Around this time two years ago, I noted that the changing nature of my work was slowing my rate of new blog posts. So many of my previous posts have been publicizing individual things I had done - an important aspect of my career in my former life as an academic. As projects grew bigger and more complex, and communication about them more complex (and wrapped up with other project stakeholders, with marketing departments, and the like), I just didn’t have the same kinds of milestones that made sense for individual bloggage. That work is going to change even more in this coming year as I take up ..read more

Along with co-authors Jennifer Isasi, Sarah Melton, and François Dominic Laramée, I’m excited to have an article out in Digital Humanities Quarterly on “Relocating Complexity: The Programming Historian and Multilingual Static Site Generation”. This is part of an exciting, and long-time-coming, special issue on minimal computing edited by Roopika Risam and Alex Gil. From our case study: Like any technologists, practitioners embracing minimal computing principles must grapple with the changing purposes, audiences, scales, and functionalities of the project they are supporting. In this case stud ..read more

After more than three and a half years at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, I’m excited to be joining JSTOR Labs as a senior software engineer for text and data mining. Among other digital humanities projects, I’ll be working on Constellate, their platform for making collections from both JSTOR and PORTICO available as data for text analysis teaching and research. It’s been a delight to work at CMU on a number of innovative DH and digital libraries projects over the years. My work with JSTOR will be fully remote, so I’ll still be in Pittsburgh for the near future (how nice it is to not hav ..read more

Scrolling through the reverse chronological archive of this blog, I’ve clearly had less and less time to write up posts over the years! Although part of that is to do with time, the other is due to the nature of my work projects, which have continually increased in size and complexity. They take longer in total to be ready for public consumption, and so fewer and fewer chances for in-progress reports. But I’m glad to start the new year off with two finally-public projects. CMU Libraries Digital collections After almost two years of work, CMU Libraries has launched its new digital collections p ..read more

Spurred on by some of my colleagues as well as a virtual visit I just had with current students at my PhD alma mater, I’m finally writing up my experience proposing my digital humanities dissertation, including sharing the proposal document itself from fall 2014, for a dissertation that I defended in spring 2016. This was my experience, which I offer up as one possible model for a DH dissertation. Expectations around proposals in particular can vary heavily not only between fields, but between individual departments, so your mileage might vary. To put some big-picture qualifiers out there at t ..read more

My friend Rebecca Munson passed away on Friday at the age of 37. You can read far better eulogies about her importance as a scholar, leader, and colleague from the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities, and on Twitter from the many, many others whom she touched. Although we were connected as colleagues through our shared work in digital humanities, we also cultivated a surprising friendship over the past year. This is my halting attempt to capture a fragment of that. This is a very personal reflection, unlike any other post on this blog. I can only hope it wouldn’t be too personal or raw for ..read more

I have a new article out with Anne Helmreich and Charles van den Heuvel in the latest edition of Histoire de l’art dedicated to digital art history. “Data Ecosystems and Futures of Art History” takes the form of a moderated discussion about the idea of research data within the discipline. We debate the meaning of the term “research data” itself, including the complex interplay between the knowledge produced by researchers based in universities compared to those in cultural heritage institutions. We also discuss what “reusability” - a pillar of open data principles in the sciences - can or shou ..read more

Last year, the University of Pennsylvania’s DREAM Lab was cancelled due to the pandemic, and instead of trying to rapidly revise our courses to go remote, we put out some of our course materials and a podcast. This year, we committed to a fully-remote DREAM Lab, and you can see the course website and materials here: https://matthewlincoln.net/tidy_humanities_data What worked well Looking at real-world spreadsheets together. We hear a common refrain from folks trying to get started in DH projects: “it would help so much if I could just see someone else’s spreadsheets.” I was nervous that sitt ..read more

This started out as some quick remarks about a specific project, but soon turned into a bit of a polemic about data and labor. There’s more to be said than can be done in fifteen minutes, so I hope it’s enough for me to raise some questions now, particularly because I don’t have all the answers for them yet. So first, what do I mean by DH data complexity? I mean the kinds of knowledge we have that is situated, uncertain, approximated, inferred - everything that doesn’t easily fit into the usual corporate idea of data about people, art, books, documents, and all our other sources and focuses of ..read more

TL;DR: I’ve made a small, in-browser utility for converting EDTF dates to pairs of date boundaries without needing to code. A screenshot of the EDTF min/max calculator Many readers of this blog will be familiar with the “preferred” way to specify dates for computers: ISO 8601, or YYYY-MM-DD, such as the date of this post, 2021-03-20. This is great when you have an exact date you want to specify, but as is often the case in messy historical / humanisitc data, we rarely have such precision. We may only know, for example, that: a painting was made at some point in 1653 a book was published on s ..read more