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Materials on Image-Mining for Medical History
Last week, I taught the image-mining portion of the Images and Texts in Medical History workshop at the National Library of Medicine. I am far from an expert on OpenCV, the open-source computer-vision library. But as usual, that didn’t stop me from attempting to teach it. The materials I created for the workshop include detailed…
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A better way to teach technical skills to a group
My DH101 class this year was my biggest yet, with 45 undergrads. I suppose that’s not huge compared with many other classes, but DH101 is very hands-on. I am fortunate enough to have a TA, the awesome Francesca Albrezzi, who runs separate weekly labs. Still, I often have to teach students to do technical things…
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What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities
This is a lightly edited version of the keynote address I was honored to give at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference at the University of Pennsylvania on July 22, 2015. Thank you to the organizing committee for inviting me! My sincere thanks, too, to Lauren Klein and Roderic Crooks for their advice and feedback on…
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Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction
This is a talk that I gave at the Harvard Purdue Data Management Symposium on June 17, 2015, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The audience was mostly librarians and other data-management professionals. I was the only humanities person on the program, so I wanted to talk about the ways that humanists think about data differently from people…
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Reflections on my digital materiality and labor class
I was really glad to get the chance to teach a special topics course on Digital Labor, Materiality, and Urban Space last quarter. I’ve been thinking about this class for years, and the syllabus is the (imperfect) culmination of lots and lots of reading and thinking. In the event, the class was terrifically generative and…
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Creating an Omeka Exhibit
This is the second part of my beginning Omeka workshop. Here’s part one. Please feel free to download this tutorial as a PDF or as a Word document, if you’d like to modify it. Now that you’ve added items to your Omeka site and grouped them into collections, you’re ready for the next step: taking your…
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Up and Running with Omeka.net
Yesterday I had fun teaching a beginning Omeka workshop at THATCamp Feminisms West, a really great event at Scripps College. (It deserves a post of its own, but that will have to wait until I have a little more energy. Alex Juhasz has a nice post about it.) Omeka’s documentation is actually very good, but…
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Use Automator to combine your research photos into one PDF
By request, these are updated instructions for using your Mac to combine your research photos into a PDF. For more on digital research workflows, see here, here, and here. If you have a Mac, you own a robot! It’s called Automator and it lives in your Applications folder. It does pretty much what the name…
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The wind in the trees: Regimes of attention
“What the modern movie lacks is beauty,” said D.W. Griffith, melancholy at the end of the a long career, “the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.” At film’s inception, it’s said that viewers didn’t necessarily know where to rest their eyes. Film hadn’t organized itself into the streamlined patterns of cause-and-effect that we…
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Utopianism and its detractors
This year, the American Historical Association’s annual meeting included a THATCamp, which I was happy to attend. Andrew Hartman, a professor at Illinois State University, published an interesting response, which I wanted to take a moment to address. Hartman enjoyed himself but wondered if the scholars attending THATCamp evinced an unwarranted utopianism about the prospects…