the same scribe or belonging to the same codex. 35

      Computer means can potentially be used to check or suggest potential "joins" of fragments of historical documents.

      An example of some of this work can be seen in the Friedberg Genizah Project and their digital tools.

  13. Dec 2022
    1. When writing history, there are rules to be followed and evidence to be respected. But no two histories will be the same, whereas the essence of scientific experiments is that they can be endlessly replicated.

      A subtle difference here between the (hard) sciences and the humanities. Every human will bring to bear a differently nuanced perspective.

    1. The Princeton Geniza Project(link is external) is a database of more than 30,000 records and 4,600 transcriptions of documentary geniza texts. Since 1986, the PGP has been dedicated to discovering and describing unpublished documents; maintaining a full-text retrieval database of geniza documents; and creating new transcriptions and translations.
    1. Published in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the paper also shows that the mice share similarities in mitochondrial DNA with Scandinavia and northern Germany, but not with mice found in Portugal.

      Use of DNA on rodents to indicate ancient trade and travel.

    1. Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine. In a tech-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, ethical systems matter. But the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations. The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major?
    1. For those of you wondering if hcommons on mastodon has taken measures to ward against the sort of meltdown the server had a few weeks ago, there's a update from one of the admins: https://hcommons.social/@kfitz/1094609

      https://hcommons.social/@amisamileanded/109466986626984098

      Apparently sometime within it's first month of existence hcommons.social had a server meltdown of some sort. The admins addressed and hardened their set up.

    1. https://schopie1.commons.msu.edu/2022/12/05/microblogging_with_mastodon/

      OMG! There is so much to love here about these processes and to see people in the wild experimenting with them and figuring them out.

      Scott, you are not alone! There are lots of us out here doing these things, not only with WordPress but a huge variety of other platforms. There are many ways to syndicate your content depending on where it starts its life.

      In addition to Jim Groom and a huge group of others' work on A Domain of One's Own, there's also a broader coalition of designers, developers, professionals, hobbyists, and people of all strips working on these problems under the name of IndieWeb.

      For some of their specific work you might appreciate the following:<br /> - https://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Education - https://indieweb.org/A_Domain_of_One%27s_Own - https://indieweb.org/academic_samizdat - https://indieweb.org/WordPress - https://indieweb.org/Category:syndication

      Incidentally, I wrote this for our friend Kathleen Fitzpatrick last week and I can't wait to see what she's come up with over the weekend and the coming weeks. Within the IndieWeb community you'll find people like Ben Werdmuller who created large portions of both WithKnown and Elgg and Aram Zucker-Scharff who helped to create PressForward.

      I'm thrilled to see the work and huge strides that Humanities Commons is making some of these practices come to fruition.

      If you're game, perhaps we ought to plan an upcoming education-related popup event as an IndieWebCamp event to invite more people into this broader conversation?

      If you have questions or need any help in these areas, I'm around, but so are hundreds of friends in the IndieWeb chat: https://chat.indieweb.org.

      I hope we can bring more of these technologies to the masses in better and easier-to-use manners to lower the technical hurdles.

  14. Nov 2022
  15. Oct 2022
  16. Jul 2022
    1. I bet with the advent of computers and the digitalizing of reference material there was a spike in the amount of verbatum quotes that are used instead of summarizing the thought into your own words.

      It's a reasonable assumption that with the rise of digital contexts and the ease of cut and paste that people excerpting or quoting material are more likely to excerpt and quote longer passages because it is now easier to do.


      Has anyone done research on showing that this is the case?

  17. Jun 2022
    1. We are the leading independent Open Access publisher in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the UK: a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research freely available to readers around the world. All our books are available to read online and download for free, with no Book Processing Charges (BPCs) for authors. We publish monographs and textbooks in all areas, offering the academic excellence of a traditional press combined with the speed, convenience and accessibility of digital publishing. We also publish bespoke Series for Universities and Research Centers and invite libraries to support Open Access publishing by joining our Membership Programme.
    1. Archaeology of Reading project

      https://archaeologyofreading.org/

      The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.


      Perhaps some overlap here with: - Workshop in the History of Material Texts https://pennmaterialtexts.org/about/events/ - Book Traces https://booktraces.org via Andrew Stauffer, et al. - Schoenberg Institute's Coffe with a Codex https://schoenberginstitute.org/coffee-with-a-codex/ (perhaps to a lesser degree)

    2. Francesca Benatti (Open University)

      Online

      Short Bio

      I joined The Open University in 2012 as a member of the Arts Faculty and I am now part of the School of Arts and Humanities and the English and Creative Writing Department. I hold a Laurea in Lettere Moderne from the University of Bologna, as well as an MA in Literature and Publishing and a PhD in English from the National University of Ireland, Galway.

      My main role in the Faculty is to promote research in the Digital Humanities as the co-leader of DH_OU, the Digital Humanities at The Open University Research Collaboration (web and Twitter) and of the OOC DTP Digital Humanities training programme.

      I am a member of the READ-IT project, the Reading Experience Database, the History of Books and Reading Research Group, the Gender and Otherness in the Humanities (GOTH) Research Centre, the European Romanticism in Association and RÊVE project and the Open Arts Archive.

      During 2014-2019 I led the Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age training programme for the CHASE doctoral training partnership. In 2017 I was the Principal Investigator of the A Question of Style project, which was funded by a Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Field Development Grant. In 2016-2019 I was a member of the Executive Committee of the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) and of the International Executive Council of centerNet.

      Select bibliography

      • Understanding the phenomenology of reading through modelling (2021-01-26) Antonini, Alessio; Suárez-Figueroa, Mari Carmen; Adamou, Alessandro; Benatti, Francesca; Vignale, François; Gravier, Guillaume and Lupi, Lucia Semantic Web Journal, 12(2) (pp. 191-217)
      • *ing the Written Word: Digital Humanities Methods for Book History (2020) Antonini, Alessio and Benatti, Francesca In : SHARP 2020: Power of the Written Word (11-15 Jul 2020, Amsterdam)
    3. Alessio Antonini (Open University)

      Dr Alessio Antonini is a Research Associate at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), Open University, and a member of KMi's Intelligent Systems and Data Science group. Before joining KMi, he was a post-doc researcher in Urban Computing at the University of Turin, Italy. His research is on Human-Data Interaction (HDI) in applicative context of Civic Technologies, Smart City and Digital Humanities (DH) applications, in which contributed with more than 30 peer-reviewed papers. Transdisciplinary problems emerging from real-life scenarios are the focus of his research, approached through interdisciplinary collaborations, ranging from urban planning, philosophy, law, humanities, history and geography. He has extensive experience in EU and national projects, leading activities and work-packages in 14 projects. With more than ten years of professional practice, he as broad experience in leading R&D projects.

      Select bibliography:

      • Antonini, A., Benatti, F., Watson, N., King, E. and Gibson, J. (2021) Death and Transmediations: Manuscripts in the Age of Hypertext, HT '21: Proceedings of the 32th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Virtual Event USA
      • Vignale, F., Antonini, A. and Gravier, G. (2020) The Reading Experience Ontology (REO): Reusing and Extending CIDOC CRM, Digital Humanities Conference 2020, Ottawa
      • Antonini, A. and Brooker, S. (2020) Mediation as Calibration: A Framework for Evaluating the Author/Reader Relation, Proceedings of the 31st ACM HyperText, Orlando, Florida, USA
      • Antonini, A. and Benatti, F. (2020) *ing the Written Word: Digital Humanities Methods for Book History, SHARP 2020: Power of the Written Word, Amsterdam
      • Antonini, A., (2020) Understanding the phenomenology of reading through modelling Understanding the phenomenology of reading through modelling, pp. (Early Access)
      • Vignale, F., Benatti, F. and Antonini, A. (2019) Reading in Europe - Challenge and Case Studies of READ-IT Project, DH2019, Utrecht, Netherland
      • Antonini, A., Vignale, F., Guillaume, G. and Brigitte, O. (2019) The Model of Reading: Modelling principles, Definitions, Schema, Alignments
  18. Jan 2022
    1. When I think back to the creation of that infographic, I wonder whether we had shown the care demanded of the data. Whether we had, in creating this abstraction, re-enacted — however inadvertently — some of the objectification of the slave trade.

      This sort of objectification seems very similar to the type of erasure that Poland is doing with the Holocaust as they begin honoring Poles who helped Jews while simultaneously ignoring Poland's part in collaborating with the Nazis in creating the Holocaust.

      How can we as a society and humanity add more care to these sorts of acts so as not to continue erasing the harm and better heal past wrongs?

      Cross reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/opinion/holocaust-poland-europe.html and https://hyp.is/hrsb9oIOEey8sEObTYhk0A/www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/opinion/holocaust-poland-europe.html

  19. Nov 2021
    1. As the emerging field of energy humanities (168) is beginning to show, the traditions, cultures, and beliefs of contemporary, industrial societies are deeply entangled with fossil fuels in what have been called petrocultures and carbonscapes (169). Future visions are dominated by such constrained social imaginaries (170), and hence rarely offer a “radical departure from the past” (171, p. 138).

      Constructing social imaginaries that are alternatives to the petrocutultural, carbonscape ones is critical to shift the mindset.

      Carbon pollution cannot be disentangled from colonialism and social imaginaries must consist of stories that tell alternative futures narratives that address both simultaneously.

      Replace petroculture with ecoculture, doughnut economics, living within planetary boundaries and eco-civilization

  20. Oct 2021
  21. bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. As the emerging field of energy humanities (168)is beginning to show, the traditions, cultures, and beliefs of contemporary, industrial societies aredeeply entangled with fossil fuels in what have been called petrocultures and carbonscapes (169).Future visions are dominated by such constrained social imaginaries (170), and hence rarely offera “radical departure from the past” (171, p. 138).

      Constructing social imaginaries that are alternatives to the petrocutultural, carbonscape ones is critical to shift the mindset.

      Carbon pollution cannot be disentangled from colonialism and social imaginaries must consist of stories that tell alternative futures narratives must address both simultaneously.

  22. Sep 2021
    1. In “A Great Idea at the Time,” Alex Beam presents Hutchins and Adler as a double act

      Just the title "A Great Idea at the Time" makes me wonder if this project didn't help speed along the creation of the dullness of the humanities and thereby attempt to kill it?

      What might they have done differently to better highlight the joy and fun of these works to have better encouraged it.

      Too often reformers reform all the joy out of things.

  23. May 2021
    1. This is a facsimile and diplomatic edition of Codex Vercellensis CXVII, Archivio e Biblioteca Capitolare di Vercelli.

      An interesting example of a digitized version of a book.

  24. Apr 2021
    1. There are surprisingly few digital editions of commonplace books, especially given how the genre lends itself to digitization. What we've made isn't perfect but we hope it helps others think through/with these types of books. More about that here: digitalbookhistory.com/colletscommonp…

      I've seen some people building digital commonplace books in real time, but I'm also curious to see more academics doing it and seeing what tools and platforms they're using to do it.

      Given the prevalence for these in text, I'd be particularly curious to see them being done as .txt or .md files and then imported into platforms like Obsidian, Roam Research, Org Mode, TiddlyWiki, et al for cross linking and backlinking.

      I've seen some evidence of people doing some of this with copies of the bible, but yet to see anyone digitize and cross link old notebooks or commonplace books.

  25. Feb 2021
    1. A fairly comprehensive list of problems and limitations that are often encountered with data as well as suggestions about who should be responsible for fixing them (from a journalistic perspective).

    1. Spent some time browsing through the wealth of resources here. What a great site. Greg McVerry will appreciate it and many of the curated resources which he may be able to remix and reuse.

    2. I'm curious how a model like Homebrew Website Club or regular DoOO meetups might be similar to or borrow from a teaching model like this class?

  26. Dec 2020
  27. Oct 2020
    1. It’s easier to “bridge” science and art when you don’t really think there’s a gap between them in the first place, as I don’t. The boundaries between subjects are really artificial constructs by humans, like the boundaries between colors in a rainbow.
  28. Jun 2020
  29. Feb 2020
  30. May 2019
    1. 1RWDOOPRYLHVKDYHWREHGRFXPHQWDULHVDQGQRWDOOYLVXDOL]DWLRQKDVWREHWUDGLWLRQDOFKDUWVDQGJUDSKV

      This is an interesting fact, usually when I think of visualization and data I go to the classic default charts and data. I'll have to keep this iin mind.

    2. 7KHEDVHRIWKHJUDSKLFLVVLPSO\DOLQHFKDUW+RZHYHUGHVLJQHOHPHQWVKHOSWHOOWKHVWRU\EHWWHU/DEHOLQJDQGSRLQWHUVSURYLGHFRQWH[WDQGKHOS\RXVHHZK\WKHGDWDLVLQWHUHVWLQJDQGOLQHZLGWKDQGFRORUGLUHFW\RXUH\HVWRZKDW¶VLPSRUWDQW

      I really like this because I don't see it often and it actually does draw my eye to the data and capture my interest.

    1. Problematicrepresentationsandbiasesinclassificationsarenotnew

      Not only are these representations nothing new to our society but they probably never will be old. Opinions and representation are not only situational, those with voices and power will use that to their advantage, whether or not it will land us with other algorithms and stereotypes.

    2. nreality,informationmonopoliessuchasGooglehavetheabilitytoprioritizewebsearchresultsonthebasisofavarietyoftopics,suchaspromotingtheirownbusinessinterestsoverthoseofcompetitorsorsmallercompaniesthatarelessprofitableadvertisingclientsthanlargermultinationalcorporationsare.

      It's a good thing google was exposed to the issues at hand and took action. As several other people have already mentioned in their annotations google has seen and responded to the racist algorithms and improved the search results drastically. This will teach youth much better examples of equality and power.

    3. Figure1.7.GoogleImagesresultswhensearchingtheconcept“beautiful”(didnotincludetheword“women”),December4,2014

      You can even see that the pictures for "beautiful men" were images of young, Caucasian males with chiseled, "imperfect" bodies. When did people decide that other cultures, shapes, and ethnicities weren't beautiful? It's a tragedy that we're recovering from globally and that will have tainted the visions of beauty for many people.

    4. Whileservingasanimportantanddisturbingcritiqueofsexistattitudes,thecampaignfailstoimplicatethealgorithmsorsearchenginesthatdrivecertainresultstothetop.Thischaptermovesthelensontothesearcharchitectureitselfinordertoshedlightonthemanyfactorsthatkeepsexistandracistideasonthefirstpage.

      I think that this is incredibly important because while in the past years these campaigns and societal viewpoints have changed and come so far, for the better, there is still the ugly truth that there are and have been these algorithms and thoughts in the past that people were so unaware of. Many people, even people who may be very aware of what's happening in the world, need to be reminded and educated on these issues. Myself included, of course.

    1. humanities scholars have collaborated with computer scientists to build tools to facilitate these essential functions of the humanities in new ways.

      I believe that the collaboration between subjects is necessary to understand ideas and theories in a more holistic way. To successfully write a scientific journal on a new medical accomplishment one must understand how to use language, grammar, and vocabulary. To paint a world renowned artwork masterpiece, one must understand the mathematics of symmetry, spacing, and measurements. It seems only natural to me that the humanities partner with all disciplines to convey its topics and research, and computer science is one such discipline that makes the humanities more applicable and accessible by researchers and public alike.

    2. Image processing involves taking a two-dimensional image that has been con-verted into digital format, making enhancements such as sharpening, changing color balances, saturation and exposure, cropping or straight-ening; annotating by adding metadata for location, date, content and so forth; and setting parameters such as color mode, compression format and size.

      This has recovered so many almost unrecognizable images from the past it's amazing. All these old, damaged documents that have been digitally revitalized is so wonderful, considering all the information we have obtained from said articles and photos.

    3. To be useful, once data is gathered, it must be inspected, cleaned, transformed and modeled to discover useful information, arrive at conclusions and support decision making.

      and presented in an organized manner so we can actually follow it!

    4. More sophisticated tools can per-form high-end linguistic 'analysis, such as tagging parts of speech (POS), creating concordances, collating versions, analyzing sentiments and keyword density/prominence, visualizing patterns, exploring intertex-tual parallels and modeling topics

      I like how this method is relatable because the analysis is what we've been familiar with through high school and university. For example in Literary Studies we learnt how to dissect poetry and pieces of literature. With the text analysis we can use the tactics we're already familiar with.

    5. Searching(including VJSual Searching): Most users are familiar with search engines like Goggle and Yahoo,

      Google Scholar is a students best friend.

    6. Video and Audio Processing Tools: These control the alteration of digital acoustic and video files and can include enhancement, clean-ing, mixing and cutting, annotation and compression.

      Anyone who has bee to a live concert after listening to the same songs on a cd or itunes can appreciate audio processing tools, as some artists sound far different without some digital "tweaking". The same goes for video, editing tools can create a entirely different product than the one shot live.

    7. digital text annotation is simply adding notes or glosses to a document, for instance, putting sticky-note comments on a PDF file for personal use.

      A more environmentally friendly way to make notes and organize thoughts, rather that printing off 80 pages of print, times 50 students, to preform comparative analysis on.

    8. The tools that have been developed since that time have helped scholars to collect material, encode it, study it with text mining and data analysis, map it using anything from Google Maps to geographic information systems (GIS), visualize it-sometimes using video, 3D or virtual reality recreations -create digital archives, incor-porate and analyze sound -anything from speech to music to noise

      The sheer depth to which we are now able to study particular things with these tools is mind-boggling. Instead of being satisfied with your local library or towns collective Library resources, you can search for information across the globe, while not leaving your home. To be able to share and collaborate and display your work in an online forum is equally as amazing, considering how quickly this has come about.

    9. This process creates a three-dimensional solid object based on computer-generated models

      This allows researchers and students to manipulate objects in their hands and explore different textures on the surface that 3D modeling just does not offer. It most definitely was a great invention!

    10. Their effectiveness for reading manuscript books has evolved greatly over the past decade, but they still require much direct intervention or "instruction" on the part of a researcher or other investigator.

      I wonder what can be done to help increase the effectiveness of these apps? Handwritten letters can be hard to read depending on the persons neatness, maybe a larger database with a wider range of handwriting samples could be used to increase the independence of the app?

    11. digital text annotation is simply adding notes or glosses to a document, for instance, putting sticky-note comments on a PDF file for personal use.

      This really does help determine where your thoughts come from while writing a paper so that credit can be given where it is due to help minimize plagiarism.

    1. A searchable map of the addresses contained in the 1956 Negro Travelers’ Green Book, which the user can filter by state or establishment type.

      As someone interested in geography and history, this application of the digital humanities is particularly intriguing. While I still do not fully grasp everything that digital humanities is and aims to do, I appreciate that the platform it gives can reach a far wider audience, myself included. There are so many things I would never have had the privilege of viewing if not for people participating in this discipline.

    2. Many  students tell me that in order to get started with digital humanities, they’d like to have some idea of what they might do and what technical skills they might need in order to do it.

      This is definitely me. I had no idea what to expect from digital humanities and still don't. I'm enjoying learning as we go and these articles definitely help.

    3. An essay, accompanied by photographs, video, and sound, that can be reconfigured by the viewer to be read in multiple ways.

      I really enjoy this layout for a project because not only is it easy to understand and navigate but it incorporates all of this generation's favourite medias; photo, video, sound, and text.

    1. fleeing humanities and related fields specifically because they think they have poor job prospects

      But again this is a generalization across a WIDE range of different schools, so conclusions about places where students rack up $200k debts may not apply to places where they do not.

    2. democratization of access has diluted the prominence of the humanities

      Or maybe the humanities & History courses have failed to adapt to the needs and interests of these new students?

    3. history majors, which fell by 20 percent

      This seems to be the bigger issue. Can we craft a better pitch for why students ought to major in History? If not, can we focus more on OTHER ways to add value for majority of undergrads in other majors?

    4. 1950. Since then, the humanities have seen three eras. The first ran from 1955 to 1985. As normal schools around the country, set up to educate teachers, transformed into comprehensive universities, men and women alike poured into English and history majors; then, when the economy soured and the growth of higher education slowed in the 1970s, the boom turned to bust, and humanities majors collapsed nationwide. The second phase began around 1985 and ran to 2008. This was a long period of stability; majors in the four largest (and easiest to track over the long term) humanities majors held steady, with modest fluctuations. Since 2008, the crisis of the humanities has resumed, with percentage drops that are beginning to approach those of 40 years ago. Unlike the drops of the ’70s, though, there’s no preexisting bubble to deflate. And there’s no compelling demographic explanation. Five years ago, it was reasonable to look at these numbers and conclude that the long-term story is all about gender. Men majored in humanities fields at the same rate in the 1990s as they had in the 1950s, while women, seeing more options in the workforce, increasingly turned to majors in business fields.

      The interesting elements here are teacher-training (Normal) schools becoming universities and the decrease in women students as they increasingly found viable career paths beyond the "Mrs" degree.

    5. wake of the 2008 financial crisis

      Interesting to correlate this change with non-recovery from Great Recession for most people.

    6. History is down about 45 percent from its 2007 peak

      But what can we say about the "peak" that could help us understand the change?

    1. 60 percent of the institutions responding to the survey offered graduate-level history courses, and the average graduate enrollment fell over 12 percent, from 205 in 2013–14 to 180 in 2016–17.

      This is a completely different issue. How many new History MAs and PhDs does American actually need per year?

    2. enrollment in introductory history courses does not appear to be leading the overall decline

      Because undergrad History surveys fill a core requirement, but also because they support other programs, esp. where faculty are not distracted by focus on grad students/research? How many of the surveys at PhD schools are taught by senior faculty vs. contingent?

    3. total undergraduate history enrollments rose 5 percent from 2015–16 to 2016–17. In sharp contrast, enrollment in undergraduate history courses fell 6 percent between 2014–15 and 2015–16 at the 17 responding institutions classified as Master’s Colleges and Universities

      History course enrollments up at institutions like mine where BA is highest degree, down at MA and PhD institutions. What TYPES of courses increased? What happened to major/minor numbers?

    4. total undergraduate enrollments in history courses fell 7.7 percent, from 323,883 to 298,821.

      Overall decline in undergrad enrollment dropped substantially over a three-year period that does NOT seem to correlate with an economic crisis or other obvious "cause".

    1. Humanities scholars can also use a project site to publicize what I call their intellectual bank.

      Sharing research on a digital platform creates the ability to reach many more people. A Ted talk, for example, can be viewed live by say, a couple thousand people; throw it up on the world wide web and your audience just grew exponentially.

    2. but it’s much easier than you think

      I beg to differ. I am currently taking three courses, a psych and a geography in addition to this one. I have spent the most time on this one, with the least results. However, that just means the rewards will be greater when I figure it all out, right? As well, everything I learn in this course could be applied to many other subjects, which is an exciting prospect. I found the black on grey extremely hard to read, something I will keep in mind when creating my own blog.

    3. One thing humanities scholars are really great at doing is reading, connecting ideas and writing about it. We know stuff! However, that work (and it is intellectual labor) is invisible and largely undervalued.  Yet it forms the foundation of all good scholarship. All people see is the footnote on an article or a note in a chapter in a book. Humanities faculty, unlike their STEM counterparts, do not have labs. We do not have a place for our work and no one sees our process. While there are bibliographic managers that help scholars manage their sources, actually writing about the things you read and how they speak to each other in a way that people can access makes it more likely that humanities scholars will have conversations with others who share your research interests.

      Sharing research encourages communication and the development of ideas and theories which is what research is all about so blog spaces and web spaces are a great way to achieve this successfully and across the web.

    1. using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.

      Libraries will never go out of style, and there is nothing quite like curling up in your favourite cozy spot, be it the beach or a recliner by the fireplace, and escaping into a good book. However, having access to a multitude of peer reviewed research articles at the tips of your fingers makes a world of difference, especially to students. As a working single Mom, having the ability to tuck my kid in at night and sit down to look up resources has made education much more accessible. For young students juggling jobs and school, I am sure this is an invaluable tool as well.

    2. No one person could digest the work’s enormous amount of material, and no single printing could render it accurately, so Mr. Foys created a prize-winning digital version with commentary that scholars could scroll through.

      It is absolutely INSANE that they were able to digitally map a 224 feet long, 11th century tapestry so that scholars could scroll through it and study it. I cannot wrap my brain around this, it's just something I never thought people would do or even could do. This fact has opened my eyes quite a bit.

    3. He offered the human genome project as an example of how an area of study can be transformed: “Technology hasn’t just made astronomy, biology and physics more efficient. It has let scientists do research they simply couldn’t do before.”

      These advanced have progressed medicine and sciences so far it's incredible. Think of all of the treatments and research data we never would've had without these advancements and technologies. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved or qualities of life improved due to technology and it's only going to keep going.

    1. At the ICCH conference in Columbia, South Carolina, in spring 1987 a group of people mostly working in support roles in humanities computing got together and agreed that they needed to find a way of keeping in touch on a regular basis.

      To think that we use online chats so casually, with family, friends and colleagues from all over the world, and it was only thirty short years ago that the first "electronic seminar" was introduced.

    2. Now that the Internet is such a dominant feature of everyday life, the opportunity exists for humanities computing to reach out much further than has hitherto been possible.

      I was just finishing high school when the internet became mainstream. In the following twenty-three years, we have seen an explosion of new developments as well as greater access to technology that is still relatively new. The implications for how knowledge can be shared and expanded upon is incredible.

    3. The TEI's adoption as a model in digital library projects raised some interesting issues about the whole philosophy of the TEI, which had been designed mostly by scholars who wanted to be as flexible as possible. Any TEI tag can be redefined and tags can be added where appropriate

      Question - What were some of the issues that arose with the TEI's adoption as a model in digital library projects?

      The ability to add tags where needed throughout the texts seems to be a positive aspect due to the added ease of searching key words and it being included in said search.

    4. An additional dimension was added to humanities electronic resources in the early 1990s, when it became possible to provide multimedia information in the form of images, audio, and video.

      This addition to the media made internet education and research even more advanced and helpful. And it also added a whole new level to entertainment that is very wonderful!

    5. At this time much attention was paid to the limitations of the technology. Data to be analyzed were either texts or numbers. They were input laboriously by hand either on punched cards, with each card holding up to eighty characters or one line of text (uppercase letters only), or on paper tape, where lower-case letters were perhaps possible but which could not be read in any way at all by a human being. Father Busa has stories of truckloads of punched cards being transported from one center to another in Italy. All computing was carried out as batch processing, where the user could not see the results at all until printout appeared when the job had run. Character-set representation was soon recognized as a substantial problem and one that has only just begun to be solved now with the advent of Unicode, although not for every kind of humanities material. Various methods were devised to represent upper- and lower-case letters on punched cards, most often by inserting an asterisk or similar character before a true upper-case letter. Accents and other non-standard characters had to be treated in a similar way and non-Roman alphabets were represented entirely in transliteration.

      I find it very interesting how materials made by human beings were put into a machine and rendered virtually unintelligible until man came through again by creating a code. It's fascinating to read how much work "creating the internet" was and it makes me very appreciative that I wasn't the one who had to do it.

  31. Apr 2019
    1. Such study “opens one to the examination of the entirety of the human condition and encourages one to grapple with complex moral issues ever-present in life.”
  32. Mar 2019
    1. Living in a media ghetto means less that my views are shaped and improved, much less challenged, than that they are hardened and made more extreme;

      Some of the reasons why views are getting so extreme.

  33. Feb 2019
    1. Given that many of my fellow Chefs are likely to focus on the scientific article, I’m going to highlight some of the exciting trends in the humanities

      useful insights here re: scholarly publishing in the humanities

  34. Jan 2019
    1. For clearly it applies not only to rhetoric, but to all teachmgof tne arts and letters, to everything we call the humanities.

      Why don't we ask this question in STEM? If rhetoric is applicable in every sphere, then surely there must be something worth examining on that level. Could this have to do with the different ways in which we approach epistemology in STEM versus the humanities, or is there something more to this lack of discourse?

  35. Dec 2018
  36. Jun 2018
    1. arguments scholars make about The Making of Americans are based on limited knowledge of the text’s underlying structure because the underlying patterns are difficult to discern with close reading.

      Human eye/analysis is limited. Technology enhances visibility.

    2. The first part introduces what Marjorie Perloff calls “differential reading,” which positions close and distant reading practices as both subjective and objective methodologies.

      Is New Historicism close or distant reading? The latter, right? But nonetheless deeply human, perhaps more so than "close reading" criticized as privileging text over lived reality.

  37. May 2018
    1. in search of a guiding philosophy

      Is it "in search of" or in avoidance of?

    2. Philosophers and others in the field of the humanities who helped shape previous concepts of world order tend to be disadvantaged, lacking knowledge of AI’s mechanisms or being overawed by its capacities.

      They are also disadvantaged because their fields are undervalued and underappreciated.

  38. Apr 2018
    1. Rather than shun the "tyranny of relevance" — a concept within the liberal-arts community that refers to the need to demonstrate tangible benefits of humanities-research funding — we should embrace it.

      Yes!

    2. The need to understand the human dimensions and impacts of those advances, as well as the basis for making many of the ethical decisions that should guide their use, has never been greater.

      In fact, this is a very specific aspect of humanistic studies: technology studies and any and all related fields.

  39. Mar 2018
    1. accelerated growth of undergraduate classes that explicitly engage with digital humanities methods.

      This is important! I think that many classes are starting to use digital tools to asses and accelerate learning in their classrooms and it would be important to take a class in digital humanities in order to get a background into the different tools/methods presented.

  40. Feb 2018
    1. "First, we need to know more about how graduates with humanities degrees are doing in the workplace. Second, we need to know more about how the skills the humanities seek to impart -- critical thinking and communication skills, for instance -- actually matter in the workplace. And third, we need to be willing to adjust our views about which humanities aptitudes are significant (or not) in the extraordinarily dynamic workplace of the coming decades. Along the way, we’re also going to have to get a better grip on just how well we’re doing in fostering the capabilities we deem most relevant to work readiness and success."

      This is an argument the Humanities will always lose.

  41. Oct 2017
    1. My hope is to position our work—the work of the digital humanities (DH) community that has nurtured me with kindness for some 18 years—less as it is lately figured (that is, less as a fragmenting set of methodological interventions in the contemporary, disciplinary agon of humanities scholarship) and more as one cohesive and improbably hopeful possibility.

      I think the scope of what the author wants to do in positioning the work of the DH community as 'one cohesive and improbably hopeful possibility' is idealistic. The reason I say this is that as a new student to DH, I am still trying to define what DH actually is and the many areas of scholarship it can be applied to. I do believe that it is very fragmented and to be honest cannot see at this stage how the author could possibly position DH cohesively.

    1. While one could manually “count” references across a novel or ouvre, or attempt to estimate relative occurrence, a text analysis tool like Voyant can more easily provide textual evidence necessary to support an essay’s claim, or, if the evidence proves the writer “wrong,” help the writer re-evaluate her argument accordingly.

      Just a tool of efficiency or for noticing unrecognized patterns through a different means of analysis. Both, IMO.

    1. Network graphs that connect characters are fun to explore for a similar reason.
    2. One of the main ways computers are changing the textual humanities is by mediating new connections to social science. The statistical models that help sociologists understand social stratification and social change haven’t in the past contributed much to the humanities, because it’s been difficult to connect quantitative models to the richer, looser sort of evidence provided by written documents.

      DH as moving English more toward the statistical...

    1. I recognize that much of what provoked me to turn to literature in the first place—vital, daring, and meditative expressions of human experience—is there. It is there in the naked lyric of a blog post celebrating or mourning some personal or public event. It is there in the classical drama of a brawling, controversial Wikipedia article whose behind-the-scenes “talk” page stages the chorus of the “rule of many” or “wisdom of crowds.”16 And it is there in the epic of all the social-news, shared-bookmark, or similar sites that build a portrait of collective life from constantly reshuffled excerpts, links, and tags from that life akin to Homeric formulae. Above all, as a literature professor, I recognize that—viral YouTube videos aside—the vast preponderance of Web 2.0 is an up-close and personal experience of language.

      Great explanation, for me, of the turn to DH.

    1. In the words of rhetorician Richard Lanham, we will learn to look both "at" and "through" digital tools.

      This is great: digital as means but also object of study.

    1. a tool and our central object of study.

      Love this too. Learning to use the technology, but also reflecting on its significance.

    2. continually rethink both the process and products of the graduate seminar

      I love the process and products here. New research methods and new method of publication.

  42. Jun 2017
    1. Nowadays, it would be hard to find a humanist who doesn't use a com- puter in some aspect of his work. The computing humanist has evolved into a scholar who not only uses the computer in his work, but also engages with the methodological and theoretical aspects of computer use in humanities disciplines. The ways in which technology is used by humanists has diversi- fied to span everything from word processor use and web page creation to the development and use of complex software systems for analysis of a broad range of data types, including not only literary and historical texts but also databases of humanities information, images, and sound. As a result, in recent years CHum has come to serve an increasingly wide array of disci- plines and research areas - English, History, New Media, Music, Corpus Linguistics, Comlutational Linguistics, and many others - and received top- notch submissions in all of them. For most of its history, the diversity of disciplines and methodologies represented in CHum's articles enabled cross- fertilization of ideas which was highly valued by the community. However, as computer use in the humanities has come to span an increasingly broad range of activities, and as computational methodologies evolve and become more sophisticated and specialized, it has become more and more difficult to retain that diversity and at the same time provide enough articles relevant to a particular area of interest. It seems, then, that the time has come to narrow the journal's focus in order to best serve its readers

      On the narrowing of COmputing and the Humanities

    1. Advocates position Digital Humanities as a corrective to the “traditional” and outmoded approaches to literary study that supposedly plague English departments. Like much of the rhetoric surrounding Silicon Valley today, this discourse sees technological innovation as an end in itself and equates the development of disruptive business models with political progress.

      From this start, this article doesn't seem based in the same reality I've been observing.

      1) I don't see/or hear DH as a "corrective" so much as an "alternative."

      2) DH seems pretty self-conscious about Silicon Valley utopianism. In fact, I'd argue that it's voices from DH that have been most savvy about deconstructing that rhetoric.

    1. literature became data

      Doesn't this obfuscate the process? Literature became digital. Digital enables a wide range of futther activity to take place on top of literature, including, perhaps, it's datafication.

    1. Don’t we have to actually read the books, before saying what the patterns discovered in them mean?

      Yes, of course. But it's ironic that this three post tirade begins with a rather distant reading of the MLA program.

    2. But does the data point inescapably in that direction?

      In the above performance of close reading, is the evidence more "inescapable"? Isn't is always in the fullness of the argumentation no matter where the data comes from?

    3. The direction of my inferences is critical: first the interpretive hypothesis and then the formal pattern, which attains the status of noticeability only because an interpretation already in place is picking it out.

      Is this really how it played/plays out? I have an idea about something that I then confirm in the facts?

    1. The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college/uni­versity education, in virtually every nation of the world.
    1. Traditionalists argue that emphasizing professional skills would betray the humanities' responsibility to honor the great monuments of culture for their own sake.

      I continue to think this binary is false. Perhaps historically the liberal arts was established and viewed as an oasis. But in my experience there was always a connection between my academic work, from grade school to grad school, and the "real world." The connection might not always have been as direct and explicit to be vocational, but nonetheless is was there and it was felt.

    1. When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.

      LOL. I was in the middle of a dissertation when this was published: not just an English major, but a doctoral candidate.

    1. I will not be attending the Modern Language Association meeting in Seattle (Jan. 5-8), but I have read through the program to see what’s going on and what’s no longer going on in literary studies.

      Isn't this a little like a movie reviewer saying, "I haven't seen this movie, but here's the problem with it"?

  43. Apr 2017
    1. p. 12 at the time she was writing, many respondents said they were the only members of their HSS departments with a computer and an internet connection.

    2. p. 2

      Originally wanted to study HSS and STEM but scientists didn't qulify. See chapter III

    1. Srigley explores a couple of points that I touched on in my article, but didn’t fully understand. This first is what I’ve referred to as the “bullshit factor,” or the ability that my English major friends and I believed we possessed to “bamboozle” our professors with our sparkling prose and strikingly original analysis. It took me into my fourth year to realize that, in my arrogance, I hadn’t realized who was playing who. The professors saw right through our bullshit, but for various reasons were unwilling to call us on it. Instead they coddled us, encouraged us, praised us – and awarded us grades we didn’t deserve.

      The Bullshit factor! Interesting argument that the faculty realise but don't call the students on it. But I wonder. It can also be a question of effort: if you want to bullshit your way through college, who am I to stop you? As a rule, I'm generally not interested in those students, as opposed to either the ones who are doing great work or poor work but are not BSers.

  44. Mar 2017
    1. y. Writing and talking are not merely tools of our trade; they are our product and our raw material and the subjects of our investiga- Patrick W. Conner is Professor of English at West Virginia University where he teaches and researches Anglo-Saxon language and literature. He is the author of Anglo-Saxon Exeter (Boydell and Brewer, 1992) and the editor of The Abingdon Chronicle, volume 12 in the Collaborative Edi- tion of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (forthcoming). He is also creator of The Beowulf Workstation, a HyperCard application to aid students in studying Beowulf. tion

      On the work of the humanist

    1. One of the earliest nonscience scholarly uses of this technology was the listHumanist,

      Humanist claimed as one of the earliest uses of Listserv for nonscience scholarly work

    1. university president public years center research million national latimes san executive major project board humanities

      The word humanities appears in this third-largest topic of the model. It is an institutional topic, with words about organizations, officers, governing structures, development and resources.

    1. The very scientific ideals of an "imper-!;CUJ,\~ sonal'' terminology can contribute ironically to ~tv., such disaster: for it is but a step from treating I · o· ,~. inanimate nature as mere "things" to treating ani-(.M,"J" t4"'\~ mals, and then enemy peoples, as mere things

      This also reminds me of common appeals to the humanities: we need the humanities because we don't want science to get out of control and forget the very human consequences of advancements and experiments, such as war technology.

  45. Feb 2017
    1. This Armillary Sphere was made of laser cut particle board.  We debated whether we should build the model out of wood, metal, or 3D print it, but we settled on cutting it from wood.  Once we settled on a material and method of building, we then went through several different images and models to decide how to build it.  The design we went with worked best with a solid stand that would allow the meridian to rotate between the horizon.  Next, we used Adobe Illustrator to create the rings and print the cardinal directions and degrees, which was then cut or etched into the wood by the laser cutter.  The pieces were fit together, and two nails were used to allow the globe and its parts to rotate.  The Earth is a Styrofoam ball suspended by a wooden dowel.  Once the pieces were cut, it was a matter of putting them together and making sure that the zodiac was in the correct orientation.

      This is a fantastic example of what humanities students can do in a maker space.

  46. Jan 2017
    1. affairs

      It's interesting that rhetoric started as this practical system for ancient Greek society, but then comes Bloom and other people Lanham talks about whose interpretation of humanism, rhetoric and the university is super apolitical, with the humanities in the university separate from society.

    1. puremotiveswhichhumanismatthepresentdayisusuallythoughttorequire.Ifyouvoteforthecloister,thenyoucannolongerpretend

      I am curious if in some ways this piece is a little outdated (I think it was published in 93?). Does the university view humanities/humanism in this way? But mostly, the piece refers a lot to separation of the disciplines and separation of rhetoric and action, and I wonder if that has changed recently. For example, WGS departments are on the rise, and they often discuss the world outside of academia or even have an activism/volunteer component to their courses, and of course they are very interdisciplinary. I'm just curious what a super recent response to this piece would look like in light of how interdisciplinary the humanities are.

  47. Nov 2016
    1. The 1620 agreement (first called the Mayflower Compact in 1793) was a legal instrument that bound the Pilgrims together when they arrived in New England. The core members of the Pilgrims' immigrant group were Separatists, members of a Puritan sect that had split from the Church of England, the only legal church in England at that time. Others in the group, however, had remained part of the Church of England, so not all of the Pilgrims shared the same religion.

      The Mayflower compact was a signature sheet that would be used for the signers to go to America for religious freedom.

    1. the initiative

      The College of Arts & Letters is home to the Digital Humanities program, which includes an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate. Rather than establishing Critical Diversity in a Digital Age as an independent initiative, we might perhaps better understand it as the very method through in which we practice digital humanities at MSU.

      If DH@MSU is animated by a critical diversity approach, we will develop a curriculum that refines our focus on critical diversity in a digital age.

      By focusing on diversifying the DH curriculum, we should be able to attract a more diverse group of strong undergraduates and to recruit a cohort of innovative faculty and graduate students from traditionally underrepresented groups.

    2. As we develop the Critical Diversity in a Digital Age initiative, we invite annotations and comments here on Hypothes.is.

      Please use the #MSUCDDA tag to help us curate engagement with the initiative here on Hypothes.is.

  48. Oct 2016
    1. In general, humanities scholars have neglected editorial work because the reward structures in the academy have not favored editing but instead literary and cultural theory. Many academics fail to recognize the theoretical sophistication, historical knowledge, and analytical strengths necessary to produce a sound text or texts and the appropriate scholarly apparatus for a first-rate edition.

      Reasons why scholarly editions aren't valued in the academy (c 2008)

  49. Sep 2016
    1. As many universities are being queried by the federal government on how they spend their endowment money, and enrollment decreases among all institutions nationally, traditional campuses will need to look at these partnerships as a sign of where education is likely going in the future, and what the federal government may be willing to finance with its student loan programs going ahead.

      To me, the most interesting about this program is that it sounds like it’s targeting post-secondary institutions. There are multiple programs to “teach kids to code”. Compulsory education (primary and secondary) can provide a great context for these, in part because the type of learning involved is so broad and pedagogical skills are so recognized. In post-secondary contexts, however, there’s a strong tendency to limit coding to very specific contexts, including Computer Science or individual programs. We probably take for granted that people who need broad coding skills can develop them outside of their college and university programs. In a way, this isn’t that surprising if we’re to compare coding to very basic skills, like typing. Though there are probably many universities and colleges where students can get trained in typing, it’s very separate from the curriculum. It might be “college prep”, but it’s not really a college prerequisite. And there isn’t that much support in post-secondary education. Of course, there are many programs, in any discipline, giving a lot of weight to coding skills. For instance, learners in Digital Humanities probably hone in their ability to code, at some point in their career. And it’s probably hard for most digital arts programs to avoid at least some training in programming languages. It’s just that these “general” programs in coding tend to focus almost exclusively on so-called “K–12 Education”. That this program focuses on diversity is also interesting. Not surprising, as many such initiatives have to do with inequalities, real or perceived. But it might be where something so general can have an impact in Higher Education. It’s also interesting to notice that there isn’t much in terms of branding or otherwise which explicitly connects this initiative with colleges and universities. Pictures on the site show (diverse) adults, presumably registered students at universities and colleges where “education partners” are to be found. But it sounds like the idea of a “school” is purposefully left quite broad or even ambiguous. Of course, these programs might also benefit adult learners who aren’t registered at a formal institution of higher learning. Which would make it closer to “para-educational” programs. In fact, there might something of a lesson for the future of universities and colleges.

    2. As many universities are being queried by the federal government on how they spend their endowment money, and enrollment decreases among all institutions nationally, traditional campuses will need to look at these partnerships as a sign of where education is likely going in the future, and what the federal government may be willing to finance with its student loan programs going ahead.

      To me, the most interesting about this program is that it sounds like it’s targeting post-secondary institutions. There are multiple programs to “teach kids to code”. Compulsory education (primary and secondary) can provide a great context for these, in part because the type of learning involved is so broad and pedagogical skills are so recognized. In post-secondary contexts, however, there’s a strong tendency to limit coding to very specific contexts, including Computer Science or individual programs. We probably take for granted that people who need broad coding skills can develop them outside of their college and university programs. In a way, this isn’t that surprising if we’re to compare coding to very basic skills, like typing. Though there are probably many universities and colleges where students can get trained in typing, it’s very separate from the curriculum. It might be “college prep”, but it’s not really a college prerequisite. And there isn’t that much support in post-secondary education. Of course, there are many programs, in any discipline, giving a lot of weight to coding skills. For instance, learners in Digital Humanities probably hone in their ability to code, at some point in their career. And it’s probably hard for most digital arts programs to avoid at least some training in programming languages. It’s just that these “general” programs in coding tend to focus almost exclusively on so-called “K–12 Education”. That this program focuses on diversity is also interesting. Not surprising, as many such initiatives have to do with inequalities, real or perceived. But it might be where something so general can have an impact in Higher Education. It’s also interesting to notice that there isn’t much in terms of branding or otherwise which explicitly connects this initiative with colleges and universities. Pictures on the site show (diverse) adults, presumably registered students at universities and colleges where “education partners” are to be found. But it sounds like the idea of a “school” is purposefully left quite broad or even ambiguous. Of course, these programs might also benefit adult learners who aren’t registered at a formal institution of higher learning. Which would make it closer to “para-educational” programs. In fact, there might something of a lesson for the future of universities and colleges.

    1. Some people define DH as divided into “hack” -- those who code and make digital things -- and “yack” -- those who critique and analyze “the digital.” I’m also interested in “stack” -- how do the structures of organizations and institutions enable or inhibit what we want to do? The people who “hack” and “yack” can’t work without the people in the “stack” (or without the people in the library stacks).
  50. Aug 2016
    1. Page 8

      Jockers talking about the old approach in the 1990s to anecdotal evidence:

      … in the 1990s, gathering literary evidence meant reading books, noting "things" (a phallic symbol here, a bibliographical reference there, a stylistic flourish, an allusion, and so on) and then interpreting: making sense and arguments out of those observations. Today, in the age of digital libraries and large-scale book-digitization projects, the nature of the "evidence" available to us has changed, radically. Which is not to say that we should no longer read books looking for, or noting, random "things," but rather to emphasize that massive digital corpora offer is unprecedented access to literally record an invite, even demand, a new type of evidence gathering and meaning making. The literary scholar of the 21st-century can no longer be content with anecdotal evidence, with random "things" gathered from a few, even "representative," text. We must strive to understand the things we find interesting in the context of everything else, including a massive possibly "uninteresting" text.

    2. Pages 7 and 8

      Jockers is talking here about Ian Watt’s method in Rise of the Novel

      What are we to do with the other three to five thousand works of fiction published in the eighteenth century? What of the works that Watt did not observe and account for with his methodology, and how are we to now account for works not penned by Defoe, by Richardson, or by Fielding? Might other novelists tell a different story? Can we, in good conscience, even believe that Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding are representative writers? Watt’s sampling was not random; it was quite the opposite. But perhaps we only need to believe that these three (male) authors are representative of the trend towards "realism" that flourished in the nineteenth century. Accepting this premise makes Watts magnificent synthesis into no more than a self-fulfilling project, a project in which the books are stacked in advance. No matter what we think of the sample, we must question whether in fact realism really did flourish. Even before that, we really ought to define what it means "to flourish" in the first place. Flourishing certainly seems to be the sort of thing that could, and ought, to be measured. Watt had no yardstick against which to make such a measurement. He had only a few hundred texts that he had read. Today things are different. The larger literary record can no longer be ignored: it is here, and much of it is now accessible.