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 [...]
Category Archives: ideas
On Machine Readable Reading Lists
Also posted in digital, digitalhumanities, humanities, open data, openknowledge, openphilosophy, projects, technology, textus Leave a comment
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, [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digital, digitalhumanities, openknowledge, projects, technology 3 Comments
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 [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digital, digitalhumanities, humanities Tagged digitalhumanities 4 Comments
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 [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digital, digitalhumanities, humanities, open data, openknowledge, projects, technology 5 Comments
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 [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digital, digitalhumanities, history, humanities, literature, notes, open data, openknowledge, projects, technology 9 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 [...]
Also posted in data, digital, isotype, neurath, open data, policy, projects, visualisation 4 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 [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digitalhumanities, history, humanities, intellectualhistory, openknowledge, projects, technology 7 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 [...]
Also posted in openknowledge, projects, publicdomain 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 [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digital, digitalhumanities, history, humanities, intellectualhistory, open data, openknowledge, 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 [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digital, digitalhumanities, history, humanities, intellectualhistory, technology 4 Comments
Jonathan Gray