Digital humanities - Information Matters

How might we understand the way in which research and education can be used as a positive force in bringing the world closer together? This difficult question is one that those of us within digital humanities at University College London want to address. Looking at our institutional history can help to clarify this. The history of digital humanities is gaining attention, with an increasing focus on understanding its development and recognising its role of addressing diversity, gender, race, and linguistic backgrounds in knowledge production, and promoting inclusive representation.

Translation

January 8, 2025 Wenqi Li

Curating Chinese Ancient Book Catalogs through Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Chinese scholars have consistently built upon past knowledge to create new intellectual works. Over the centuries, these efforts have yielded a vast sea of literature spanning classics, histories, and literary compositions. Consequently, bibliography or book catalogs has long been regarded as a critical discipline—“the entry point to scholarship.” Ancient scholars relied on catalogs to locate texts and delve into learning. Today, as we explore the world of ancient Chinese books, catalogs remain indispensable guides.

Featured Original

May 17, 2024 Quinn Remington

Resource “Accessibility” Is More Than Just “Posting It Online”

Not everyone has the time and money to book a flight across the world to look at an artifact in person, so how do researchers with limited funding access one-of-a-kind resources? The Internet is a godsend for collaboration, letting us share photos of ancient pottery fragments, 3D scans of mummified tissue, and create virtual tours of ancient Egyptian tombs. However, sharing becomes a little more complicated when that artifact contains thousands of individual pages in 61 diaries, handwritten by a steamship clerk living in nineteenth-century Iraq. The Svoboda Diaries Project (SDP) focuses on exactly that. For nearly two decades, this project has used new and exciting digital preservation methods and extensive collaboration to make these diaries accessible to everyone.

Chinese

September 6, 2022 Xuanhui Zhang

被忽视的大多数：用因果推断解析文化遗产众包中志愿者参与的不平衡现象

所有依靠用户创造内容的大规模网络社群都有一个特点：大部分用户是潜水者；相反，小部分用户非常活跃，并创造了大部分内容。我们通常用二八定律、90-9-1法则、沉默的大多数等来描述和解释这种社群结构的不平衡。然而，如果我们不去关注哪些是潜水者哪些是活跃者，只关注他们的行为结果，那么，他们的参与是平衡分布的吗？