Digital History

I am participating in this year’s Day of Digital Humanities. So my posts today will be cross posted to a blog called “Bill’s Digital Intervention“. I urge you to dip into the wealth of digital knowledge and insight being produced over at the Day of Digital Humanities headquarters or through the #DayofDH hashtag on Twitter.… Read More →

I’ve been trying to interest some of my colleagues in the Communication program in a project that works to document the use of social media in the Bakken Oil Patch. So far, there have been no takers, so I thought I’d pitch the idea a bit more widely. Over the past 5 years, the use… Read More →

This week I’ve begun work on a paper that I’ll give with my colleagues David Pettegrew, R. Scott Moore, and Sam Fee at the Archaeological Institute of America’s Annual Meeting in Seattle in January. The paper is titled “Archaeological Data and Small Projects: A Case Study from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project on Cyprus” and it… Read More →

There has been a ton of buzz lately about Udacity. Udacity is a company developed by Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig two other robicists, David Stavins and Mike Sokolsky. They offer Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) on various topics related to robotics and technology to literarily tens of thousands of students per course.… Read More →

I was pretty excited when I received word that the University of North Dakota’s Scale-Up classroom is almost ready and accepting applications for classes in the Spring of 2013. The Scale-Up classroom is designed to foster an “active learning” environment in courses that have large “lecture sized” (100+) enrollments. The students are generally seated around… Read More →

This afternoon I’m getting together with some of my colleagues from the arts, social sciences, and humanities to discuss the place of digital humanities in professional advancement both on campus and in our disciplines more broadly. The meeting will occur under the auspices of the Working Group in Digital and New Media and be the… Read More →

This weekend, I read over Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU 2011). The book does pretty much what the title says. It explores the impact of technology on academic publishing and the role it plays in transforming academic discourse (and, potentially, university life). The book provides a nice… Read More →

People who read this blog know that I have a super abundance of ideas. In fact, I have a category for ideas (it’s my idea box). My idea for offering massive open online courses here at the University of North Dakota did not come to pass. My scheme for a “teaching sabbatical” where faculty are… Read More →

I’ve really enjoyed cruising through the Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki open peer-review volume called Writing History in the Digital Age which is slated to be published by University of Michigan Press’s new Digital Humanities Series in their digitalculturebooks imprint. I commented on many of the contributions and mined them all for references and ideas.… Read More →

On Friday, I’m joining a colleague, Tim Pasch, to give a short talk to help graduate students and advanced undergraduates in the humanities to digitize their research work flow. The talk is at 12 at the Digital and New Media Lab (O’Kelly 207). Our goals will be to (1) encourage students to understand that incorporating… Read More →

This past week University of Michigan’s Digital Culture Book imprint published the edited version of the Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt project Hacking the Academy. For anyone interested in the fertile intersection of digital culture and university life, the book is a must-read. Moreover, its unique format and production process represents one of the best… Read More →