I had four more or less random thoughts on my drive onto campus this morning. 1. Famae Volent. There has been a good bit of buzz around the Classics job-hunter site Famae Volent this month. Most of it stems from the increasingly toxic, relatively un-moderated, and thoroughly angst-fill comments section. The tone lately has been hostile with… Read More →
The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is very excited to announce the publication of the first volume of the Epoiesen Annual. This is an annual volume based on the extraordinary new journal, Epoiesen: A Journal for Creative Engagement in History and Archaeology, edited by Shawn Graham and colleagues and hosted by the library at Carleton University… Read More →
Last week an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Timothy Brennan created a good bit of buzz in my social media world. The author declares, after a bit of muddled argument, that digital humanities is largely bust after carefully setting aside certain common digital tools like the “Moodles” and podcasts. In short, he suggests… Read More →
This week the Society of American Archaeology annual meeting takes place is Vancouver, B.C. Unfortunately, I won’t be attending, but I will be there in person as my colleagues Derek Counts and Erin Averett deliver a paper that looks at how digital archaeology and digital publishing will work together to reshape the future of the… Read More →
This is the fourth in a series of blog posts thinking about the recent round of budget cuts at the University of North Dakota. Go read part 1, part 2, and part 3 if you find this interesting. One of the little things that working on the Bakken oil boom has taught me is that history is awkwardly situated… Read More →
Yesterday Sarah Bond published a thoughtful, short article in her regular Forbes column suggesting that academics abandon Academia.edu and move their research to open access alternatives. Bond argues that academia.edu is a for-profit wolf in .edu-sheep clothing. It’s not a real .edu, in that it’s not in institution of higher learning (which is the current… Read More →
The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota’s most recent book, Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College edited by Eric Burin is getting some positive attention both around campus and in the local media. If you haven’t downloaded the book, do it today! Check out Eric Burin’s interview with Prairie Public Radio’s Main… Read More →
Next month, I’m going to give a little paper at the TAG Conference in Boulder, Colorado. I posted a fairly provisional abstract for it here. Basically, I want to argue that speed with which academic ideas are made available is changing the practice of knowledge production even in very traditional fields like archaeology. It was… Read More →
I spent part of yesterday morning contributing to an email discussion of digital humanities and virtual reality with the good folks at the North Dakota Humanities Council. This was both fun and productive. One result of these conversations is that I was encouraged to propose some new grant initiatives to the NDHC. These are just… Read More →
My colleague Prof. Cindy Prescott generously offered this response to the my conversations with Troy Larson. Bill’s previous blog post and Troy’s response raise interesting questions about intellectual property and the relationship between academic and public history. Many researchers in the hard sciences worry constantly about being “scooped.” Historians (and people in the humanities in… Read More →
I had originally intended to write about the local humanities this morning, but I was distracted by an interesting little discussion on the internet. A local author, Troy Larson, took issues with a website produced for a class offered by Tom Isern, a historian at North Dakota State University. Tom had designed the class, as… Read More →
Today is the long awaited Intergalactic Day of Digital Humanities. While we have not heard whether we’ll be joined by any off planet humans and the usual uproar about whether “the humanities” are offensive to non-human lifeforms has yet to flair up, I commend the organizers for melding together humanocentric jingoism with a open-armed inclusiveness.… Read More →
Over the past couple years, I’ve been turning over in my head an article idea about archaeological blogging. I have written a good bit on my blog about the virtues and prospects of writing about my research and teaching on a nearly daily basis, but I’ve so far found it difficult to wrap my various… Read More →
Over the past 5 years, I’ve been active in a group called the Working Group in Digital and New Media. This is a cross-disciplinary, cross-college, and cross-campus group of scholars whose work touches on digital methods, media, and approaches to problems in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Each year, to attract new members we do… Read More →
Last week, I mentioned that I was invited to write something for our local literary journal on digital art, presumably, in the field of archaeology. I decided to take idea of art broadly and focus on some transformations in the world of archaeological presentation and data collection. More importantly, for me, is that I decided… Read More →
