blog. Wybo Wiersma .net

While still working on my MSc thesis, I went to San Francisco this summer. I first attended the Digital Humanities 2011 conference at Stanford University. It was great to see many known faces there again, and the talks and posters were ‘not bad’ either. Especially impressive was the keynote on Culturomics, the quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books.

Then I started work at Academia.edu, a well-funded startup which now has over a million users. Academia.edu is a social network for scholars, which – besides the usual social network-features – organizes people by their department and research-interests, and enables scholars to present their publications in a beautiful way. Not only does it allow direct subscription to the news-feed of individual researchers (as in a personalized journal), but it also makes uploaded papers more widely available, as user-pages are indexed by Google, and thus easy to find by researchers and other interested parties. ...read more

Other essays I completed during the second half of my time at King’s are (from 1st halve are here): Keywords in context (a mixed bag, on concordance analysis of Hannah Arend’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, the process of concordancing, and collective responsibility), and Critical mass in collaborative hypertext environments (on critical mass in hypertext environments in general). This latter essay is available on LogiLogi

A poster on LogiLogi, and it’s “Quest for Critical Mass”, was presented at Digital Humanities 2010. And we won an European Science Foundation bursary for it. On our poster we report on recent improvements of LogiLogi, provide some background theory about critical mass, and identify factors that can be of influence on attainment.

The conference has just ended, and it was a great event, featuring topics as diverse as literary ...read more

In the last few months I have written four essays. The first two were for a course called Digital Publishing in the Humanities: Three Digital Publications: Carrying the Printer Home (about modes of reading and the suitability of digital resources for them, and the need for annotation possibilities to enable academic reading), The Letters by Vincent van Gogh: Silently Painting Letters Across Screens (about ...read more

In addition to this, you can now also use LogiLogi to read, and comment on, my thesis for History. It is about the justifyability (or lack thereof) of Intellectual Property throughout history. It is called: Enclosures of the Mind: Intellectual Property from a Global Perspective. On LogiLogi you can find it here, and a .pdf of it can be downloaded here.

Also when speaking more broadly, Digital Humanities is a very promising and socially useful field. Promising because whereas for example in physics a digital revolution has already happened, in the Humanities, because of their different and complex needs, there is still a lot to do and to discover.

And it is useful for society because applications and improvements for Historians and Philosophers – when successful – ...read more

The Digital Humanities 2008 conference was the conference to visit! It covered topics ranging from computer linguistics, dialectology, corpora, digital text-editions, and last but not least information- systems for people from the humanities and philosophers. In this last category there were 2 projects presented that we think are are especially interesting; of course besides our own project, LogiLogi :-).

The first was Discovery ...read more