An archaeological field research database that can be used for different projects poses an advanced technical problem. It does not only have to deal with different needs of a variety of disciplines and methods like excavation and survey but also be usable for architectural or object studies. Therefore, a generic data model is required that can…[Read more]

If 2015 marked the elapse of 25 years since the birth of the web, 2016 marked the 20th anniversary of web archiving: of systematic attempts to preserve web content and make it accessible to scholars and the public. As such, the time is ripe to make an initial assessment of the history of the movement, and the patterns into which it has already…[Read more]

The very recent past has seen an upswing of scholarly interest not so much in the Internet and Web themselves but in the terms in which they have been discussed and understood. This article examines a remarkable effusion of writing in the 1990s that addressed the spiritual and ethical implications of “cyberspace”. Christian critics reacted in dif…[Read more]

While language contact has so far been predominantly studied on the basis of detailed case studies, the emergence of methods for phylogenetic reconstruction and automated word comparison – as a result of the recent quantitative turn in historical linguistics – has also resulted in new proposals to study language contact situations by means of aut…[Read more]

DTC 356 explores the cultural, aesthetic, and political roles of information and data. Beginning with library classification systems and Wikipedia, the course then turns to the role of metadata in organizing collections and our lives before ending with a consideration of text-mining and topic modeling. The conclusion considers these techniques in…[Read more]

Print-friendly remediation and backup copy of my course site for “Digital Public Humanities,” part of the Spring 2016 offerings in the Public Humanities MA program at Brown University. Course web site can be found here: http://digitalpublichumanities.jimmcgrath.us/. While not the first DH course offered at Brown or the first course in Public…[Read more]

PDF of syllabus for Brown University Leadership Institute course on media literacy. Course was taught over two weeks on Brown University campus in the summer of 2018. “Leadership” language and “Action Plan” part of Institute branding and course requirements. Syllabus may be of interest to students and instructors interested in high school /…[Read more]

The fact that “all languages evolve, as long as they exist” (Schleicher 1863: 18f) has been long known to linguists and does not surprise us anymore. The reasons why all language change constantly, however, is still not fully understood. What we know, however, is that language usage must be at the core of language evolution. It is the dynamics amo…[Read more]

Collective article by Precarious Workers Brigade and Carrot Workers Collective. In: Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity. Edited by Michał Kozłowski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa, Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Szreder.

Digital images with metadata contain unique potential for research into the history of the art market. The embedding of digital images in a database allows for the possibility of an association with their historical context due to the presence of metadata, which includes economic data, such as the provenance chain, as well as information about…[Read more]

Skepticism regarding the tree model has a long tradition in historical linguistics. Although scholars have emphasized that the tree model and its long-standing counterpart, the wave theory, are not necessarily incompatible, the opinion that family trees are unrealistic and should be completely abandoned in the field of historical linguistics has…[Read more]

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2017. The contributions are shared in form of a PDF document with a table of contents that allows for a quick search of the contributions and offers also the direct links to the blog.

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2016. The contributions are shared in form of a PDF document with a table of contents that allows for a quick search of the contributions and offers also the direct links to the blog.