Old Bailey Online research in New Zealand, and a full data source

With the approval of the Old Bailey Online team, I’m happy to report that the full dataset of the Old Bailey Online can be downloaded here: http://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/~r.sainudiin/datasets/public/OldBailey/. More sources for the data are expected to follow but this seems a nice way to build on the work underway in New Zealand.

Read Full Entry



Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities

Video: This panel discussion of Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder's Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities (M.I.T. Press, 2015) occured on January 27th, 2016 at the University of Oxford. It was part of the TORCH Books at Lunchtime Series, and associated with the Oxford Internet Institute.

Read Full Entry



Towards a Systems Analysis of the Humanities

Video: This is a video of my contribution to the workshop 'The Frontiers of DH: Humanities Systems Infrastructure', presented by the UC Digital Humanities Programme during November 2015. See also Prof. Paul Arthur: Smart Infrastructures for Cultural and Social Research, Prof. Alan Liu: Against the Cultural Singularity, and (earlier in the month) Dr. Tim Sherratt: Towards A Manifesto for Tactical DH Research Infrastructure.

Read Full Entry



Introduce data mining to your History course in 2 minutes

https://www.mashape.com/ offers Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that perform common text analysis tasks, including the one we’ll use for this tutorial: Named Entity Recognition (NER). Text analysis is a good way to introduce students to data mining. You can use text documents, or a URL.

Read Full Entry



From the Wayback Machine: Do we need a Systems Analysis of the Digital Humanities?

This post was first published at ideasunderground.com on 24 May, 2009. I’ve reproduced it here partly because that blog no longer exists, partly because it’s a lazy-but-efficient way of offering an idea I’ve been mulling over for some time to a new audience, and partly because I’m (sadly, perhaps) still quite taken with it. It fits well with my belief that scholars – especially in a post Edward Snowden world – need to understand the engineered nature of the virtualmachines they use in their work (regardless of whether they want to build digital outputs or not). Achieving a robust level of scholarly self-consciousness in the digital age is a challenge that most people have (I suggest) given up on, in the face of technological advance rather than methodological choice or epistemological orientation. This has huge implications for the integrity of future scholarship, but opens up equally fascinating areas for research and analysis.

Read Full Entry