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I am working on a digital humanities project that examines what I term “the archival novel,” a genre that structurally instantiates elements of Victorian methods of information management and archiving within nineteenth-century literature, especially the gothic epistolary. The archival novel, as I define it, necessarily contains metadata – dates, media genres, and the genders, social…

“Hypermaterializing Posthuman Poetics” is a practice-based investigation into the use of meta-data structures for conducting and presenting literary criticism. In order to conduct this investigation, I am building multi-modal models of selected poems by Susan Howe – a language-oriented American poet who enacts her feminist politics through notoriously difficult poetry. This difficulty stems – in…

Historical research often draws upon our detective curiosities, tracing archival clues and analyzing (meta)data to make sense of culture and context. In my own PhD work, Playing Detective: Reenactment, Procedure, and Crime-Solving Entertainment, I rely on primary artifacts to unearth the historical perceptions of forensic science and police work as mainstays of popular entertainment and tools for civil…

What if you could view an ancient artifact online in 3D, zooming in on and selecting texts on the object to view a translation? You might be able to visualize how the positioning and the reading direction of texts interact with the 3D surface they’re inscribed upon to create an object that the Ancient Egyptians…

If you were to ask any technical professional working within the digital humanities today about the state of innovation or development present in the field you would probably hear many similar responses. I’m sure most would tell you that it is an exciting and interesting time to be involved with the humanities as a myriad…

On excavation, every archaeologist deals with metadata on a daily basis. From the trench supervisor to the ceramic specialist while collecting data, we collect data about our data. How well an archaeological project manages its metadata is directly connected to the success of the project and the quality of the research it produces. As a…

This may stray a bit from your standard academic blog post, but I thought I would share my experiences at the Winter Expo hosted by Virtual Reality Los Angeles last weekend. Since my first exposure to the HTC Vive back in August at Pax Prime, a gaming convention in Seattle, I have been hooked and…

“The Readers’ Thoreau” (http://commons.digitalthoreau.org) offers educators and their students a new way to study the works of the nineteenth-century American writer, Henry David Thoreau, in the form of a collaborative social edition. One of several projects launched by Digital Thoreau—itself a collaboration of SUNY Geneseo, the Thoreau Society, and the Walden Woods Project—“The Readers’ Thoreau”…

A few months ago I wrote an article on haptic computing and tactile interfacing, and it got me thinking of the ways people interact with objects.  As an archaeologist, I’m confronted with the complications of preserving sometimes fragile, often irreplaceable, historical objects.   “It belongs in a museum!” is the rallying cry of one Dr. Jones,…

By Haley Di Pressi, Stephanie Gorman, Miriam Posner, Raphael Sasayama, and Tori Schmitt, with contributions from Roderic Crooks, Megan Driscoll, Amy Earhart, Spencer Keralis, Tiffany Naiman, and Todd Presner UCLA’s Digital Humanities program emphasizes cross-disciplinary, cross-hierarchy collaboration among students, faculty, and staff. We’ve created this Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights as a statement of our values…