Humanities Researchers on the Radio

Rice University (my employer) just announced that it will be working with the PRI program Fair Game to produce a series of segments profiling cutting-edge humanities research. Through this initiative, Rice’s School of Humanities hopes to engage leading humanities researchers more fully in public conversations.  The first shows will focus on democracy, taking [...]

THAT Podcast

I love listening to Digital Campus, a podcast produced by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) that explores the impact of digital technologies on educational and cultural institutions. Now the folks at CHNM have launched another great podcast: THAT (The Humanities and Technology) podcast. In each episode, hosts Jeremy [...]

YouTube Scholarship

Web video isn’t just about dogs attacking toilets and guys skiing down escalators (to mention two recent YouTube videos championed by TopYouTubeVideos.com)–it also can be a powerful mode for disseminating ideas. Universities such as UC Berkeley and USC now have their own YouTube channels, and digital humanities groups such as MITH and HASTAC are making [...]

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration

“[E]veryone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.” So states the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, which will be released on January 22. Modeled after the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which helped to spark the open access movement, this Declaration aims to stimulate the international [...]

Cell phone novels

A new literary genre is becoming popular in Japan: the cell-phone novel. According to an article in today’s NY Times, five of the ten Japanese bestselling novels this year were originally cellphone novels–as the name suggests, serial fiction delivered to cellphones. Typically written in the first person, these novels have simple plots [...]

Lions and tigers and screens, oh my!

When is something that you watch on a screen more “real” and more compelling than what you experience right in front of you? When you’re watching live footage of birds wheeling around a cliff rather than standing in front of a zoo cage glancing at listless black bears. In “Zoo Keepers’ Dilemma,” a [...]

Digital Humanities in 2007 [Part 3 of 3]

In previous posts summing up digital humanities developments in 2007, I discussed efforts to develop the humanities cyberinfrastructure through new funding programs and organizations and reflected on questions of authority and reliability. In this final post, I’ll look at emerging forms of digital scholarship in the humanities as well as social networking. [...]

Digital Humanities in 2007 [Part 2 of 3]

In my previous post, I highlighted some of the major developments in digital humanities in 2007, focusing on the creation of organizations such as centernet and the Digital Americanists, journals such as Digital Humanities Quarterly, and funding programs such as the NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative. Now I’ll broaden the scope to look at [...]

Digital Humanities in 2007 [Part 1 of 3]

I love reading year-end summaries and lists. Even if the judgments can seem arbitrary, such lists let me know about things I missed and remind me of what matters. Here I offer my own impressions of significant goings-on in and around digital humanities in 2007. Since a lot happened this [...]