Matthew Sillence

Today’s challenge was definitely one of bandwidth as there was a lot to take in! This morning involved working with both GitHub and Python. GitHub is something that I am planning to use, mostly for teaching materials in the digital humanities. Some of the feedback that we had from the Arts and Humanities... [Read More]

Today’s challenge was to tackle two tools in the cleaning of ‘dirty’ data: Open Refine and SQLite Studio. My initial reaction to Open Refine is its utility for speeding up tasks that academics and research students could easily spend days or weeks on; the kinds of cleaning tasks that are inevitably prone to... [Read More]

Another fantastic day a DHOXSS 2018. This morning’s session with Elizabeth Wickes stressed the importance of minimum viable curation - the idea of accessing data with the constraints of a real-world situation. In this case something that actually related very well to my line of work: the presentation of a... [Read More]

My first day at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, which has been intense but very productive. This morning’s introductory lecture by Dr Victoria Van Hyning on crowdsourcing initiatives and the rise of ‘citizen humanities’ really emphasised the combination of the digital tools and interfaces and human processing power for large-scale projects that... [Read More]

Over the last week, I have been reading Daniel Levitin’s very popular The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for far longer than it should. I won’t summarise the whole book here, nor do I wish to write a review... [Read More]