This weekend saw the first meeting of NYCDH, an exciting initiative to join the various digital humanities efforts on campuses across the city under one umbrella group. The event, which was moderated by Ray Siemens and Lynne Siemens of the University of Victoria and DHSI, was meant to build community among what can often be disparate organizations despite our physical proximity. Just like Digital Experiments, the NYU DH...
There's been a lot of recent discussion about how to incorporate tools of the digital humanities into teaching, with a panel on the topic proposed for the 2014 ASECS and a book, Brett Hirsch's Digital Humanities Pedagogy, just out from Open Book Publishers. This question goes to the heart of how to define DH—as a field, subfield, speciality, discipline, etc.—and of its role in the humanities writ large. There...
Well, it looks like the government reading our letters isn't only a historical analogy: in the wake of the NSA leaks, the Times reveals that the government records metadata for all paper mail, too. It should remind us once again that what we think of the quintessentially private form of communication—the sealed letter—in fact travels through many hands and many levels of government bureaucracy before reaching a recipient. This...
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...
David Simon demonstrated a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the narrative form in which he operates when he came out against the now-ubiquitous phenomenon of weekly TV recapping. Simon argues about recappers, "They don’t know what we’re building. And by the way, that’s true for the people who say we’re great. They don’t know. It doesn’t matter whether they love it or they hate it. It doesn’t mean anything...
I had a pretty exciting Wednesday this week - helping IBM make computers smarter than humans. Designers at their Watson research facility in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., are designing a computer to play Jeopardy, and as a former contestant living in the New York metro area, they asked me to come "spar" with the machine. Turns out they were looking for average Jeopardy contestants like myself - those who...
Fascinating conference today and yesterday at Yale Law School on new media, journalism and economic models for the future. A combination of the usual suspects (Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Brill) and a variety of journalists, law professors, economists, sociologists ... One of the great things the conference is doing is enacting its precepts with a live video stream, live blog and constant Twitter updates - it's even creating a...
Blog vs. Blog On a slightly related note: isn't it funny how certain segments of Internet users have appropriated the word "blog" to mean a post in a comments section? I've been noticing this for a while now, and you generally only see it on the Web sites of papers like the Register, whose readers have learned to leave comments but are generally not very Internet savvy. They...