Blogoshpere 30 January – 05 February 2012

Due to some illness I can only post this review of the blogosphere in my fields of interest now. Anyway, people out there worked much last week fortunately. In the Early Modern set there is a fascinating variety of posts including a comparison of EM news to blogging about historical events nowadays, climbing hills and conversion, Isabella’s virginity, burlesque, EEBO and about Twitter.  Digital Humanists wrote about definitions of Digital Humanities and about measuring impact. Happy reading!

Early Modern Studies:

NM in the post entitled “History’s Birthday – Blogging Early Modern News” provides a fascinating phenomenology of writing news. This phenomenology then provides a way of comparing EM news (ballads etc) and blogging about historical events nowadays. This is a though-provoking post, indeed.

“Climbing hills and mountains: the labouring convert.” explores the English uses of the metaphorical journey to the hilltop in writings dealing with conversion. A must-read post.

Liz Dollimore in her “Shakespeare’s Sources – Measure for Measure” argues that Isabella’s virtue seemed to have been an issue for Shakespeare. She claims that in Shakespeare’s sources, in George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (1578) and in Giraldi Cinthio Epitia and Juriste (1566) Isabella’s forerunners lost their virginity, which is preserved, in turn, in Measure for Measure with the bed-trick featuring Marianna.

Stanley Wells’ post, “Send Up for Shakespeare!” is a very informative writing about the burlesque adaptations of Shakespeare. Fun!

Anna Bagitelli reflects on research in the digital age in her “EEBO Interactions and Bibliography: Linking the Past to the Present”. She reviews the novel approaches to texts, and then she writes about the merits of EEBO Interactions: a chat-room for EEBO users. The only problem left without discussion is that contribution is massively behind the pay-wall.

Sava Saheli Singh compares in a fascinating way 16-17^th-century note-taking techniques and Twitter in his post, “old paradigms for a new mode.”

Digital Humanities:

Melody Dworak defines crowd-sourcing and digital humanities in an illuminating way in her “Defining Terms: My First Step in Visualizing DH Crowdsourcing Models.”

Shawn Moore defines Digital Humanities in his “An Affective Response to Defining Digital Humanities.” It is also worth reading the comment thread, too.

Ernesto Prieggo distinguishes between “quantitative” and “qualitative” impact in social media in his “On Sharing With the Right People, or Why Online Metrics to Assess "Impact" Should Be Qualitative (Too).” When defining “qualitative” impact he does this with exploring an example: “I call this qualitative impact: in this specific case my sharing of one particular link produced only one click, but the person who clicked on it would not have found the article that quickly otherwise (perhaps she wouldn't have found that article at all!). Moreover, the person who did the only one click was indeed the exact target audience for that article.”