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.

17 August 2013

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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9 August 2013

"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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