A few weeks ago I visited my childhood home. Some time after dinner, I walked down into the basement with the desire to explore. The house is old and the basement’s walls and floor are surrounded in thick concrete and stone. I can never quite stand up straight for fear of whacking my head or […]
Read more "History is an old chest of tools"I recently created a project using my Raspberry Pi mini computer that explores visualizations of documents run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Visit the project repository on GitHub and view the project in action. A lot of OCR focuses on, surprise, visuality. This project, then, is an attempt to sonify dirty data. Digital Humanists are no strangers […]
Read more "Sonifying Dirty Data with a Raspberry Pi"The following is from a conference paper I presented on open access in the humanities. Introduction Good Afternoon. Let’s jump right into this and talk about open access. We will define two terms: Open source means sharing and making all the source code files of a project available online. This does not just include code, […]
Read more "Critiquing Open Access in the Humanities"The Importance of Habits I am only as good as my habits. Habits are the mortar in the foundation of my life. As healthy habits are ignored, the foundation grinds itself down. For years I shied from explaining life through necessity (even sufficiency). The problem, I thought, was that our metaphors of failure and success ignore […]
Read more "Every Historian Needs a Workflow – A Primer for the ‘Digital Age’"Sound sounds a lot different when you take the time to listen. I am learning this each time I attempt ‘field work’ (which is just another way to say when I actually go outside and do research with sound). On a cool October evening several weeks ago, I drove out to the Maker Space North […]
Read more "Sonifying History using Open Data Kit"The following map is my final project for my Digital Humanities course work. This interactive map is a simple soundscape of construction at Carleton University from the mid 2000s to the present day. The sounds of construction constitute a large aspect of my experience at Carleton. From library construction, parking garages, residences, etc. Carleton students […]
Read more "Soundscapes of Carleton Construction"A simple quote from Henry Lefebvre: “Clever images of the everyday are inserted on a day-to-day basis, images that can make the ugly beautiful, the empty full, the sordid elevated—and the hideous ‘fascinating.’” In this quote, Lefebvre discusses the ubiquity of certain images that appear as natural to us. Take, for instance, the iconic Earthrise […]
Read more "Ubiquity in Life Magazine"This photograph is incredibly haunting (proceed at your own intent). It was reportedly taken by a member of the Einsatzgruppen in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1941. It shows a member of the Einsatzgruppen preparing to murder a Jewish Ukrainian man. The man stares off out of the camera’s view as he clutches his coat. His body […]
Read more "The Ethics of Photography: The Last Jew in Vinnitsa, 1941"On December 24, 1968, the American astronaut William Anders photographed earth as his lunar module orbited the moon. The earth sits suspended in a deep dark background as it appears to rise above the crest of the moon, layering the bottom of the photograph. ‘Earthrise’, as it was soon called, quickly became famous. The photograph was, and remains, […]
Read more "A Mote of Dust"“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.” – Marcel Proust, […]
Read more "Behold the Hundred Universes"