News

UCLA is a partner in a UC President’s Catalyst Award, one of only four of such grants awarded in 2016. As one of the four PIs (together with Tom Levy from UC San Diego, Ben Porter from UC Berkeley and Nicola Lercari from UC Merced) I am involved in developing and testing digital means of…

To follow up on an article written by my esteemed predecessor, I’d like to explore how developments in mobile technology are affecting us. In the 9 short years since the first smart phone was released, our habits and communication styles have measurably changed.  Working in technical support, I have a unique viewpoint of some on…

It seems not too long ago that we were making the switch from Standard Definition (SD) TV to High Definition (HD). Now, within the past few years the buzz has been about 4K TV, which is supposed to be the next logical step for a crisper, clearer viewing experience. 4K TVs tout a resolution that…

What do you do with a website once it has reached the end of its lifecycle? There are any number of reasons why you might create a website, but what should you do when you’re ready to disable or move your site to another platform or Content Management System (CMS) (like WordPress, Drupal, SquareSpace, etc.)?…

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…