The cyberattack on The British Library in October 2023 knocked out ebooks and almost ever other computer thing there for years.

Ebooks just came back. They were knocked out everywhere using the BL’s license (legal deposit libraries I think? More libraries?)

Distributed physical copies matter.

Associate professor’s book highlights history of Indigenous slavery Linford Fisher’s work on the project started with considering New England’s connection to the Atlantic slave trade.

Grateful to @browndailyherald.bsky.social for a nice write up of my book that is officially releasing on April 28 from @liveright.bsky.social / @wwnorton.com. Preorder your copy now, and local friends, hope to catch you at an event! (www.linfordfisher.com).

www.browndailyherald.com/article/2026...

I wrote up a quick set of teaching ideas in honor of this year's @dhawards.bsky.social. Here are a few different ways that I might use that site in the classroom with students to find new projects, think critically, and speculatively design their own awards.

walshbr.com/blog/teachin...

Digital Humanities Salon: Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past and Black Family Displacement on the East Side Please join the Center for Digital Scholarship for the Digital Humanities Salon series on select Thursdays at noon in person at the Patrick Ma Digi...

Our next #DigitalHumanities Salon is THURSDAY 4/23 at noon! Renée Ater and Dannie Ritchie will share two newly launched projects: Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past and Black Family Displacement on the East Side of Providence. Register here: tinyurl.com/5n86xhwf

We’re excited to celebrate the launch of the newly redesigned website for the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship! Explore our workshops, blog, projects, and more through a more accessible and streamlined site: digitalscholarship.emory.edu

Read more here: scholarblogs.emory.edu/ecds/celebra...

Designing Our Digital Past: Anchoring Digital-History Tool Development in the Historical Method Through Design-Based History Research Many of the tools digital humanists use have come from a variety of disciplines outside of history. As a consequence, many digital-history methods sections focus on how a tool developed by non-historians might support, or need to be adapted for, particular historical questions. Few digital tools have been developed by and for historians with a specific eye to the methodological and theoretical explorations of design principles that are necessary to anchor digital-history-specific tool development in historiographic practices. This article introduces Design-Based History Research (DBHR) as a methodological bridge between the practices of digital-history tool design, the use of digital methods to create historical argumentation, and social-science-inspired methodological innovation. Design-Based Research (DBR) is an educational-research approach to studying learning theory that supports theory building by integrating theory into the design of new tools and environments, in a manner that allows the designers to rigorously study the theory, and the relationship between the theory and the tools that embody it (Puntambekar, 2018; Sandoval, 2013). In practice, this means that DBR focused on software design incorporates theoretically motivated decisions about user interface features, user activities, and data-structure choices into an initial tool/software-package design and then studies the design package in use as a way of iteratively refining the theoretical principles in each of the tool's design phases. DBHR is an adaptation of the DBR approach, with a theoretical approach grounded in the unique needs of historians and historiographic practices. We aim to illustrate DBHR by describing the design and use of Net.Create, a user-focused network-analysis tool that prioritizes historiographic practices (evidence interpretation, citation preservation, and historiographic debate) in its feature development and user-interface choices (Craig & Danish, 2018). We document how the needs of digital historians shaped the current design of Net.Create, explore the connections between specific tool features and their operation, and delineate how those tool features support the digital-history needs we identified. As part of this iterative-design process, we will also address some of the human-computer-interaction observations, user-entered network data, and qualitative-network-analysis approaches that shaped each stage of our feature development around digital history practices. Our DBHR process ultimately led us to prioritize the development of three features that support and encourage sustained historiographic debate at each phase of a network-analysis digital-history project: simultaneous entry and visualization of capta, data that is gathered and contested rather than downloaded or received, in order to support and encourage historiographic debate during the data-gathering phase and prior to a formal analysis phase easy-to-use revision of network taxonomy and network data, to support interpretation, reinterpretation and re-input of evidence and data by many collaborators simultaneously, synchronously or asynchronously, during the initial analysis phase data provenance features that expose the researchers' positionality and preserve the original citations for each network datapoint, to support the integration of close-reading analytical practices both by the research team and by other historians after the communication of results to a public audience By documenting the historiographic roots of each of these features, we hope to offer a systematic articulation of digital history tool design not simply as software development but as a pathway to the concurrent and intertwined development of historical theory, digital-history tools, and collaborative historical methods.

So excited that eight years of research are now public in the Journal of Digital History: @jdanish and @kalanicraig present a Design‑Based History Research framework and Net.Create, a network analysis tool for digital history.

Still time to vote in #DH Awards 2025, the #DigitalHumanities Awards awareness event. Anyone can vote (once) up until 2026-04-17. Anyone? Yes, anyone. Your aunt can vote, your highschool friend can vote, anyone!

dhawards.org/dhawards2025...
(or secure form directly at forms.gle/FvWp3NYs8hv1...)

The longer I spend in digital humanities, the more I am obsessively drawn to analog technologies and convinced we must actively and intently teach them or the digital world loses its color, texture, and depth.

If you’re teaching DH right now, how are you thinking about your students’ relationship to generative AI? Are you ignoring it? Banning it? Discussing a policy with them first? Encouraging vibe coding?

Interested to see how educators across the continuum of opinions are managing it.

So excited to celebrate with @linford.bsky.social at the @jcblibrary.bsky.social! We're so proud of @stolenrelations.bsky.social and the work that Prof. Fisher has done with us. Look, it's a book! It's a website! It's over ten years of work!

A man sitting at a working desk, in 1540 setting, with a drinking cup, a few books, a writing desk with paper sheets, and lots of more details.

Working the morning shift as a scholar in 1540, a browser tab and a word document opened on two screens, other needed texts opened and handy, an overfull mail account nearby, and a hot beverage in reach to make for the best working condition. Bonus: wearing a thinking hat. #academicchatter

We're huge fans of pvdthings.coop here in Providence and love seeing what other Thing Libraries have for their communities to use!

Aerial view of the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford with a freshly mown lawn featuring intricate curved stripe patterns around the circular building.

Ground-level view of striped grass patterns on the lawn beside the Radcliffe Camera, showing alternating light and dark green lines stretching across the grass.

A lawn mower on the striped grass outside the Radcliffe Camera, highlighting the precision-cut pattern with people and historic college buildings in the background.

The lawn outside the Radcliffe Camera had a trim today 🌱

No, it’s not AI.

Designed and carefully cut by James from our University Parks Estates team.

📷 Instagram | Jimigk13

This was stunning when I saw it 12.5 years ago, and remains a stunning and elegant use of geo and viz tools today!

A cautionary tale of shoddy digitisation I shall of course reference with next year's students.

this wikipedia editor is orbiting the moon right now!

How People with Disabilities Use the Web Introduces how people with disabilities, including people with age-related impairments, use the Web.

People who want to make the web accessible need to understand the many different ways that people with disabilities use the web. This W3C resource offers a good introduction to how disabled people navigate the web, and barriers they commonly encounter.

www.w3.org/WAI/people-u...

Digital Humanities Salon: Providence Urban Removals Please join the Center for Digital Scholarship for the Digital Humanities Salon series on select Thursdays at noon in person at the Patrick Ma Digi...

Join us at noon this THURSDAY 4/2, in the Rockefeller Library Digital Scholarship Lab (rm 137) for our next #DigitalHumanities Salon! Prof Patricia Rubertone will present on a dataset of over 500 individuals who were "warned out" of Providence in the early 1800s. Register here: tinyurl.com/22n8arx5

Registration is open for our upcoming symposium on May 1! Please feel warmly invited to "Forging the Future of Digital Scholarship: People, Projects, and Priorities," a hybrid one-day event held at the Rockefeller Library Brown University & on Zoom! Learn more, and register: go.brown.edu/futures

March 25 marks the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
ECDS is spotlighting a blog post on the 3D reconstruction of the Marie-Séraphique.

Read more: scholarblogs.emory.edu/ecds/spotlig...

DH Awards 2025 Voting Form This is the voting form for the openly-nominated openly-voted Digital Humanities Awards 2025. Please go look at the nominated resources at http://dhawards.org/dhawards2025/voting/ before voting. Vo...

Hi friends, the @stolenrelations.bsky.social project has been nominated for a Digital Humanities Award! We'd love your vote if you have a moment to fill out this form! You have to scroll down (or cmd-F) to find Stolen Relations. (Also--cool to see other projects!) docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Okay, I had to join the cool kids and document the arrival of the first copies of my book, Stealing America! Author's copies landed super early from @liveright.bsky.social and @wwnorton.com and they did a fantastic job. Available for pre-order now; official pub date is April 28.

Stolen Relations @stolenrelations.bsky.social is one of the nominees for a 2025 Digital Humanities Award in the category of "Digital Humanities Resource." Voting will be open until mid April, and we'd love your support! dhawards.org/dhawards2025...

CDS staff are here and we'd love to say hi to our fellow #DH practitioners! We'll see you at our panels on New Directions for Digital Centers, at 1, and Engaging Communities in Decolonial DH, at 4.

Encoding Endings: TEI, Typology, and Similarity in Medieval Latin Colophons Join the Center for Digital Scholarship for a special talk, “Encoding Endings: TEI, Typology, and Similarity in Medieval Latin Colophons” with ...

Join us at noon this TUESDAY 3/17 for an exciting #DigitalHumanities talk: Jakub Kozák will be presenting on developing a database to analyze Medieval Latin colophons (scribal additions concluding copied texts) through patterned variation across many texts! Register here: tinyurl.com/2s46rcbt

Many are the repositories whose digitized collections are held together by paper clips & twine paid for with an uncertain budget that may not get renewed in the next fiscal year because there’s long been a zeal to “just” digitize things but not to invest in their careful documentation & maintenance.

A Critical Look at AI for Text Analysis in ProQuest TDM Studio Are you curious about whether generative AI can assist with your text analysis project? What can genAI offer, if anything, beyond traditional compu...

See you at 2pm on THURSDAY 3/12, in the Digital Scholarship Lab (Rockefeller Library rm 137) for our final "Building Your #DigitalHumanities Toolkit" spring workshop. Join us to learn more about the implications of generative AI for text analysis! Register here: events.brown.edu/library/even...

Digital Humanities Salon: U2 Egypt Please join the Center for Digital Scholarship for the Digital Humanities Salon series on select Thursdays at noon in person at the Patrick Ma Digi...

Join us at noon on THURSDAY 3/12, in the Rockefeller Library Digital Scholarship Lab (rm 137) for our next #DigitalHumanities Salon! Laurel Bestock and Lutz Klein will present on digitizing declassified aerial photographs of 1950s Egypt. Register here: events.brown.edu/library/even...

Forging the Future of Digital Scholarship: People, Projects, Priorities “Forging the Future of Digital Scholarship: People, Projects, Priorities,” a symposium co-organized by Brown University Digital Publications an...

Save the date! 🗓️

On May 1, the Center for Digital Scholarship will be co-hosting "Forging the Future of Digital Scholarship: People, Projects, Priorities."

Join us for this one-day event at the Brown University Library or on Zoom (registration required): go.brown.edu/digital-scho...

Names of Athenian Triremes: Investigating Group Cohesiveness and Social Identity in the Athenian Navy of the 4th Century BC - Journal of Maritime Archaeology The set of inscriptions known as the Naval Inventories of Athens (IG II2 1604–IG II2 1632) provide a wealth of information regarding the state of the Athenian navy in the fourth century BC. The inscri...

I guess I didn’t wake up thinking I needed to know the names of the 279 named triremes ⛵️in the 4th century BCE Athenian navy, but it appears we all do. link.springer.com/article/10.1... I do like that 3.58% had animal names like Λεοντῆ (lion skin) and Λέαινα (lioness). Greek epigraphy is fun! 🪦