Been there, done that: Art history as a model for the effect of technology on disciplinary development
Posted: July 29, 2012 Filed under: Essays, History, Notes, Reading, Reviews, Universities, Visionary Cross | Tags: 3D scanning, anglo-saxon studies, art history, digital humanities, disciplinary development, photography, technology, Visualisation Leave a comment »Evidence of why it is useful to read outside your main areas of disciplinary interest…
I’ve been reading my way through Revisualizing visual culture (Ashgate 2010), on a number of titles I bought from the Ashgate stand at the the recent DH 2012 conference in Hamburg. Most of the chapter thus far have been relevant to work we are doing with the Visionary Cross project, especially now that we are starting to get usable 3D meshes (as time allows, I hope to post some other small posts about the various chapters in this and my other recent reading). Read the rest of this entry »
De ooggetuige [The eye witness],Simone van der Vlugt
Posted: June 29, 2012 Filed under: Notes, Reading, Reviews | Tags: de ooggetuige (book), dutch literature, simone van der vlugt, thrillers Leave a comment »Just finished reading De ooggetuige [The eye witness], the gift given to customers by booksellers in the Netherlands as part of “Thriller Month.”
These gifts are a lovely part of the Dutch literary scene: the most famous is the Boekenweek geschenk, an annual gift during “book week”; they are usually short works (ca. 90 pp. in a small format paperback) by authors of note. I’d never heard of Maand van het Spannende Boek (Month of the Thrilling Book) before, but I do like the idea of there being more times for getting free books in the year. Read the rest of this entry »
Schools of Schools of “Humanities Computing”
Posted: February 14, 2009 Filed under: Digital Humanities, Essays, Research, Reviews | Tags: Computers, digital humanities, schools, Teaching, university of alberta Leave a comment » When I went to Yale to begin my PhD in 1989, the English department—or perhaps just the graduate students, a group that tends to feel these things more strongly—was mourning the decline of the “Yale School”. New Historicism was the increasingly dominant critical approach at the time, and while it seemed that all the Deconstructionists had been at Yale, none of the major New Historicists were—Stephen Greenblatt got his PhD (and B.A. and M.A.) from Yale, but, like Michel Foucault, seems never to have held a faculty appointment there. I was thinking of this sense of “school” yesterday, while I was attending the University of Alberta’s Humanities Computing Graduate School conference. Read the rest of this entry »Byte me: Technological Education and the Humanities
Posted: December 20, 2008 Filed under: Digital Humanities, Essays, Research, Reviews, Teaching | Tags: Computers, digital humanities, digital pedagogy, education, pedagogy, universities Leave a comment » I recently had a discussion with the head of a humanities organisation who wanted to move a website. The website was written using Coldfusion, a proprietary suite of server-based software that is used by developers for writing and publishing interactive web sites (Adobe nd). After some discussion of the pros and cons of moving the site, we turned to the question of the software.Head of Humanities Organisation: We’d also like to change the software. Me: I’m not sure that is wise unless you really have to: it will mean hiring somebody to port everything and you are likely to introduce new problems. Head of Humanities Organisation: But I don’t have Coldfusion on my computer. Me: Coldfusion is software that runs on a server. You don’t need it on your computer. You just need it on the server. Your techies handle that. Head of Humanities Organisation: Yes, but I use a Mac.Read the rest of this entry »
