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On behalf of HumTech, I would like to congratulate the team behind one of our past project collaborations, Mapping Indigenous LA (MILA), for being featured earlier this week on KPCC’s “Take Two” news program. The humanities are criticized for being irrelevant to the needs of modern America. MILA’s engagement with its community partners, however, shows…

Shakespeare died 400 years ago this week, but we’re still getting to know him. And, thanks to UCLA’s HumTech, I think we can now read the DNA of his plays in a way that reveals something fundamental about how his authorial mind worked. This started with a tiny question: which secondary character speaks a little…

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”…