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…
One of the questions we keep returning to throughout the course is whether digital history has actually changed the questions, problems, and opportunities facing historians or whether these are simply the same issues masquerading as novel ones. In “Confronting the Digital,” Tim Hitchcock makes the case for significant change. According to Hitchcock, historians have not responded effectively to the fact…
In Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, Franco Moretti makes the case for distant reading in literary studies. As someone who hasn’t taken a class on literature since high school, there was a lot that was unfamiliar to me, but I tried to think about how the book can apply to digital history. Moretti argues that the canon…
