Twitter and blogs are not add-ons to research

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The importance of social media as part of the 'impact agenda' within Higher Education: If scholars continue to have “small (vociferous) conversations amongst ourselves, in professional seminars and at conferences”, then they will soon “lose [their] place in the broader social dialogue”, says the blog, which is also published on the London School of Economics’ Impact of Social Sciences platform. “If there is a ‘crisis’ in the humanities, it lies in how we have our public…
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Public history centre hopes to get the records straight

Second World War Posters
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Digital archives must balance outreach, financial viability and scholarship, Matthew Reisz hears Researchers at a new centre devoted to public history have warned that spending cuts and ill-conceived digitisation programmes pose a major threat to the archives essential to much academic work. Kingston University's Centre for the Historical Record was launched with the aim of promoting "collaborative research, knowledge exchange and discussion between historians, archivists, curators, heritage providers and the public". A conference held to…
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Let’s Dig a Little Deeper @timeshighered

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For academics in the arts and humanities, efforts to digitise large archives of books, folios, images, artworks and sound recordings have opened exciting new research opportunities unthinkable just 20 years ago. But the wealth of digital material available is also posing problems. How can researchers make sense of the vast amount of data? In 2009, Jisc - UK higher education's IT consortium - launched the Digging into Data Challenge, which offered funding to researchers and…
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Dan Cohen: Is Google Good for History?

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"Is Google good for history? Of course it is. We historians are searchers and sifters of evidence. Google is probably the most powerful tool in human history for doing just that. It has constructed a deceptively simple way to scan billions of documents instantaneously, and it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of its own money to allow us to read millions of books in our pajamas. Good? How about Great? But then we…
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Beyond the Museum: Working with Collections in the Digital Age

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Humanities Computing Unit, University of Oxford: 20th April 2001 "Is the new digital age the answer to the prayers of museums, archives, and libraries? Does it free up collections allowing unprecedented access facilities for scholars and the public? Or is it all built on a house of cards? Do the new technologies really offer us anything, and are they sidetracking the holders of the nation's heritage into areas that really have unproven benefits? Is funding…
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