Open Education: Imagining Sleep

If I were to design a web-based course, I’d want it to make intelligent use of multimedia (movie clips, podcasts, music, images, etc.), adopt a Creative Commons license so that people could freely use it, be interactive, take an interdisciplinary approach, and, of course, demonstrate a deep knowledge of the course topic. For an [...]

Digging in the DiRT: Sneak Preview of the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki

When I talk with researchers about a cool tool such as Zotero, they often ask, “Hey, how did you find out about that?” Not everyone has the time or inclination to read blogs, software reviews, and listserv announcements obsessively, but now researchers can quickly identify relevant tools by checking out the newly-launched Digital Research Tools [...]

Ways that digital resources can transform teaching and research, grand and small

While trying to determine how many articles in JSTOR and Project Muse cite Making of America (MOA), I stumbled across several articles that describe how databases such as MOA are beginning to transform humanities research. (Funny–when I look for this kind of evidence, I don’t find it, but when I’m not looking, there [...]

What can you do with texts that are in a digital format?

I’ve had a longstanding, friendly debate with a colleague about whether it is sufficient to provide page images of books, or whether text should be converted to a machine- and human-readable format such as XML. She argues that converting scanned books to text is expensive and that the primary goal should be to provide [...]

Evaluating the quality of electronic texts

In my last post, I said that 83% of the primary source works that I used in my dissertation are now available online as full-text. But how reliable are these electronic texts? Can researchers feel comfortable citing them and using them for text analysis? In my view, the quality of an electronic [...]

How many texts have been digitized?

In remixing my dissertation as a work of digital scholarship, I’m trying to use digital resources for my research as much as possible. But is this even possible? How many research materials in American literature and culture are available online as full-text, and how reliable are these electronic texts? I worked on [...]