Jennifer Vinopal (New York University) asks the question, “how do you cope with the possibility that the tools you are using may be biased (or error prone) and that the “black box” is sending you down the wrong research highway?” Vinopal relates her experience using a text analysis tool that revealed the term “e-books” was ...

Kevin Smith (Scholarly Communications Officer, Duke University) introduces Fair Use week, taking place Feb. 24-28, and organized by the Harvard Library’s Office for Scholarly Communication. Smith contextualizes this celebration, noting that fair use: is today one of the most important underpinnings of scholarship.  We argue about its scope sometimes, but we rely on it everyday.  The ...

Lincoln A. Mullen (Ph.D. Candidate, Brandeis University) has written a series of posts analyzing historical history dissertations using data from the Proquest Dissertations and Theses Database. Mullen was able to obtain two “dumps” from the database: From the MARC records that ProQuest gave me, I’ve been able to extract a number of fields, only some ...

Caro Pinto (Mount Holyoke College) discusses her experience co-teaching the course Media Archaeology, Digital Humanities & The Archives, which experimented with the concept of a humanities lab in the classroom. Projects included appraising digital photos, taking apart an iMac, and running programs on a C-64. Pinto also discusses how librarians need to adapt their pedagogical ...

In a post to her website, Digital Humanities Librarian Laurien Taylor (University of Florida) discusses the use of community-sourcing and scholar-sourcing in her work. These terms, Taylor argues, are distinct from “crowdsourcing” because they are more targeted in scope, focusing not on “the entire online world” but on commitments at the institutional level, which in ...

Ed Summers (Library of Congress) has written a brief post about playing with interviews from the Paris Review and Wikipedia articles, and his attempts to use JSON-LD and D3 for network visualization. His post is a great example of the way that a passing interest in something can be an entry into new technology skills. It also demonstrates ...

Trevor Owens (Library of Congress) has written an intriguing post on The Signal that considers the future direction of interfaces to digital collections by examining the rescue of Geocities data by a group of digital preservationists known as the Archive Team. Owens explains: Through data dumps of full sets of raw data, cultural heritage organizations can consider embracing ...

Bethany Nowviskie has written a post outlining the history of the familiar digital humanities phrase, “more hack; less yack.” She provides essential context behind the much-debated term: In other words, isn’t “more hack; less yack” really just a strawman? I only find it being used in earnest beyond the academic DH community—and, when pressed, even ...

Johanna Drucker has written an article for the Los Angles Review of Books discussing the misconception that digital technology will “cure” academic publishing: To make sure humanities scholarship thrives, it is crucial that we cut through the fog of pixel dust–induced illusion to the practical realities of what digital technology offers to scholarship. Among the ...

Ashley Maynard has written an introduction to digital humanities for librarians. The post is part of a series published for Hack Library School’s Digital Humanities Week. Reflecting on her new role as Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Tennessee Libraries, Maynard offers suggestions and resources for getting started in digital humanities.  Maynard also remarks what many of ...