Digital Humanities Quarterly

A new academic open-access, peer reviewed journal has been launched. The Digital Humanities Quarterly aims to cover all aspects of digital media in the humanities with a commitment to:

Experimenting with publication formats and the rhetoric of digital authoring
Co-publishing articles with Literary and Linguistic Computing (a well-established print digital humanities journal) in ways that straddle the print/digital divide
Using open standards to deliver journal content
Developing translation services and multilingual reviewing in keeping with the strongly international character of ADHO

DHQ will publish a wide range of peer-reviewed materials, including:
Scholarly articles
Editorials and provocative opinion pieces
Experiments in interactive media
Reviews of books, web sites, new media art installations, digital humanities systems and tools
A blog with guest commentators

 

Key differences between old and new media

Oliver Reichenstein has written a very succinct piece on Understanding New Media summarising key Web2.0 concepts in ‘old media’ and ‘new media’

 

The universe of Jonathan Harris

Universe is an another interactive by Jonathan Harris creator of We feel fine which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago

Universe had me mesmerised for an hour or so as this is another of his playfully disturbing pieces about the dominant narratives of our culture.

On his site Jonathan Harris describes the project as

As humans, we have a long history of projecting our great stories into the night sky. This leads us to wonder: if we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? These questions form the inspiration for Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations

WordCount is an experiment in the way we use language. It takes 86,800 most frequently used English words ranked in order of most common usage. Typography is used to reveal the information as words are scaled to reflect its frequency of use. The larger the word the more often it is used.

Other projects by Jonathan Harris are Lovelines is an exploration of human desire, while Phylotaxis tackles “where science meets culture” and 10×10 is very well known. All are worth checking out if you have not encountered them before.

 

The Museum of Lost Interactions

The Museum of Lost Interactions is described as a timeline of innovation.

The website consists of nine exhibits of forgotten communication and entertainment media, ranging from 1900 to 1979.

These are curious and fascinating projects that prefigure many of the technological gadgets we play with today.

These nine exhibits were donated by a group studying Interactive Media Design, who lovingly restored each to working order. Their discoveries were made whilst researching examples of interaction design that pre-dated digital technology. They also uncovered archive film, photography and packaging which places each artifact in its historical context.

I know that everyone involved has been affected by the surprising similarities and profound differences between these and contemporary designs, and of how interchangeable technologies often are but how much more important social change can be.

 

Two ezines

Two online magazines that are useful resources particularly for my students are:
Computer Arts which provides online tutorials of key software, feature articles, reviews and news. A newsletter is available via email.

Digital Media Designer offers feature articles, tutorials, product reviews and news about key software packages used in the industry for print and web design. A newsletter is available

 

Charles Dickens London and illustrations

David Perdue has created the Charles Dickens Page which aims to educate and increase awareness of Dickens’ life and works.

The site includes an interactive map of Charles Dickens London Using the Dickens London map is easy as “Detail” will take you to that section of an 1859 map of London, “Dictionary” provides a description of that location and “Today” will take you to an Google Map aerial view of the area today

Charles Dickens: the name conjures up visions of plum pudding and Christmas punch, quaint coaching inns and cozy firesides, but also of orphaned and starving children, misers, murderers, and abusive schoolmasters. Dickens was 19th century London personified, he survived its mean streets as a child and, largely self-educated, possessed the genius to become the greatest writer of his age.

Key illustrators of Dickens works are also featured plus information on the two primary methods used in the publication of illustrations whaich at the time were etching and wood engraving.

 

Communication, cultural and media studies theory resource

The CCMS Infobase by Mick Underwood covers most of the basics and then some in communication, cultural and media studies theory which is what it aims to do.

Aimed at the final year of secondary school or the first year of university many students would find this site useful and at least worth investigation. There are plenty of resources to draw upon here.

 

We Feel Fine

We Feel Fine is described by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar as an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

We feel fine is a fresh perspective on the human condition as expressed on blogs around the world. The site is mesmerising and quite poetic poignant and highly engaging as the data visualisation is beautiful. It is great to see an interactive piece which is not self indulgent.

The interface is intuitive and playful. We feel fine displays particles. Each particle represents a feeling posted by a single individual. Any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The bar at the top enables you to search via a particular word, gender, age, weather, location, and date.

 

An interactive site on Roman Paris

Paris an Roman City is sprinkled liberally with interactive panoramas, maps, 3D virtual objects and the ability to view close up images. I spent an hour or so on this site thoroughly enjoying myself

 

Plato’s concerns with new media

In Plato and new media Jerry Everard points to a wonderful skit on YouTube and observes that it captures one of Plato’s greatest concerns with writing compared to face-to-face communication

Plato, one of the first new media analysts was concerned about the then new technology of writing. And he understood the potential (and actual) pitfalls of this new operating system. The same has been true of all subsequent new technologies. Always there remains the need for a meta-helper - one who understands the new technology to help later adopters make full use of the new technology.