As We Have Blogged

This week out CityLIS Digital Information Technologies and Architecture module comes to an end and with it our requirement to blog on topics and labs covered in class which was the founding purpose of this blog. This post reflects on the experience of blogging as a learning activity. I have contributed to blogs before: personal […]

Crafting the Digital Humanities

This week’s lab explores some of the markup and semantic design that makes resource like the Old Bailey Online so useful for text mining by contrasting its technical approach with that of Artist’s Books Online. Artist’s Books Online Artist’s Books Online is a project to create digital repository of artist notebooks and other material directed by Johanna Drucker. The […]

Excavating Crime and Correspondance: A Data Dig Lab

This lab follows on from our experiments in text analysis and involves exploring two examples of using data mining in the digital humanities. Case 1 uses the Old Bailey Online as the source for a practical experiment. This experiment pulls together several topics we’ve already covered as we used the Old Bailey Online API to extract data […]

Web 3.0: Towards The Sensing Web

I have to confess. I don’t like THE Semantic Web. Not the idea of it. I’m fascinated, intrigued, sceptical, excited, doubtful and very interested in the idea of connecting data in more meaningful ways. I love the potential and pour many hopes into it even as I doubt the reality and slightly fear the possible pitfalls […]

A Small Text Analysis Mission to a Comet

Last week I watched fascinated as scientists at the European Space Agency entered a critical phase of their Rosetta Mission. They separated the Philae Lander from the main Rosetta craft and waited as it fell towards Comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko and attempted to land and affix itself to the surface in order to take scientific measurements. […]

Beyond Journals: Altmetrics for Mapping and Measuring Scholarly Publishing

Following on from our look at archiving and analysing Twitter, this week in DITA we examined a use case for APIs and social media analytics: alternative metrics for scholarly publishing. This article covers how alternative metrics are extending traditional bibliometrics, thinks about how altmetrics work and some of the limitations and talks about one of […]

Collecting Echoes

Along with other #citylis students I attended the British Library Labs Symposium (Monday 3rd November 2014) during reading week. As well as being a fantastic event it provided an opportunity to think about not just participating in but also preserving a conference backchannel. What is a backchannel? An event backchannel is a secondary discussion via […]

When Databases Talk Back

I’ve been reading through DITA blogs the last couple of days. Over 40 blogs and 130 posts of great writing so far from classmates on DITA. Some totally new to blogging and facing their blogging anxieties and WordPress learning curves; some more experienced. All of them spreading their blogging wings in new and different ways as we […]

APIs and Applications

When I was growing up my brother and I each had a train set. My brother’s was a Hornby set. It was very realistic and the trains looked amazing with superb attention to detail. However, if he wanted a different train for a different purpose he had to buy an additional train – a different […]

Mixtapes and Mashups

Remembering Analogue “I’ll make you a mixtape that’s a blueprint of my soul” – Mixtape by Jamie Cullum from the album The Pursuit For people of a certain age (i.e. mine) the mixtape brings back fond memories of afternoons and evenings of teenage ennui banished by curating the perfect combination of songs and getting them to fit […]