This article examines the recurring ways in which some of the most popular DH tools are presented as easy to use. It argues that attempts to couch powerful tools in what is often false familiarity, directly undermines the goal of encouraging scholarly innovation and risk taking. The consequences of framing digital tools as either easy or more…[Read more]

This article details the contributions of blind readers to the development, design, and marketing of the optophone, a text-to-tone transcription machine introduced in the early twentieth century. We combine archival research with prototyping to investigate the dimensions involved in past coding and decoding practices. If archives provide…[Read more]

The spread of open digital forms of scholarly communication, combined with increasing institutional pressure to track research “impact,” has encouraged scholars and administrators in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) to turn their attention to metrics that promise to help in the assessment of research outputs. As a result of the lim…[Read more]

Modern editors of Othello unanimously and silently adopt the Folio (1623) text as their copy text but emend it in light of the quarto (1622) text at III, iii, 97. Neither of the two reasons for emendation, textual corruption or literary unintelligibility, applies. A critique of textual editing shows that, given knowledge of the many and various…[Read more]

The block that I am teaching on Birkbeck, University of London’s MA in Critical and Cultural Studies in 2018-2019.

This wide-ranging block focuses on a series of important topics examining the convergence of technology, subjectivity and cultural theory. By examining technological, political, and cultural change, we will consider how 20th and…[Read more]

The Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities is about researching media through new media: for example, playing games to better understand their politics and mechanics, exhibiting new media art to witness how people engage it, building stories to become more familiar with their structures and narratives, making wearable technologies to…[Read more]

This textual crux all modern editors unanimously and silently emend, from the Folio “he”, their copy text, to the Quarto “you.” Although they find F so nonsensical as to deserve no comment, Shakespeare, his company, and his audience found it not only sensible in a play involving jealousy, but also powerful. The difference between then and now…[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.

Both in terms of its content and its methodology, Pious Irreverence is a pioneering work. Weiss artfully employs all the tools of textual analysis developed over the last four decades of rabbinic scholarship and brings them to bear on TY, a largely neglected corpus. Tanhuma-Yelammedenu has never been studied as a work of theology, nor from a…[Read more]

This essay uses Arnaldo Momigliano’s genealogy of antiquarianism and historiography to propose a new method for engaging the past. The Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) traced antiquarianism from its advent in ancient Greece and later growth in Rome to its early modern efflorescence, its usurpation by history, and its transformation…[Read more]

This article presents the results of a multidisciplinary project aimed at better understanding the impact of different digitization strategies in computational text analysis. More specifically, it describes an effort to automatically discern the authorship of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in a body of uncorrected correspondence processed by HTR…[Read more]

Manuscript Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 6298 contains an as yet unexamined fragment of the second batch of the gospel glosses (EvII) from the biblical commentaries of the Canterbury School inserted as an addition in 3r of the manuscript. In this article, I describe this fragment, and I attempt to contextualize its insertion into the…[Read more]

This document provides the description and transcript of a set of liturgical fragments from the holdings of University Library in Utrecht. The fragments belong to a twelfth-century breviary, probably from St. Paul’s Abbey in Utrecht.

Besides glosses and other textual annotations, early medieval Latin manuscript commonly feature technical signs, annotation symbols and sigla that reflect readership or provide a framework for interpretation and use. The early medieval Insular book users were particularly keen on using such devices. This article maps the usage of technical signs…[Read more]