Category Archives: digital

On Machine Readable Reading Lists

A few years ago I used to work at several college and departmental libraries at the University of Cambridge. One of the tasks which library staff regularly had to undertake was to cross reference the latest copies of all relevant reading lists with their collections, to ensure that they had copies of all the books [...]

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Mockups for OpenPhilosophy.org

Work is now underway on OpenPhilosophy.org, a website that will enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create bibliographies of public domain philosophy texts. Today we did some basic mockups for what different pages on the site might look like. Here’s a quick look. Front page Top bar: Small logo in top left. About page, [...]

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The Citation Conundrum

There is an unknown – but probably shockingly large – number of public domain texts on the web. Many of these could be of value to students and scholars. Lots of digital texts have page numbers which can be straightforwardly referenced in papers and publications. For example the journal article, the scanned monograph, born digital [...]

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Let’s make OpenPhilosophy.org!

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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