Last year, Wolfgang Schmale wondered in a blog post (in German) whether the expression the digital age has established itself as designation of a new historical period, noting that it is “doing quite well in the competition with other labels such as ‘postmodernity’ or ‘postmodern era’.” The following is a free English translation of my German-language comment on this post.
Author Archives: Michael Piotrowski
Digital Humanities Publishing
I have a long-standing interest in electronic digital publishing. In fact, my first job after getting my master’s degree was with a large scientific publisher, so besides having the experience of an author and editor, I also know a thing or two about the role of scientific publishers. It is from this time that I still have a rubber stamp saying “SGML,” which I keep because it says a lot about scholarly publishing.
And “NLP” means…
In the post Writing for Hypotheses in Org-mode, I described how much better blogging becomes once you can directly post from your Emacs. This is a long overdue update.
Some Thoughts on Inform 7 for Teaching about Formal Modeling
The last two days I’ve been teaching a course on formal modeling in the context of our new doctoral program in Digital Studies (Programme doctoral en études numériques); in fact, it was the first ever course taught in this program. It would certainly have been easier to give a course on the basis of material that you already have, but I wanted to teach something new rather than just warming up old material. In accordance with my ideas for developing the digital humanities at UNIL, I decided on the topic of formal modeling. This meant, however, a lot of work over the summer and, with the date of the course coming closer, nagging doubts about the—newly developed and thus untested—content. Would I have enough material? Would the participants be able to relate to it, or would it be too hard? And so on.
The Digital Age
This is a rough draft of a comment on Wolfgang Schmale’s blog post Digitales Zeitalter (in German).
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Rules
For a change, this post is actually related to NLP. It’s about rules, but not the linguistic kind, but those that govern our research communities.
Plato and the Dormouse
During my summer vacation I read John Markoff’s book “What the
Dormouse Said.” 1 I assume it was the publisher that insisted on
adding the subtitle “How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the
Personal Computer Industry”; it does give you an idea what the book is
about, but actually it’s somewhat misleading.
DH-MAX
In his recent blog post Die Digital Humanities brauchen ein Ziel: DH-MAX, Wolfgang Schmale wondered whether the digital humanities need a goal and suggested one potential goal, which he calls “DH-MAX.” At the core of DH-MAX is, as I understand it, a new publication infrastructure made up of “megaportals,” i.e., repositories of all the research results that do not really warrant a long-form, narrative publication, organized by interdisciplinary topics such as memory, remembrance, border, migration, othering, nationalism, etc.
This post is a response to Wolfgang Schmale’s post. As his post is in German, my response is also in German. In summary, I disagree that the digital humanities need an explicit goal, because there is no such thing as the digital humanities. I do agree, however, that new forms of publication are needed, and I argue that nanopublications could form the technical infrastructures for the megaportals he envisions.
Books, Blogs, and Dialectics
Over the Easter holidays I read the little book Tschichold – na und? (‘Tschichold—so what?’) by Gerd Fleischmann (Wallstein, 2013).
Document Engineering and Digital Humanities
Documents of all types have always played a central role in the humanities, both of an object of inquiry and for documenting research results. The digital humanities are thus also concerned with documents and with digital documents in particular. Apart from “traditional” scholarly questions, this raises many new questions, for example, on encoding, markup, and processing of texts, where technical and scholarly aspects interact.