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2016 Digital Humanities Training Opportunities

Last year, I wrote a post rounding up the DH training opportunities as I knew them for the summer of 2015 (and beyond). The 2016 list is quite similar. It includes, as a part of the DH Training Network:

Appl…

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Attending to Smartphone Apps

food
The app economy, we’re told, is “bigger than Hollywood.” Apple likes to boast of how many jobs its app store has created, and even the president exhorts the young folks to program their phones, not just play with them.

Yesterday, The Verge published a great story by Casey Newton on the collapse of the app store’s middle class, where all those “bigger than Hollywood” dollars go to an increasingly concentrated set of firms, mostly in gaming, messaging, and entertainment, and the vast majority of …

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Open Data Button Aims to Set Data Free

This week, the people who brought you the Open Access Button have released the beta version of their new “Open Data Button,” a browser add-on with a simple but powerful purpose:

Download the Open Data Button for your browser. Next time you’re reading a research paper and you want to investigate the data behind it, push the Open Data Button. The Open Data Button will try to find you the data you need. If that doesn’t work, it’ll start a request to the author asking them to share their da…

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Managing Slack

Photo of a street sign: "Slack End"

Over the past couple of years, the on-trend communication tool among technology types has, no doubt, been Slack. Lee wrote an introductory post about it in August, and Maha followed up a couple of weeks later with some thoughts about when to use it.

The past week saw two interesting posts that look at Slack from very different “management” angles:

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Data Visualization With Knoema

Colorful network data visualizationAnyone who’s had to deal with large amounts of data will be well aware that sometimes a visual can be extremely helpful in understanding that data. This map of states party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child that I tweeted out last November is a case in point:

Map showing which countries are parties to the Convention on the Rights of the Child

Even if I were particularly skilled at creating visualizations, I might not always have the time available to do so, or to locate the data I need. Having access to a service that already has the necessary data and that can use t…

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Basic Twitter Analysis With twXplorer

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There have been a number of posts here on ProfHacker about using Twitter, particularly around archiving tweets. Our favorite method has been Martin Hawksey’s free TAGS template for Google Sheets. But, there may be a situation when you want a quick analysis of activity around a certain hashtag or term (trending or otherwise) without the trouble of setting up a permanent archive.

Enter a new tool developed by Knight Lab out of Northwestern, the same folks who brought us the popular timeline.js pl…

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Create a New Habit with an App

counting

In Three Steps for Creating a New Habit, I outlined three key elements that can help you be successful in creating a new, positive habit, whether that’s related to writing, exercise, or rest and renewal. These three steps are:

  • Connecting with the deeper value or “why” behind your desire for the new habit

  • Defining specific, measurable, and realistic targets for your new behavior

  • Tracking your actions, so you know what helps you be successful and what gets in your way.

There are lots of d…

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When the Virtual and Physical Networks Converge

While curating the keyword Networks (with Mia Zamora) for the MLA collection entitled Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models and Experiments, we were reminded not to focus solely on digital networks to the exclusion of physical/analog ones (thanks Andrea Rehn!).

This March, my virtual and physical PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) will converge as I organize and host the Digital Pedagogy Lab Cairo: An AMICAL Institute. I am exhilarated but also anxious for many reasons. Unlike mos…

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Three Steps for Creating a New Habit

dog in snow

We’re seven weeks into the new year, and the January crowds at your gym or yoga class are probably starting to thin out now. Many people’s New Year’s goals have been set aside, maybe due to unrealistic expectations, or to the variety of unexpected obstacles (snow days, sickness, etc) that can get in the way of new habits.

But you don’t need to wait until next January to try to create a positive new habit — and in fact, research has shown that successfully creating a new habit helps you then mak…

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On the Importance of Process

CandlesIt’s been an interesting few months in academia, and not in a good way. Two institutions of higher education — Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois and Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland — have found themselves in turmoil.

Both stories are well known at this point.1 At Wheaton, Political Science Professor Dr. Larycia Hawkins made a statement about the relationship between Christianity and Islam; concern about the compatibility of her statement with the College’s Statement of Fai…

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