In this post, Sean Kheraj assesses his Google Home device’s performance as a “history calculator,” testing how well it can define historical terms and answer basic historical questions. He puts this in context with some history of digital history: In their 2005 article in First Monday, Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig recount the story of a remarkably prescient colleague,…
online search
DH Read: “Just Google It: A Short History of a Newfound Verb”
This WIRED piece by Virginia Heffernan reminded me of something that Jessica Dauterive, the other 2016-2018 DH Fellow, has brought up in our weekly DH Fellow meetings—that there was something much more playful, open-ended, and less structured about digital history during its earliest phase in the 1990s and that this playfulness is no longer integral to how digital historians think about their work…
DH Read: “Standard practice: Libraries as structuring machines”
Emily Drabinski’s “Standard practice: Libraries as structuring machines,” originally posted on Parameters, is a piece that connects to some of the same issues I discussed last week with the article “For Google, Everything Is a Popularity Contest.” Drabinski starts out by arguing that, “Libraries are highly organized spaces, defined and produced by standards that determine everything from where a book sits…
DH Read: “For Google, Everything Is a Popularity Contest”
Ian Bogost has an article at The Atlantic about Google’s new “Classic Papers” section of Google Scholar, where articles from 2006 are selected on the basis of the number of citations since then. Bogost explains the difference between value and popularity and reveals how Google’s monopoly over information discovery has changed how we think about knowledge and information: PageRank and Classic…
