"The opening of ... mail, like the revelations that the N.S.A. has been monitoring telephone, e-mail, and Internet use, illustrates the intricacy of the relationship between secrecy and privacy. Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves. ... As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom:...
I spent the past week at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, learning (among other things) how to use the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines to create digital editions of manuscript documents. I practiced on a set of seventeenth-century manuscript newsletters from the Bodleian Library's Carte collection, which I took photos of during a research trip last summer. I'm hoping to use...
The new digital exhibit "What Jane Saw," reconstructing Jane Austen's 1813 visit to a show of Sir Joshua Reynolds' paintings, has been getting a lot of attention, including a splashy feature in the Times. The exhibit shows off some of the best of the digital humanities, incorporating an aesthetically pleasing presentation that both offers real new knowledge for scholars of the period and reaches out to members of the public in...