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 [...]

Becoming a “Digital Scholar”: Digital Discovery 2008

[Below is the text of a presentation that I will be giving at the Digital Discovery conference on March 27, 2008]
When I started a graduate program in English way back in 1992, I used computers mainly to write papers. Then came the web. Within a few years, I was creating web-based assignments for [...]

Social Scholarship in the Humanities

Scholarship seems to be getting more visibly social. According to Laura Cohen, social scholarship is “the practice of scholarship in which the use of social tools is an integral part of the research and publishing process.” Social scholars may blog, share bookmarks, data and other resources, participate in social networks, make their [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Literary DNA and Google Books

Can digital tools help us to trace literary inheritance and influence? In my dissertation, I claim that Washington Irving helped to originate a tradition of bachelor sentimentalism in American literature that Donald Grant Mitchell extended in Reveries of a Bachelor, Melville satirized in Pierre and “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids,” and Henry [...]