For years relegated to the digital broom closet, a reminder of the Internet’s tacky origins, GIFs have made a comeback in a number of milieu. These images, both newly trendy and relics of a bygone era, are part of a movement to express nostalgia through a medium rather than a message, to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s terms.
While it's commonplace to say that the Internet, with its preference for small, digestible bits of information, is killing age-old, traditional longform journalism, Harvard Professor Robert Darnton argues that news has long been made up of small tweet-like bits of information.
The social sciences and the humanities are closer together, in methods and in theory, than they have been for a long time. As we move forward, digital methods and data analysis will have a role to play in all of this. The new Social Sciences Data Laboratory (D-Lab) has emerged to meet this need.
Four years ago the Townsend Humanities Lab launched with just a few pilot projects and user tutorials. Since then, the Lab has grown to encompass some 200 projects and over 2000 users. As we prepare to retire the THL, we revisit some of the rich collaborations—from courses to research groups to projects among individual scholars—that have taken place on the site.
Some say that TMI (Too Much Information) is the Internet culture’s catchphrase, but others argue that it's worth preserving everything from defunct websites to all the celebrity tweets about the name of the royal baby.
Bryan Cockrell, coordinator of the Society for Cultural Heritage, Arts, and the Law Working Group, considers the relationships between celebrities and their fans.
Hannah Birnbaum, coordinator of the Rethinking Debt Working Group, explains how Marx and Nietzsche can help us better understand contemporary political discourses about debt.
Kate Mattingly, co-coordinator of the Dance Studies Working Group, discusses her discipline's innovative approaches to analyzing dance.
