John Unsworth

Brandeis University · English

This highly-anticipated volume has been extensively revised to reflect changes in technology, digital humanities methods and practices, and institutional culture surrounding the valuation and publication of digital scholarship. A fully revised edition of a celebrated reference work, offering the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of resea...

Academic libraries are increasingly looking to provide services that allow their users to work with digital collections in innovative ways, for example, to analyze large volumes of digitized collections. The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is a large collaborative that provides an innovative research infrastructure for dealing with massive amount...

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the internet, DARPA launched the Network Challenge to explore issues related to social networking, collaboration, and trust. The iSchools viewed this as an excellent opportunity to achieve multiple goals: (1) to conduct a collaborative research project of interests across multiple iSchools, (2) to enhance t...

The ECHO DEPository (Phase 1) is an NDIIPP-partner research and development project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in partnership with OCLC, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications); the Michigan State University Library; and an alliance of state libraries from Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina and...

Information technology developments over the past 3 decades have profoundly influenced university scholarship, but the relationship has been characterized by aspects of both continuity and change. This panel of presentations and ensuing discussion consider ways in which these developments drive changes in scholarly practice and present challenges f...

"Cyberinfrastructure" is more than just hardware and software, more than bigger computer boxes and wider pipes and wires connecting them. The term was coined by NSF to describe the new research environments in which high-performance computing tools are available to researchers in a shared network environment. These tools and environments are being...

I'll give the short answer to the question »what is humanities computing?« up front: it is foreshadowed by my two epigraphs. Humanities computing is a practice of representation, a form of modeling or, as Wallace Stevens has it, mimicry. It is also (as Davis and his co-authors put it) a way of reasoning and a set of ontological commitments, and its...

• Does it declare the terms of its own success or failure? It is fair, I think, to require new projects in the area of electronic texts, digital libraries, hypermedia editions, to declare the terms of their potential success or failure. If I can't tell you that much about what I propose to do, then I don't know what I'm doing, or why. If I do know...

If an electronic scholarly project can't fail and doesn't produce new ignorance, then it isn't worth a damn. Contrast the spirit of this assertion with the rhetoric that characterizes much of what we say, write, and read about the subject of electronic text, the World-Wide Web, and information technology in general: the trope is one of change, inve...

In a volume devoted to particular electronic projects in the humanities, I thought it might be useful to talk about the context in which this activity is taking place. I don't think we can understand the real importance of electronic scholarly editions--or our own responses to them--unless we see electronic scholarship in its larger cultural contex...

This essay is an attempt to describe and explain the way that an unusual (but by no means anomalous) culture has developed under the aegis of PMC-MOO, a text-based virtual-reality program that runs on a networked Unix workstation. It is also an attempt to describe the scholarly and pedagogical trajectory of this program, by identifying the conceptu...

Bibliogr. na konci kapitol

In Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, Jean-François Lyotard says that, like myths, the "metanarratives" of modernity -- the work-ethic, faith in technological progress, the Christian doctrine of salvation -- . . . have as a purpose the legitimation of social and political institutions and practices, of laws, of ethics, and of modes of thought. Bu...

Electronic publishing is part of what Mark Poster calls a cultural shift from "print-wrapped language" to "electronically wrapped language" (11), and it is here to stay. But just what is inside the wrapping? What does this shift portend for academic publishing and for culture in general? This question has been the subject of lively debate, in the c...

"The excitement of contemporary studies is that all of its critical practitioners and most of their subjects are alive and working at the same time. One work influences another, bringing to the field a spirit of competition and cooperation that reaches an intensity rarely found in other disciplines" (x). In these remarks on "contemporary studies,"...

Electronic publishing, formerly an idea whose elegant utility one could only admire in the abstract, has in recent years become possible. Several electronic journals are now published regularly, in science, business management, the humanities, and the social sciences. In this essay we describe the current state of electronic publishing in the human...

Postmodern Culture was founded in 1990 by Eyal Amiran, Greg Dawes, Elaine Orr, and John Unsworth at North Carolina State University (professors Dawes and Orr have subsequently stepped down as editors in order to pursue their research projects, though both remain on the editorial board). Postmodern Culture is a peer-reviewed electronic journal which...

published or submitted for publication

ne of the major challenges facing universities in the next decade is to reinvent themselves as information organiza- tions. Universities are, at their core, organizations that cultivate knowledge, seeking both to create new knowledge and to preserve and convey existing knowledge, but they are remarkably inefficient and therefore ineffective in the...

In everything from course management to big enterprise systems, universities must choose between monopolies and the open approach published or submitted for publication

published or submitted for publication

The literary marketplace has always had three essential elements: authorship, publishing and audience. Each of these has been shaped by market forces from the very beginning, and each in its own way has mirrored the successive phases of Western capitalism -- pre-industrial/pre-modern, industrial/modern and, in the last fifty years, post-industrial...

Any essay which addresses itself to "post-modern American fiction" has at least two things to explain at the outset: its understanding of the terminology it uses, and its focus on the American scene. There has been considerable disagreement over the use (and even the form) of the term "post[-]modern," but some consensus has developed around the ide...

The Digital Humanities 2007 Conference Abstract book contains abstracts for all the papers, posters, and panel sessions presented at the conference which was held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign June 4th - 8th, 2007. Digital Humanities 2007 was the 19th Joint International Conference of the Association for Computers and the Humani...

The ECHO DEPository (Phase 1) is an NDIIPP-partner research and development project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in partnership with OCLC, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications); the Michigan State University Library; and an alliance of state libraries from Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina and...

We describe an IMLS-funded project to extend an existing data curation curriculum to include humanities data. IMLS RE-05-08-0062-08 published or submitted for publication is peer reviewed

Are medievalists early adopters? What accounts for this early adoption? When and why have medievalists moved on? What does early adoption look like today? What can medievalists learn from other fields? What can other fields learn from medievalists? unpublished not peer reviewed

published or submitted for publication