Lab Blog

The digital humanities appear to marginalize the figure of the author, but the author may nonetheless be gaining a new prominence, as distant reading is put to use to identify authors.

Ducks are pretty well-defined, and it's easy to call one when you see one. A true education online however, is often so-called but less well-defined, and this may be the reason for the confusion and passion behind the open education debate.

Stanford's visual technology-powered Spatial History is performed as a collaboration between writer and reading, evoking place by the descriptive power of the writing and the persuasive grain of the detail. This tool has proven not only provocative, but also highly intuitive and promising for the digital humanities.

As online textual analysis now provides data about the frequency of various punctuation, letters, and words, will the reliance on smaller units in quantitative analysis of texts also influence the focus of more traditional interpretive work? Will narratology yield to phraseology?

Father Roberto Busa, who passed away last week, inspired the launch of hundreds of DH projects, from Robert Dilligan's computational poetry analyses in the 1970s to the prospective bumper crop of the 2012 MLA in Seattle.

Stanford Literary Lab's Franco Moretti feels that close reading forces an inherently limited perspective on its practitioner, and so developed "distant reading," or rather, a new "science of fiction."

Recent initiatives in the digital humanities aimed at moving rare items onto a 'democratically' available digital domain are causing scholars to rethink the barriers standing between the individual and an abundance of formerly obscure artifacts.

The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation's online media site, making available countless documents, photos, film and every speech given by John F. Kennedy, stands to demonstrate not only the feasibility but the necessity of making every detail of the recent past available for public use.

Application Programming Interfaces are the very tool through which the social side of the Internet has become so connected, and they may also be the key to more accessible and integrated resources for humanists on the web.

The 911 Archives, telling the online history of the events leading up to and after 9/11/2001, are a window into what recording our recent history could look like when universally accessible and wholly documented online.