How the Web Can Make Books Vanish

I have recently (in the odd moments allowed to me by that anti-intellectual managerialist nightmare with the Orwellian Newspeak name, the Research Excellence Framework) been preparing for publication my keynote talk at the first Sheffield Digital Humanities Congress last year, Made in Sheffield: Industrial Perspectives on the Digital...

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"Start from Arts and Humanities"

Mark Weiser was the Chief Technology Officer at the Rank Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) from 1996-1999. PARC had of course during the 1960s and 1970s been the place where many of the features we associate with personal computing were developed. Weiser had a vision of something which went further - a world where we are surrounded...

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Riffs on McCarty

A recent highlight for the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London was the award of the Roberto Busa prize, the major international award for lifetime achievement in the digital humanities, to Willard McCarty, one of the founding fathers of the Department. Matthew Jockers in introducing Willard’s Busa lecture...

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Small Worlds and Big Tents

The climax of David Lodge’s novel Small World, a burlesque on academic conferences in which scholars pursue each other around the world from conference to conference, occurs at that bizarre cultural manifestation, the Convention of the Modern Languages Association. The MLA Convention attracts thousands of American scholars every year...

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Requiescat

  Although I have now been travelling on London buses for more than fifty years, I still find that the upper deck of a London bus is one of the most entertaining and diverting places to be. Coming home on the bus this evening, the Strand was disrupted outside King's College by preparations for Lady Thatcher's funeral tomorrow....

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