Behind every printed national biography is a board of editors responsible for finding established scholars to write the biographies. The personal and institutional networks, the scientific and ideological socialization of these authors have a significant influence on the biographical constructs and narratives they have designed, and thus also…[Read more]

Digital tools for capturing color and texture data from archaeological artifacts

Spectral Reflectance Transformation Imaging (Spectral RTI) combines the advantages of Spectral Imaging with the advantages of Reflectance Transformation Imaging into a single consistent data set.

The significance of Spectral RTI for Archaeology

In the twenty-first century advances in digital technology are propelling the study of ancient literature and scribal culture. This essay describes an integrated set of advances in image capture, processing, and dissemination that improves upon first-hand experience and harnesses the power of the web to connect people and data. Illegible…[Read more]

Final report on experiments conducted and lessons learned through the NEH Digital Humanities startup grant that tested methods of combining spectral imaging and RTI.

Syllabus for 2017 edition of DH285: Introduction to Digital Humanities, taught at Michigan State University as a required course in the Digital Humanities minor. The course is a survey introduction to the field and has no prerequisites. Twelve students were in the course.

Teaching digital humanities at the undergraduate level is as much about issues of critical theory, inclusion, and diversity as it is about teaching digital tools and methods. The dialectics of teaching new DH tools and questions of critique, the archive, and representation central to the humanities forms the basis of the undergraduate Digital…[Read more]

Aus der Integration von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (IKT) mit dem vielfältigen Fach »Archäologie« (vgl. Daly – Evans 2006) resultiert ein Studienfeld, das sich eingehend mit einem umfangreichen Pool unterschiedlicher Aspekte der IKT in der Archäologie auf theoretischer und praktischer Ebene beschäftigt (vgl. Costopoulos 2…[Read more]

The movement for Digital Social Innovation (DSI) insists on the need for a long memory to not take anything unexpected as “innovative” just because there is no awareness of what has happened before or elsewhere. In this article we want to briefly collect three case studies from the recent past that have seen social justice movements aut…[Read more]

‘On the Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene’ is an attempt to think theory beyond the stereotypes of what it is considered to be. This includes preconceived notions of what it is to be a
theorist, and to create, publish and disseminate critical theory.

Many thinkers, for example, are currently attempting to replace the tyr…[Read more]

Critics often discuss works of fiction by condensing them into a few resonant scenes. We are so attached to this strategy, in fact, that we sometimes apply it to history itself: New Historicists explicitly theorize the anecdote as an appropriately literary representation of the past. But why should minutes and hours be more literary than months…[Read more]

Beginning with television’s popularization and mass availability in the 1950s, TV has extensively been employed to transport and mediate history. From the early televisual experiments of The Twilight Zone and Star Trek to more recent examples such as Quantum Leap, The X-Files and Continuum, Science Fiction television and its subgenre of A…[Read more]

The final two months of 2017 witnessed a renaissance of an always-popular meme on Metafilter, Twitter: parodies of William Carlos Williams’s 1934 poem, “This Is Just to Say.” Parodies typically replace nouns and adjectives in this twelve-line, three-stanza Imagist poem. A minimum of six replacements yields an entirely new poem, such that users…[Read more]

How did Soviet Jews respond to the Holocaust and the devastating transformations that accompanied persecution? How was the Holocaust experienced, survived, and remembered by Jewish youth living in Soviet territory? Anika Walke, Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, examines these important questions in Pioneers and…[Read more]

The paper studies long-term changes in the length of Russian poetry (1750–1921) to reveal the relation of poem length (counted in lines) to a poetic form and its evolution. The research has shown a dramatic decrease in the mean and median poetry lengths during the 19th century. This decrease was followed by the decline in length diversity, which r…[Read more]

Forschungsdaten in den Geisteswissenschaften unterscheiden sich grundlegend von denjenigen in den Naturwissenschaften. Macht es überhaupt Sinn, davon in diesen allgemeinen Worten zu sprechen? Gibt es innerhalb der Disziplinen große Unterschiede, vor allem vor dem Hintergrund der Digital Humanities, die manchmal als eine Art übergeordnete Di…[Read more]

The relationship between obsolescence and innovation in the digital age is a peculiar one, conveying not past and future but instead demonstrating their eternal simultaneity.