The Future and the Digital Humanities

This was a talk I gave at the University of Sussex on 20 November 2013. Parts of it are now…

Are We Doomed to a World of PDFs?

This is a contribution to a panel on ‘Speculative Futures’ in the Ecologies of Publishing Futures symposium organised by the Royal College of Art on 23 November 2015. I try to express my hopes for the future of publishing, although I’m doubtful whether it will ever…

Robin Alston’s Library History Database

I was sad to learn in July this year of the death of my old friend and mentor from British Library days, Robin Alston. Robin’s achievements as a bibliographer were innumerable and fundamental to our present digital environment. In particular, I would single…

Help Save the British Records Association!

One of the distinctive features of many London squares and terraces are the black…

Are the Arts and Humanities More Digital than the Sciences?

Digital Humanities and the Quest for Academic Respectability

Intervention at Higher Education Academy Summit ‘Towards a Pedagogy for the Digital Humanities’, Lewes, 7 May 2014

Andrew Sanders, in his Short Oxford History of English Literature (2000), has…

Acts of Reading, Redux

Contribution to a panel at a British Library ‘Digital Conversation’ 24 September 2015

The Long, the Short and the Very Short

Whenever I look at newspapers from my youth — the 1960s and 1970s — I am struck by how much more reading there was in them — so many words and so much text, even in tabloid papers. It does seem to suggest that our attention span is getting smaller. Of course, it…