The New York Times had an article today on the planned publication of Robert Frost's letters, arguing that the forthcoming volumes "could soften a battered image" and re-humanize Frost. The article sets up a familiar dynamic, pitting the biographers offering "their" versions of Frost's life against the letters, which, the article assumes, will show the "real" Frost. The collected correspondence, the author writes, will "offer the most rounded, complete...
At this year's MLA in Chicago, I was part of a great panel on "Geospatial Literary Studies" organized by David Wrisley of the American University in Beirut. The "geospatial humanities"—digital humanities work that emphasizes place and geography—has been expanding in the past few years, and this panel was the first devoted to the subject at MLA. The panelists presented some fabulous projects, from mapping bookstores in nineteenth-century Manhattan...
Among the many great points Ted Underwood makes in his recent blog response to Franco Moretti's latest work, I wanted to flag his brief opening observation about the Internet's effects on scholarly interaction. "If the Internet is good for anything," he writes, "it’s good for speeding up the Ent-like conversation between articles, to make that rumble more perceptible by human ears." Academics have been largely inured to the...
The Emily Dickinson Archive is the latest digital humanities project featured in The New York Times, and the latest to offer a more intimate connection with an author through images of letters, manuscripts, and other examples of handwriting. The site performs an incredible service in breaking down the institutional barriers between archives that can stymie scholarly investigation; the Times article details some infighting among the participating libraries, but they seem to...
On the eve of World Post Day, it's interesting to note that during this government shutdown debacle there has been no discussion about shutting down the U.S. Postal Service: it's just assumed that it will continue to run as usual. This appears to be so taken for granted that there are very few news articles even answering the question about whether mail delivery will continue, despite the fact...
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...
I'm very excited to talk about Shakespeare, digital humanities, and literary "myths" in today's Boston Globe!
Yesterday I had one of those amazing, serendipitous archival experiences that researchers romanticize (with good reason). As I was searching Britain's National Archives database for correspondence to and from Charles Hanbury Williams—an eighteenth-century diplomat whose letters I read at the Lewis Walpole Library last year—I found this entry: "An 'engagement' diary. Of a member of the Capell family (probably Frances, daughter of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams): the very concise entries...
I've just come back from the second of my two weeks of skills-building workshops this summer, and the connections between the two—the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and the Rare Book School—demonstrated again how past and present moments of media change continue to overlap. As I described below, during my week at DHSI in June, I learned how to use the TEI guidelines for digitizing manuscript documents. Last week...