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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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The Case of the Missing Faces
As I’ve often mentioned, I’ve been working for quite some time on a study of the photographs of Walter Freeman. Freeman, a Washington, D.C., based physician, was the world’s foremost lobotomist; it’s estimated that he lobotomized some 3,500 people. He was also a prolific and dedicated photographer. He almost invariably took photos of his patients…
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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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Google Fusion Table Basics with IU’s Cushman Collection
I’ve used Indiana University’s Cushman Collection of photographs before, in my Palladio tutorial. Google Fusion tables, though, is a slightly simpler way for people to get started with data visualization. So here’s a quick tutorial that uses the same data to create a map and some simple charts. You can also download this tutorial as a PDF…
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A fun way to introduce DH students to dataviz
As a teacher, I’ve always operated on the assumption that students are primarily interested in each other. Here’s a fun activity that takes advantage of that interest to teach students a little about data visualization. It’s an extremely unscientific Cosmo-style quiz, designed to show students which interests they have in common with each other. It’s…
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Hackathon on Police Brutality, Feb. 14 at UCLA
I’m not organizing this event (Brittany Paris, of UCLA’s Information Studies department is), but wanted to give it my full support: A hackathon on police brutality data for L.A. County on Saturday, February 14, from 12 to 4 in the UCLA Decafe (1302 Perloff Hall). All are welcome. Register here.
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Photography and the limits of empathy: Reading Garner and Brown through Saidiya Hartman
I wish I had more time to write this, but I’ve been reading Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection this week and have found that it’s brought some clarity to my thinking about the recent news and coverage of the Mike Brown and Eric Garner cases. In particular, it’s informed my thinking about the photographs circulating around these…
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Getting started with Palladio
NOTE: Scroll down to get to the tutorial itself! Updated November 2015 for Palladio 1.1. If you’d like to use this tutorial in the classroom, or if you want to alter it and make it your own, there’s a version on Github you can do whatever you want with. Palladio, a product of Stanford’s Humanities…
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Here and There: Creating DH Community
Thanks a million to the University of North Texas’s Spencer Keralis for inviting me to come speak at Digital Frontiers, a great conference in Northern Texas! I’m having an excellent time. Here’s the talk I gave today. Around springtime, when universities are making offers for jobs that start in the fall, I tend to get…