Plenty of digital humanists have gotten quite good at knowing how to take text files and, as Steve Ramsay says, “screw around” with them in fairly sophisticated ways using various algorithms–TF-IDF, topic modeling, N+7. But lots of digital artifacts aren’t text. We aren’t (I’m supposing) as good at screwing around with those. So I want …
Category Archive: session-proposal
Oct 18
Where do games fit?
Catch-all for gamers, game-players, and the game-curious. A no-holds-barred arena for figuring out whether making and/or studying games really do(es) fall under DH, and for making a list of the possible ways to say “Yes, games are part of DH.” Above all, let’s compare notes on treatments of this question that we’ve run across, like …
Oct 18
DH Project Pattern Language
In at least two fields that I know of, practitioners make conscious use of documented patterns. You can’t swing a chicken without hitting them in the software and web development worlds, from the Gang of Four book to Yahoo’s design pattern library, perhaps throwing Twitter Bootstrap into the mix. Architecture holds a place as the …
Oct 18
Recreating the Irreproducible
So we can store everything in digital form now. Except when we can’t, when it’s something ephemeral that didn’t get persisted when it occurred. Except that maybe we can? I’d like to talk about the frontiers of digital recreations of irreproducible historical phenomena, like sound before recordings, not to mention things like smell, taste, and …
Oct 17
DH and the end user
As an academic librarian, I spend a majority of my time connecting end users with primary source materials and items created by you, the digital humanist, GIS wizard, archivist, etc.! I would like to have a discussion about the following topics: What do you want end users to know about searching for the information you’re …
Oct 16
Life and Scholarship in Plain Text
Last year at THATCamp New England I gave a workshop on using plain text for scholarship, especially using Markdown and Pandoc. Tom Scheinfeldt and Abby Mullen apparently struck some kind of deal whereby I am obligated to talk about Markdown, so here is a session proposal. I propose that we talk about how how to write …
Oct 16
Micro-Details in Macroanalysis
One of the usual drawbacks of a large-scale analysis of data is that details about the individual pieces of data are lost. We have to make the data fit into a specific mold in order to run our program, so we strip the individual pieces of data of their unique elements–the things that make them …
Oct 15
Social Media in Humanities Teaching and Research
Social media has been a part of the higher education landscape for years, both as topic of study and research, and as a tool used to achieve pedagogical goals. What lessons have humanists learned about using social media for both of these aims? How should we prepare humanists of the future to use this medium …
Oct 12
Geospatial Showcase
I'd like to propose a show-and-tell session for people who are making maps or want to get started with them. Anyone who wants to participate can spend a few minutes showing a map they made—and preferably, actually rendering the map in front of everyone else. Hopefully we'll have a diversity of mapping methods which will …
Oct 02
DH and Student Outreach/Programming
DH can go beyond the classroom. At Wheaton, we’re experimenting with ways to take some of the core concepts of digital humanities and find expression for them in the form of student outreach programs and events. We can certainly talk a bit about our projects– so far they amount to a lecture series and a …
