Working with these texts for my paper at this year’s meeting of ISCLR (International Society for Contemporary Legend Research), I remembered that I have an entire inbox dedicated to emails sent to me by friends and family that struck me as “net lore” (which is the name of the mailbox, by the way). I just [...]
This is one of things I remember being discussed at the Project Bamboo meetings. Such discussions certainly informed my draft for a digital repository for UL-Lafayette. The video for how a distributed repository structure should work is extremely effective: Depositing Data with DataONE from DataONE on Vimeo. More on DataONE.
My friend and colleague Gwydion provides a nice overview of big data for humanists. It won’t be useful for people already doing the work, but it is useful for how he pitches it to those who have not thought, or don’t want to think, about it.
Open Data Commons “is the home of a set of legal tools to help you provide and use Open Data.” They have a lovely write-up of why open data matters: Why bother about openness and licensing for data? After all they don’t matter in themselves: what we really care about are things like the progress [...]
Forbes has a fantastic dynamic map of migration statistics drawn from IRS data. The migration is internal to the U.S., but clicking on cities or areas reveals patterns that make you ask questions. Here’s a screen shot for the map with Lafayette as the focus: Migration into and out of Lafayette, Louisiana What’s the inbound [...]
Over at Wired: Beautiful Data: The Art of Science Field Notes.
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have gotten together to adapt a collection of microformats that will make it possible for folks who produce and publish content to the web to make searching that content more meaningful: Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the [...]
Photography is part of my research, and I also enjoy photographing my family and just generally documenting my world — more on that as my next potential project later. Between those various interests and commitments, I have about 15,000 images, all of which are safely cataloged by Adobe’s Lightroom. (I tried Aperture when it premiered [...]
Apple’s latest update to iOS fixes the problem of making the location services cache easily available on your computer, but before you update, you might still enjoy seeing how much information about you is available. How widely available it is is a matter for a separate discussion. I tried out the app on myself, just [...]
I did not know about the Electronic Literature Organization until I saw their announcement of the publication of their second collection in The Humanist. It looks interesting. It might be worth a rummage in the near future.
April 1 is international backup day, which seems like an odd day to choose. I think it would be better, if also equally unfortunate for those of who live in societies that celebrate April Fools, to mark it as open information, or open access, day. Today is the 200th birthday of Robert Bunsen, famous for [...]
Latrinalia — the writing on the walls of bathrooms — and graffiti have been studied by folklorists for quite some time. It’s refreshing to see folks not only collecting material but also attempting to publish it in some fashion as they collect it. My friend and colleague Quinn Dombrowksi was the first person I know [...]
I wish all services, and even a lot of applications, were as good as Dropbox. I turned the participants in my digital humanities seminar onto it, and, if I had done nothing else, I think that alone would have made the class for some of them. None of them hauls around a USB drive anymore. [...]
Apps like Read It Later do collect interesting kinds of data from their users. Interesting in the aggregate: it would appear that one of the things that iPad users are doing is spending their evening hours on the couch not watching television but reading. (Or perhaps both.) There are a variety of cool graphs and [...]
Because MLA came in January this year, our household is a week or so behind its usual schedule for getting Christmas put away. Typically we do this earlier in January, trying to get our Christmas tree on the curb in time for it to be recycled for coastal restoration. Unfortunately, that recycling program is not [...]