For our final class of the semester, George Mason’s History Librarian, Dr. George Oberle, came to present on the topic of libraries and enclosure. As a former employee of Fenwick Library with a continuing interest in the world of academic libraries, I found this especially interesting. After providing some background on the history of scholarly presses and the growing commercialization…
We spent the class period on November 21st presenting our ideas for the final project, a proposal for a digital humanities project. My project idea is an online teaching resource, specifically related to indigenous histories of Chicago (although I am not pursuing this project in real life). This post is not the final proposal, just an attempt to collect my thoughts so…
Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture makes the case that the expansion of copyright power in the last several decades is hindering creativity and scientific advances. Lessig argues that while copyright law began as an attempt to incentivize creativity by protecting creators’ rights to their work, “The law’s role is less and less to support creativity, and more and more to protect…
As an introduction to spatial history, we read “What is Spatial History?” by Richard White and “Putting Harlem on the Map” by Stephen Robertson. I love urban history and its attention to the meaning and experience of space, so I was interested to know more about spatial history. I ended up feeling very conflicted. White describes a number of examples…
