Lara Putnum’s “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast” elucidates the consequences of full-text search on scholarship first noted by Ted Underwood in “Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago.” Underwood advised we consider topic modeling as an alternative to full-text searching... Continue reading

Benjamin Zweig’s project, outlined in “Notes from the Field,” tracked the architecture and locations of religious structures in medieval Gotland. Zweig revealed an unequal number and type of structures across Gotland’s settlements, leading him to question the disparity’s cause. Are these structures representative of cultural traditions and geographic barriers between... Continue reading

Tanya Clement poses digital tools as assets to the humanities; she suggests “By identifying quantifiable pieces of a text using word frequencies and locations, these scholars have generated computer-assisted close readings of the structures of texts that correspond to, contradict, or otherwise provide interesting insight into what has been assumed... Continue reading

Readership changed in medieval Europe and manuscript design changed with it. As Malcolm B. Parkes notes, “The scholarly apparatus which we take for granted,” including tables of contents, chapters, numbered sections, running headers, footnotes, paragraphs, summaries in the margin, identification of authorities, and even the index, “originated in the notions... Continue reading

Participatory archives, as Kate Theimer tells us, are the future. Archives must become places where “people other than the archives professionals contribute knowledge or resources resulting in increased understanding about archival materials.” One way archives can engage the communities they serve is to invite “the public to make their own... Continue reading

Matt Kirschenbaum’s question “How do we decide when we’re done?” is a constant nuisance to all writers, not just those engaged in digital projects (qtd. in Price 17). For print (including documents distributed in print and digital, usually academic-database formats), someone out in the world finally says it’s done; no... Continue reading

In the first paragraph of “Messy Data and Faulty Tools,” Joanna Swafford cites the Stanford Trans-Historical Poetry Project, found here. Stanford Literary Lab aims to create an algorithm that scans meter by breaking lines into their smallest metrical units in order to classify the metrical scheme of any poem (Algee-Hewitt,... Continue reading

Katherine Halyes tells us that the digital medium can inhibit critical reading rather than cater to it; hyperlinks, short forms, habitual actions, and endless content are just some of the features of the web that “make it a powerful practice for rewiring the brain” but also elements that may “tend... Continue reading