Over a week has gone by since THATCamp Paris ended (for me) with a CodeSprint at 190 Avenue de France. So I suppose it’s finally time for me to sort of put some ideas together about it. First, I’m very glad I went. I have never been to a THATCamp before, and the last time [...]
I may also mention that the book was written… where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies… Hence it is possible and even probable that I overlooked things which I ought to have considered and that I occasionally assert something which modern research has disproved or modified… On the other hand it is [...]
Continue reading about Erich Auerbach on scholarship in the post-Library.nu era
[This post is a slightly enhanced version of an email I sent to the Humanist mailing list today in response to this message asking about the value of GIS curriculum in scholarship. Here, I begin by quoting the relevant parts of the original post] At my university, a vice president has been arguing that there [...]
“GIS indeed represents power to most audiences: it stands for funding and research grants, jobs, information, student enrollments, mesmerizing images on the computer screen, best solutions and locations, and the power to convince. This power derives …
[A lot of the below is meandering toward what I suspect is a rather obvious conclusion to hardened veterans of the digital humanities. Since I'm not one of those, my own shoes needed to walk the mile. Of what transpires below, what might be new is, quickly, how while there is a call for digital [...]
Continue reading about Image vs. Text (also quant. vs. qual.)
Yesterday’s post on the tension between curatorial/service-y intellectual work and straight up analytical work was intentionally kept rather general, both for larger appeal and since I’m trying to figure out my approach to these questions in a way that’s consistent. Today, I’ll be a bit more specific, and this is sort of a warning about [...]
Continue reading about Curating addendum (ok… “webmapping vs. mapping”)
“It seems kind of absurd to expect a 30 year old to be able to produce a monograph,” one of the attendees of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research at UVA said after our dinner in the stunning Dome Room. We were chatting as a group, and the topic moved to how the dissertation as [...]
Continue reading about Curating and analyzing (or, curating vs. analyzing)
Should a foreign language requirement for a literary studies PhD be fulfillable by a machine language? Or maybe even by a methods course (like a course in statistics, GIS, or some other competence in computational technology)? These questions have been on my mind since I flew back Sunday morning from an energizing time at lovely [...]
Continue reading about Learning a language: human vs. machine
My little collection of webpages and blog posts (pearltree) grows slowly, but I was glad to add a post today by Matthew Jockers, whose work got highlighted in an article in the Chronicle back in 2008, just as I was designing my dissertation proposal. It was inspiring in the sense that I felt like what [...]
Even though in my last post I tried to describe the movement towards “doing scholarship in public” that forms a background for three different levels of academic fights these days, it still seems sometimes like the “humanities is a waste of time” fight remains the most salient. After all, if one takes that waste of [...]
Continue reading about Cultural neuroscience to the rescue of us lost humanists?