Comments on: Digital Humanities Now

By: Knitting Clio

Knitting Clio — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:19:40 +0000

I change my mind — if I didn’t subscribe to DH I would not have known that Brittany Murphy passed away . . .

By: Jeremy Boggs

Jeremy Boggs — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:38:01 +0000

While DHNow is great for finding out what folks in the DH twitter community are reading, its not so great at showing what they think about a particular link. I'm not sure if DHNow can really solve that using Twitter, either, since retweeting essentially involves republishing a tweet, sans commentary. The comments feature on the DH Now site could serve the purpose, of additional commentary. It would be pretty easy to hide the actually twitter messages in the post, too, if they're too distracting or just not useful. One thing I think would be more useful is, instead of simply listing the tweets and retweets, to show some kind of metrics about how often a particular link was references or retweeted. If particular users share links that are retweeted more frequently, those users could be highlighted, and their contributed weighted more. In a way, it could incorporate reputation metrics based on the number of times someone's links are retweeted. Even further, it would be interesting to see the retweeting of a particular link into different follower networks, in a interface similar to MentionMap. I would find it especially useful to see if a link that shows up on DH Now has a reach beyond the users DH Now is following.

By: Knitting Clio

Knitting Clio — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:03:56 +0000

Thanks for posting this Mills. I had the same reaction.

By: Trevor Munoz

Trevor Munoz — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:25:39 +0000

I agree this is fair criticism and of course it is early to judge yet. Capturing all of the retweeting may not in fact be helpful in the digitalhumanitiesnow.org feed. I would still like to be able to see the full list of who retweeted something–perhaps just usernames after the first few.

Early indications suggest that DHnow is not fulfilling it’s promise of surveying the range of what’s important in this field—the Friday night at 5pm view, as it were. At the moment, what comes down the feed still feels like a quite narrow slice of digital humanities activity (even among the subgroup that tweets semi-actively).

I am curious to see how the CHNM team can broaden and enrich this promising new resource in DHN 2.0.

By: Mills

Mills — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:28:38 +0000

Anything to keep me from tweeting will make me happy! Thanks again for dreaming this up!

By: Dan Cohen

Dan Cohen — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:12:23 +0000

Fair enough. DHN is currently using the wholesale feed from Twittertim.es (which does the aggregation), which I agree is in most cases unhelpful and too heavy on retweets (which look bad in sequence but perform the important role of propagation to different networks). Watch for DHN 2.0 in early January for a much-improved design and less echo chamber–which will hopefully make it even less necessary for you to join Twitter.