Articles tagged with "Digital Humanities"
While still working on my MSc thesis, I went to San Francisco this summer. I first attended the Digital Humanities 2011 conference at Stanford University. It was great to see many known faces there again, and the talks and posters were ‘not bad’ either. Especially impressive was the keynote on Culturomics, the quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books.
Then I started work at Academia.edu, a funded startup which now has over a million users. Academia.edu is a social network for scholars, which – besides the usual social network-features – organizes people by their department and research-interests, and enables scholars to present their publications in a beautiful way. Not only does it allow direct subscription to the news-feed of individual researchers (as in a personalized journal), but it also makes uploaded papers more widely available, as user-pages are indexed by Google, and thus easy to find by researchers and other interested parties.
Academia.edu is (also see next post) a great place to work. The team consists of great engineers, and decisions are generally made in a non-hierarchical way that allows the best ideas to come to the fore. A lot of interesting new technologies are being used as well, such as Redis, MongoDB, Memcached, Varnish, and Solr (besides Ruby on Rails). In that sense it is a real startup. And since I arrived we have started doing automated testing, and been improving the quality of the code. In addition to all this, our office also provides a very nice work-environment, as it is centrally located (Kearny and Bush), with a lot of light, and plants (for whoever wants them on their desk).
My work-space at Academia.edu
...Continue reading »I (Wybo) have just completed my thesis for Digital Humanities at King’s College London. It is titled ‘LogiLogi: The Quest for Critical Mass.’, and it reports on an (ongoing) attempt at attaining critical mass for LogiLogi.
It presents and discusses all improvements that were made to LogiLogi over the past year, among which: an integrated search page, improved recent changes and rankings, author badges, a screencast, in-place edit, easy attach buttons, logi-blogs, and more.
You can get the thesis here (or here a version with high quality images).
...Continue reading »A poster on LogiLogi, and it’s “Quest for Critical Mass”, was presented at Digital Humanities 2010. And we won an European Science Foundation bursary for it. On our poster we report on recent improvements of LogiLogi, provide some background theory about critical mass, and identify factors that can be of influence on attainment.
The conference has just ended, and it was a great event, featuring topics as diverse as literary stylometrics, linguistics, 3D-modeling, and GIS. Especially Melissa Terras’ plenary talk is worth reading (& watching as soon as the video comes on-line).
An image of our poster can be seen below, and the whole poster can also be downloaded here. See our subversion repository for the sources.
I’ve been studying Digital Humanities at King’s College London for about four months now, and I must say that it has been a good experience so far. The professors are nice and knowledgeable people, and the readings as part of classes are generally very interesting. In addition, to prepare for a Phd / MA in philosophy, I have also been taking a 40-credit (little over 20% of the yearly credits) course in Ethics at King’s philosophy department. A course that is fascinating and well-taught as well.
A question I often get, though, is: “What the (kleene star) is Digital Humanities?”. My usual response is that it is doing humanities research using IT-technology: Such as data-mining philosophical texts, modeling philosophical arguments, making 3D models of historical sites, or building tools and resources for philosophers (or other humanists). And that has appeared to be about right, though in practice there is a bit of a bias towards building digital editions of canonical texts, because that is what is best at attracting funding. But anyway, here is an alternative explanation of what Digital Humanities is to classical Humanities on Youtube (don’t fully agree with it, but is a funny watch anyway).
There is a rule at King’s, or more likely, in the British educational system, that one is not allowed to write an assessed essay on the same topic/resource twice. Therefore I haven’t been writing much about LogiLogi so far, as I want to save it for my thesis.
...Continue reading »LogiLogi has a base in London now. I (Wybo) moved to London last month. I’m doing a MA in Digital Humanities at King’s College London now (with a HSP Talents Scholarship, and a KCL Int. Humanities Scholarship).
For my MA-thesis I am going to improve LogiLogi, and try to initiate a first community of philosophers on it. The proposal for this can be read here.
Also I finally received the last grade for my BAs (I hold 3 BA’s now), which is a 9.5 (out of ten, less than 3% get this mark) for my thesis for Philosophy on LogiLogi: Philosophy Beyond the Paper. You can read it on LogiLogi first of all, and here as a .pdf paper simulation.
London by night
...Continue reading »
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