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Category: Research

“Data Envy” at MLA 2016

Posted in Conferences, Digital Humanities, and Research

This is the transcript of the short paper I gave as part of the “Digital Scholarship in Action: Research” panel at MLA 2016 in January . The attendant PowerPoint is stored and indexed on the MLA Commons Open Repository Exchange, and is available here: https://commons.mla.org/deposits/item/mla:667/

“Data Envy: Or, maintaining one’s self-confidence as a digital humanist at a time when everyone seems to be talking about …  Big Data”

SELF-CONSCIOUS: Perhaps I’m being overly self-conscious, but lately I’ve felt increasingly out of the loop in terms of DH discourse – namely because I don’t do big data. Or at least I don’t think I do. And I observe that discussions about DH invariably involve topic modeling and pattern recognition and linked data and large-scale data visualization and “bags of words”.

Six Months In: Taking Stock of my Situation

Posted in Digital Humanities, and Research

It will be six months next week since I started my position as Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Bucknell University. The experience has been, by turns, exciting, exhausting, exasperating, and metaphorically exsanguinating. Ultimately, though, it’s been exhilarating (all right – I’ll stop with the alliteration now). In the process of trying to make sense of what’s going on here, what it means for me, and what I mean to the digital scholarship initiative at Bucknell, I’ve had to deconstruct myself, rebuild myself, and think a lot about what I do and why I believe in it. I’ve looked at the DH community with which I’ve aligned myself and reached out to friends and colleagues in ways both beneficial to the university and necessary for me. I’ve been hyperconscious of what it means to write about this in public spaces at the same time I encourage my colleagues to demonstrate transparency in their work.

Presence and Absence: Visual Artifacts and Cultural Memory

Posted in Research, and Visual Thinking

I’ve been thinking a lot lately (all right, again) about transmission of visual artifacts in early modern England and how access – and lack thereof – would have informed perceptions of place and people. I’m not sure where I want to go with this, but here are three examples of what’s swirling in my head:

Screenshot of a panel from Saxton's Atlas (Hartforshire)
Screenshot of a panel from Saxton’s Atlas (Hartforshire)