Digital Humanities
@ Pratt

Inquiries into culture, meaning, and human value meet emerging technologies and cutting-edge skills at Pratt Institute's School of Information

Event review: Conference: Afterlives: Place, Memory, Story

CUNY Public history collective conference “Afterlives: place, memory, story” covered different presentations addressing restoring and re-purposing historical material and narratives. In general, it was discussed how to find new innovative ways to reach different audiences in the public history. Many of the presented projects utilized digital tools either in the analysis or for presenting the results of the research. The…

“Digital Accessibility and the Making of a Meta Maker Movement” A Talk by Dr. Joshua Miele hosted by GC Digital Initiatives at The Graduate Center, CUNY on Thursday, October 20, 2016

On Thursday, October 20 at 6:30pm, Dr. Joshua Miele, of the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, gave a talk on “Digital Accessibility and the Making of a Meta Maker Movement” at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Dr. Miele was invited by GC Digital Initiatives to discuss the fundamental understanding of accessibility within the maker movement, and the work he and his team has done to provide blind makers the necessary tools and resources they need to help design their own tools in order to engage in the maker movement. Dr. Miele emphasised the significance of collaboration between blind and sighted people, and the inclusion of blind people throughout the design process and in the management and running of an accessible makerspace.

NYU Center for the Humanities hosts “Distracted Reading: Acts of Attention in the Age of the Internet” event on Tuesday, September 27, 2016

The NYU Center for the Humanities held an event entitled “Distracted Reading: Acts of Attention in the Age of the Internet”on Tuesday September 27 at 6 p.m. that addressed the concept of “distracted reading,” or the idea that students’ attention is being diverted to technology rather than their class work. Speakers at the event, which was moderated by Marion Thain, Associate…

Event Review of Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative Lecture

Sara Sheer Event Review   Summary: Professor Robert Englund of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) gave a lecture on the digitization of cuneiform texts. He described how the tablets had been scanned, then transcribed, translated, transliterated and annotated into machine-readable-code. This data was then organized into databases for the benefit of researchers. The geographic dispersal of cuneiform texts and…

Textual Analysis and Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are an intrinsic part of the Western cultural narrative. As such, their stories are ever evolving, reflecting the mores and historical and sociological context of their time. The fairy tales of today—heavily influenced by Disney’s adaptations—were built on previous generations’ versions, which developed out of previous versions, and so on. They have been retold first through oral storytelling,…

Day of DH: A Textual Analysis

What is digital humanities? There is no single agreed-upon answer amongst practitioners or members of the field. Many note that it is less a unified discipline than a series of methods and practices that share common values (Spiro, 2012; Burdick, 2012; Presner, 2009). One common value amongst the digital humanities crowd is openness and contributions from many, much as in…

Topic Modeling Cryptome’s Archive Over Time

Introduction For 19 years, the nonprofit website Cryptome has collected and published a wide range of materials primarily related to domestic and international governmental affairs which have otherwise faced obstacles to traditional publication. Founded and solely maintained by the architects John Young and Deborah Natsios, Cryptome openly “welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material…

Were Terry Pratchett’s Final Works Affected by Alzheimer’s Disease?: An Analysis into Vocabulary Trends within the Discworld Series, Post Diagnosis

INTRODUCTION Regardless of type or style, writers cannot help but put themselves on the page, and so none of their biographies would seem complete without drawing attention to their subjects’ craft directly. By the extension of this thought, what could we learn about ourselves if we took all of what we have written down and stored both online and offline…