“The Internet hates walled gardens,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick writes in the “Texts” chapter of Planned Obsolescence, and this reality highlights some of the failures of digital publishing to acknowledge and facilitate the communal readings of texts (117). Certain file formats—namely, PDF, EPUB, and Kindle—often encourage the reproduction of the look and feel of the print book […]

While Joshua Miele’s 20 October lecture, “Digital Accessibility and the Making of the Meta Maker Movement,” centered on his efforts to teach physical computing and open-source hardware (Arduino) to non-sighted children, it was most compelling when challenged us to reframe our own approaches to accessibility itself. Our current digital culture, Miele argued, attempts to answer […]

If you’re familiar with a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, or the myriad other options, then you’re familiar with content types and how they allow you to define and organize information. Or, in Rachel Lovinger’s definition, they describe “the various configurations of content that are distinct enough to be unique types in […]

One of the most vocal criticisms of the digital humanities is their supposed lack of interpretation. As interpretation remains the bedrock of the humanities, the argument goes, the digital humanities represent, at best, a degradation of the humanities or, at worst, something antithetical to them. For a recent example of this criticism, consider the words […]

During our last class, much of the discussion—about Google Books, funding for projects, the potential need for advertising—gravitated towards questions of producing and publishing scholarship in the contemporary digital environment. This prompted me to think more about the difference between “producing” and “publishing” and how the digital humanities can illuminate and maybe even change it. […]