A little while ago I posted some ideas for a project called OpenPhilosophy.org, which would enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create collections of philosophical texts which have entered the public domain. I’m very excited to say that the project has secured some funding from JISC, who champion digital technology for use in higher [...]
Author Archives: jwyg
Let’s make OpenPhilosophy.org!
Posted in bibliography, digital, humanities, ideas, open data, openknowledge, philosophy, projects, publicdomain, technology 1 Comment
TEXTUS: an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata
Since finally blogging about OpenPhilosophy.org last month I’ve been thinking about how one could make a generic open source platform that could be used to power it, and other things like it. Enter ‘TEXTUS’: TEXTUS is an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata. It enables users to transcribe, translate, and [...]
Posted in bibliography, digital, history, humanities, ideas, literature, notes, open data, openknowledge, projects, publicdomain, technology 6 Comments
Picturing processes
There has been lots of wonderful work to represent numbers in pictorial form. Pictures can help to show us how big things are, how much of something there is, how much one thing is compared to another, how amounts change over time, and so on. We can use interactive graphics to represent quantitative data on [...]
Posted in digital, ideas, isotype, neurath, open data, policy, projects, visualisation 2 Comments
Ideas for OpenPhilosophy.org
For several years I’ve been meaning to start OpenPhilosophy.org, which would be a collection of open resources related to philosophy for use in teaching and research. There would be a focus on the history of philosophy, particularly on primary texts that have entered the public domain, and on structured data about philosophical texts. The project [...]
Posted in bibliography, history, humanities, ideas, intellectualhistory, openknowledge, philosophy, projects, publicdomain, technology 6 Comments
A translation fund for public domain texts
If a text is widely known and published more than a century and a half ago, chances are that it will be freely available on the web to read and download. Every person with an internet connection has access to a vast wealth of cultural and historical material: novels and poems, essays and manifestos, constitutions [...]
Posted in ideas, openknowledge, projects, publicdomain 3 Comments
On Archiving Everything: Borges, Calvino, Google
Today Google marks the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges with this colourful sketch. The sketch alludes to his role as Director of the Argentinian National Public Library, his architectural literature, and – not least – his recurring fantasies of the all-encompassing archive, the total library: Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the [...]
Posted in borges, literature, technology, wittgenstein 6 Comments
Architectural Literature, Literary Architecture
A few years ago an architect friend and I used to fantasise about building and animating a model of a small but representative section of Borges’s “Library of Babel”. We wanted to incorporate the animation into a short film with a reading of Borges’s story, complete with lots of digitally-assisted indefinite zooming through the model. [...]
Posted in architecture, art, events, exhibitions, history, literature Tagged architecture, borges, calvino, library, literature, unbuilt extremities 4 Comments
Who read what? Mapping influence in intellectual history
In my research I often wonder about whom and what the people I’m reading read. Did Wittgenstein read Nietzsche? Did Nietzsche read Hegel? Did Hegel read Shakespeare? Did Shakespeare read Chaucer? Did Chaucer read Sophocles? Knowing which texts a given writer was aware of (and which they probably weren’t aware of) can help us to [...]
Posted in bibliography, digital, history, humanities, ideas, intellectualhistory, open data, openknowledge, philosophy, projects, technology 7 Comments
How much will digital tools change the nature of scholarship?
Will new digital technologies radically transform the nature of research in the arts and humanities? Generally I think I might be relatively old fashioned about this. Of course new technologies may change our modus operandi, and may alter the kinds of research we do. For example the (arguably disproportionate) dominance of the monograph and the [...]
Posted in bibliography, digital, history, humanities, ideas, intellectualhistory, philosophy, technology 4 Comments
Ars Combinatoria at Transmediale
Today I co-ran a session called Ars Combinatoria at Transmediale. From the blurb: As a young man the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz was interested in creating an ‘art of combinations’, which would allow people to create interesting new inventions from a set of basic elements. The ‘Ars Combinatoria’ project is about creating new works [...]
Posted in events, leibniz, openknowledge, publicdomain 1 Comment
Jonathan Gray 
