Sapping Attention

People love to talk about how "practical" different college majors are: and practicality is usually majored in dollars. But those ...

Here's a little irony I've been meaning to post. Large scale book digitization makes tools like Ngrams possible; but it also makes t...

A map I put up a year and a half ago went viral this winter; it shows the paths taken by ships in the US Maury collection of the ICOADS  dat...

OK: one last post about enrollments, since the statistic that humanities degrees have dropped in half since 1970 is all over the news the la...

A quick addendum to my post on long-term enrollment trends in the humanities . (This topic seems to have legs, and I have lots more numbers ...

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about low enrollments in the humanities yesterday. The heart of the story is that the human...

What are the major turning points in history? One way to think about that is to simply look at the most frequent dates used to start or end ...

Here's some inside baseball: the trends in periodization in history dissertations since the beginning of the American historical profess...

The new issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities is up as of yesterday: it includes an  article of mine, "Words Alone," on the ...

The hardest thing about studying massive quantities of digital texts is knowing just what texts you have. This is knowlege that we haven...

My last post had the aggregate statistics about which parts of the library have more female characters . (Relatively). But in some ways, it...

Now back to some texts for a bit. Last spring, I posted a few times about the possibilities for reading genders in large collections of book...

I'm cross-posting here a piece from my language anachronisms blog, Prochronisms . It won't appear the language blog for a week or ...

My last post was about how the frustrating imprecisions of language drive humanists towards using statistical aggregates instead of words : ...

Just a quick post to point readers of this blog to my new Atlantic article on anachronisms in Kushner/Spielberg's Lincoln ; and to direc...