About Me

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I am Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow and Theme Leader Fellow for the 'Digital Transformations' strategic theme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I tweet as @ajprescott.

This blog is a riff on digital humanities. A riff is a repeated phrase in music, used by analogy to describe a improvisation or commentary. In the 16th century, the word 'riff' meant a rift; Speed describes riffs in the earth shooting out flames. The poet Jeffrey Robinson points out that riff perhaps derives from riffle, to make rough.

Maybe we need to explore these other meanings of riff in thinking about digital humanities, and seek out rough and broken ground in the digital terrain.

24 April 2012

Dirty Books, Densitometry and the Digital Humanities

I am immensely grateful to Eric Kwakkel of Leiden University for drawing my attention via Twitter at the weekend to an important piece of recent work which to my mind provides a model for the sort of innovation we should be developing in the digital humanities. It is a completely experimental approach which doesn't produce a sustainable...

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16 April 2012

Geo600: Gravity's Rainbow

I have a worry that this blog could start to assume a very elderly and curmudgeonly tone, and that I will start to establish myself as a sort of digital Victor Meldrew. I certainly feel that it is one of the roles of the digital humanities scholar to try and counter the kind of puppyish techno-enthusiasm which seems to believe...

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7 April 2012

To Code or Not to Code?

Easter 1982 – thirty years ago! – was spent feeding my latest addiction. Like over a million others, I had acquired the Sinclair ZX 81, which popularised home computing in Britain. It had just one kilobyte of on-board memory; I soon invested in the upgrade to take it up to 16 kilobytes. You used your television as the monitor,...

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