digital humanities

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Digitization of Bentham’s Papers Completed

The University College London Bentham Project has announced that the digitization of the writings of Jeremy Bentham has been completed: “thousands upon thousands of images of Bentham’s manuscripts are now available in electronic form.” (more…)

Berkeley’s Handwritten “Manuscript Introduction” Digitized

Kenny Pearce, a professor of philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, has been working with his university’s library to produce a digitized version of Berkeley’s handwritten introduction to his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, which differs in significant ways from versions that have been published. (more…)

A Semantic-Network Approach to the History of Philosophy (guest post by Mark Alfano) (UPDATED)

What can we learn from constructing semantic networks of familiar works in the history of philosophy? A fair amount, according to Mark Alfano, a philosopher at Delft University of Technology and Australian Catholic University, as he explains in the following guest post*—such as which concepts tend to get more attention from readers than might seem appropriate give..

Data About Your Own Writing

Are you curious about your use of words and phrases in your writing? If so, you can play around with the text analysis tools at Voyant Tools. You can paste in the text of a paper, or upload or link to it, and Voyant will produce data about the frequency and location of words and phrases, presenting it in text and graph forms. (more…)

A Visualization of Influence in the History of Philosophy

“I don’t know a lot about philosophy,” says Grant Louis Oliveira, a data analyst and quantitative social sciences researcher with an undergraduate degree in political science. He continues:

I’d like to change that and more rigorously explore my ideas, but I find the world of philosophy a bit impenetrable, and I don’t think I’m the only one. I know most the big na..

Online Library Emphasizing American Philosophy In The Works

A project is underway to create an online interactive version of the William Ernest Hocking Library, a collection of philosophical works housed on Hocking’s estate in the mountains of New Hampshire. (more…)

Digital Humanities In Philosophy: What’s Helpful & What’s Hype?

“I must say, it is rather addictive, and sometimes really satisfying.”

That’s Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) writing at Plato’s Footnote about the digital humanities—in that line, specifically about using Google’s Ngram Viewer, which, he adds, “philosophers make surprisingly little use of.” (more…)

Feinberg’s Copy of On Liberty Now Online

The late Joel Feinberg‘s annotated copy of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty has been digitally scanned and made publicly available through the Princeton University Digital Library. If you view the book on a touch screen you can flip through it quite naturally with a finger, as you would a book with very cooperative pages.

Princeton philosopher Michael Smith bought t..

Philosophy and the Digital Humanities

The above image is a detail from the famous “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch. “Enormously sized, lavishly detailed, and compellingly grotesque,” the work is now available to explore in an “online interactive adventure.” Viewers can take a “15 step” tour of the image, or go their own route, clicking on the flags placed on the image to listen to or..

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon

You may have heard of, and if so probably by now forgotten about, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” A meme before the age of memes, it is older than some Daily Nous readers. Heck, Wikipedia describes it as a “parlour game.” No one has “parlours” anymore. Barely anyone has a “parlor,” even.

And yet, “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon” kind of works, doesn’t it?

Regardle..

Ethics of Suicide Digital Archive

In what is being referred to as “an unprecedented example of library-author-publisher collaboration,” a new philosophy book and accompanying digital archive of its material were recently launched. The book is The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources, by Margaret Battin (Utah). Professor Battin worked with her publisher, Oxford University Press, and the University o..

Kant + Data = Beautiful Utility? (updated)

Minerva is “a web tool for supporting philosophical historiography research.” It’s the master’s thesis project of Valerio Pellegrini, and was designed by him in conjunction with “a team of philosophical historians from the University of Milan” and the Density Design Research Lab. It was initially designed for examining the work of Immanuel Kant, but the idea is to e..

Rise of the Intuitions

Is there a word more overused in philosophy nowadays than “intuition”? That is many people’s intuition sense of things, but why go with gut feelings when there is data? That’s right: data. James Andow of the University of Reading has just published findings on the use of the word “intuition” and its variations in an article in Metaphilosophy entitled “How ‘Intuitio..

Ancient Scrolls of Philodemus, Carbonized by Vesuvius, Now Readable

Using a technique known as x-ray phase-contrast tomography (XPCT), a research team in Italy has figured out a way to read the text of ancient rolled-up scrolls that had been blackened, warped, and embrittled in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. The scrolls were found in 1752 during excavations in Pompeii. Most of the approximately 1,800 (!) scrolls found so fa..

What’s Wrong with Oxford Scholarship Online?

Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) is the digital imprint for Oxford University Press, making available electronic versions of OUP books. According to Bob Pasnau (Colorado), they are terrible. His library started an OSO subscription and stopped purchasing hard copies of OUP books, and he has not been very happy.

For a great many purposes, I prefer to read material on s..

Loeb Classical Library — Online Soon

Harvard University Press is digitizing the entirety of The Loeb Classical Library and putting it online. While a free trial will be available, permanent access to the collection will be through paid individual and institutional subscriptions. For book lovers, the familiar little red and green hard copies will remain in print. There is an article about the online ver..

Digitizing the Geometry of Spinoza’s Ethics

Torin Doppelt, a PhD candidate in philosophy at Queen’s University, has created Spinoza’s Ethics 2.0, a an interesting digital humanities project that “provides a representation of the structure of the geometrical demonstrations of Spinoza’s Ethics” (via Philosophy Matters). I asked him if he could say a little more about the project for Daily Nous readers. He write..