What used to be a small specialty in a few newsrooms has grown some larger wings in the past couple …
What used to be a small specialty in a few newsrooms has grown some larger wings in the past couple …
The MIT SENSEable City Lab, in partnership with BBVA, visualizes spending in Spain during Easter of 2011. The animation shows …
In a recent op-ed as part of The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Digital Campus special issue, Bethany Nowviskie, director of Digital Research and Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library and president of the Association for Computers an…
How do you engage people with data? How do you make them care and pay attention and remember anything about a particular piece of data? One way is dressing the data up as an information graphic. Another might be to get people to play a little game with the data. Nick Diakopoulos and colleagues have built a fascinating research prototype of what this might look like.
The idea of gamification is hard to escape these days, with many websites offering achievements of different kinds for activities from just being somewhere to pushing yourself harder to exercise. At worst, gamification can be an annoying contest for its own sake, but at best it can turn passive observers into active participants.
Guessing Public Health Data
Diakopoulos’ Salubrious Nation project attempts to lure people into thinking about data by presenting it as a game. A map presents demographic data about every county in the 48 states of the continental U.S. The system picks one county at random and asks the player to guess a public health statistic about it, like binge drinking, teenage pregnancies, etc. There are two types of interaction: the user can mouse over any county to see demographic data about it (population, poverty rate, life expectancy, etc.), and a slider at the top to enter the player’s guess.
The clever thing about the slider is not only that it indicates the national average as a reference, but that the map responds to it. As the [...]
This is just a quick post to share two bits of news about our Praxis Program at the Scholars’ Lab. The first is that I’ve written an op-ed on Praxis and our Fellows’ practicum project for this year’s Digital Campus special issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The piece was originally titled “Praxis, Through [...]
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The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University created PressForward to explore a…
Keynote Speaker: Dan Cohen, Associate Professor, Department
of History and Art History and Director, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and
New Media at George Mason University
Scholarship and scholarly discussion is increasing
occurri…
This guest post was written by Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu — a site that serves as a platform for academics to share their research papers and to interact with each other
Instant distribution
Many academics are excited abou…
In an earlier EMOB post, “Digital Humanities and the Archives I: Economics and Sustainability”, we discussed the varied connotations that the term “sustainability” evokes. Yet the concept of “archives” also engenders a multiplicity of meanings as does the word “database.” In some circles “archive” and “database” are used interchangeably, while for others the terms signal [...]
The Ex Libris (bookplate) illustrations below were selected from the first half of the enormous John Starr Stewart Collection at the University of Illinois. Will from 50Watts sampled the back half of the same database: [The Bookplate Collection: Second…
This is a rough DRAFT of a doctoral course I will be offering in Spring 2013 in our new Ph.D. Lab in Digital Knowledge. All the work in that course will have a public component. If you are interested in participating as an individual …
Detail from a full strew border of a monkey playing bagpipes, from the Isabella Breviary, Southern Netherlands (Bruges), late 1480s and before 1497, British Library, Additional 18851, f. 13 If you happen to be in the mood for a bit of weekend whimsy (and who isn’t?), we would like to draw your attention once again to the British Library’s ‘Isabella Breviary’. The Breviary was created for Queen Isabella of Castile (1451-1504), and was the manuscript featured in our 2011 calendar series (see here for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December). There is much…
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