Collection
digital humanities
How conspiracy theories emerge—and how their storylines fall apartA new study by UCLA professors offers a new way to understand how unfounded conspiracy theories emerge online. The research, which combines sophisticated artificial intelligence and a deep knowledge of how folklore is structured, explains how unrelated facts and false information can connect into a narrative framework that would quickly fall apart if some of those elements are taken out of the mix.
3Science tools are not made for their users5 min read I often get to talk about Gephi, an open source tool to visualize and analyze networks that I co-created a decade ago. The project is in a semi-dormant state since a few years, but despite some issues it still works. As frustrating as it can be, Gephi has its fans – kudos … Continue reading Science tools are not made for their users
5Archaeology of Reading |The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR's corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey. Though the surviving remnants of their massive libraries are scattered across research libraries throughout the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, AOR presents a virtual library of many of Dee's and Harvey's most engaging and revealing annotated books. Their contents span a wide range of subjects, including agriculture, alchemy, ancient and medieval history, astrology, astronomy, humor, law, linguistics, mathematics, medicine, military theory, natural history, navigation, the occult, oratory, politics, poetry, and topography. The AOR viewer places each page of each book alongside a text panel containing full transcriptions (and English translations) of all the manuscript marginalia on that page. A second text panel enables users to conduct complex searches across all of Dee's and Harvey's marginalia. Through AOR, users can either browse or locate precisely every one of their annotations in these books, all parts of the printed texts they underlined, all their manuscript symbols and marks, all the people, places, and books they mentioned, and much more.
3Crafting FreedomThe Crafting Freedom Website provides educators with a user-friendly resource on the African-American experience during the era of slavery. Here you'll find ready-to-use lesson plans, videos, PDF slide shows, teacher tools, and student handouts that bridge the gap between the expanding scholarship on the 19th-century black experience and the need for this history to be more widely understood.
7Mapping Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1788)The map below locates the ninety-three entries from Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies: or, Man of Pleasure's Kalender, For the YEAR, 1788. Containing the Histories and some curious Anecdotes of the most celebrated Ladies now on the Town, and also many of their Keepers.
3France’s First Modern Novel Gets Its First Digital Bilingual EditionBacked by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Hélène Bilis, associate professor of French, will work with a team of scholars to produce the first bilingual digital edition of “The Princess of Clèves,” the classic 1678 novel by French author Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette.
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