It's not very hard to get individual texts in digital form. But working with grad students in the humanities
looking for large sets of texts to do analysis across, I find that
larger corpora are so hodgepodge
as to be almost completely unusable. For humanists and ordinary people to work with large
textual collections, they need to be distributed in ways that are actually accessible, not just open access. [Read complete post...]
Ben Schmidt
I am director of digital humanities and clinical associate professor of history at New York University.
I use humanistic data analysis and data visualization to help people think about the American past in new ways. My primary current research project is Creating Data, a digital monograph about the organization of information in the American state in the late 19th century. I also write occasionally about higher education (teaching evaluations and humanities policy), narrative anachronism and [plot structure], and political history.
At NYU, I teach courses in digital humanities and history of the United States and technology in the history department and through the program in Digital Humanities, of which I am the director.
I live in Manhattan.
For a third-person bio or photo, click here.
Recent Blog Posts
Day of DH, 2022
Mar 27 2022
:::thread [Read complete post...]
A Rose for Ruby
Feb 27 2022
There are programming languages that people use for money, and
programming languages people use for love. There are Weekend at Bernie's/Jeremy Bentham corpses that you prop up for the cash, and there
are "Rose for Emily" corpses you sleep with every night for decades
because it's too painful to admit that the best version of your life you
ever glimpsed is not going to happen. [Read complete post...]From Hugo to Svelte-Kit
Jan 21 2022
I've been spending more time in the last year exploring modern web stacks, and have started evangelizing
for Svelte-Kit, which is a new-ish entry into the often-mystifying world
of web frameworks. As of today, I've migrated this, personal web site from Hugo, which I've been using
the last couple years, to svelte-kit. Let me know if you encounter any broken links, unexpected behavior,
accessibility issues, etc. I figured here I'd give a brief explanation of why svelte-kit, and how I did a
Hugo-Svelte kit migration. [Read complete post...]
Increasingly Stealthy
Sep 15 2021
Scott Enderle is one of the rare people whose Twitter pages I frequently visit, apropos of nothing, just to read in reverse. A few months ago, I realized he had at some point changed his profile to include the two words “increasingly stealthy.” He had told me he had cancer months earlier, warning that he might occasionally drop out of communication on a project we were working on. I didn’t then parse out all the other details of the page—that he had replaced his Twitter mugshot with a photo of a tree reaching to the sky, that the last retweet was my friend Johanna introducing a journal issue about “interpretive difficulty”—the problems literary scholars, for all their struggles to make sense, simply can’t solve. I only knew—and immediately stuffed down the knowledge—that things must have gotten worse. [Read complete post...]