The personal blog of Matthew D. Lincoln, PhD, Collections Information Architect at Carnegie Mellon University.
Well it’s been over a year since taking on managing the engineering team at JSTOR Labs and I haven’t exactly been posting prolifically on here… I think I am just better at knowing how much I don’t know now, compared to when I began this blog. I also feel as though I haven’t had a lot original to say that hasn’t been said elsewhere, better. It’s high time I get this out of my drafts branch, where…
The center of my working hours for the past two years has been constellate.org , a platform for teaching, learning, and performing text analysis with scholarly and primary source content from JSTOR, Portico, and elsewhere. The Constellate dataset builder page . Our dataset builder allows users to filter and explore a corpus of over 35 million documents. This search - and the analytical queries…
Around this time two years ago , I noted that the changing nature of my work was slowing my rate of new blog posts. So many of my previous posts have been publicizing individual things I had done - an important aspect of my career in my former life as an academic. As projects grew bigger and more complex, and communication about them more complex (and wrapped up with other project stakeholders,…
Along with co-authors Jennifer Isasi, Sarah Melton, and François Dominic Laramée, I’m excited to have an article out in Digital Humanities Quarterly on “Relocating Complexity: The Programming Historian and Multilingual Static Site Generation” . This is part of an exciting, and long-time-coming, special issue on minimal computing edited by Roopika Risam and Alex Gil. From our case study: Like any…
After more than three and a half years at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, I’m excited to be joining JSTOR Labs as a senior software engineer for text and data mining. Among other digital humanities projects, I’ll be working on Constellate , their platform for making collections from both JSTOR and PORTICO available as data for text analysis teaching and research. It’s been a delight to work…
Scrolling through the reverse chronological archive of this blog , I’ve clearly had less and less time to write up posts over the years! Although part of that is to do with time, the other is due to the nature of my work projects, which have continually increased in size and complexity. They take longer in total to be ready for public consumption, and so fewer and fewer chances for in-progress…
Spurred on by some of my colleagues as well as a virtual visit I just had with current students at my PhD alma mater, I’m finally writing up my experience proposing my digital humanities dissertation, including sharing the proposal document itself from fall 2014, for a dissertation that I defended in spring 2016. This was my experience, which I offer up as one possible model for a DH dissertation.…
My friend Rebecca Munson passed away on Friday at the age of 37. You can read far better eulogies about her importance as a scholar, leader, and colleague from the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities , and on Twitter from the many, many others whom she touched. Although we were connected as colleagues through our shared work in digital humanities, we also cultivated a surprising friendship…
I have a new article out with Anne Helmreich and Charles van den Heuvel in the latest edition of Histoire de l’art dedicated to digital art history . “Data Ecosystems and Futures of Art History” takes the form of a moderated discussion about the idea of research data within the discipline. We debate the meaning of the term “research data” itself, including the complex interplay between the…
Last year, the University of Pennsylvania’s DREAM Lab was cancelled due to the pandemic, and instead of trying to rapidly revise our courses to go remote, we put out some of our course materials and a podcast . This year, we committed to a fully-remote DREAM Lab, and you can see the course website and materials here: https://matthewlincoln.net/tidy_humanities_data What worked well Looking at…