Email has become a dominant instrument of modern communication -- its content illuminating people's lives, activities, and transactions. Even email headers reveal deep social networks. The archival email collections of recent authors and public figures can thus provide unique windows into contemporary society. ePADD, a new software tool developed by Stanford University Libraries, relies on natural language processing and other computational analytic methods to provide DH researchers with unprecedented access to these important collections.

On May 7^th, Stanford University Libraries’ Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR) welcomed David O’Sullivan, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley to the Stanford campus for two events: a panel discussion on geospatial narrative and a guest lecture on spatial simulation modeling.

The slides and audio from David’s lecture: “Simple spatial models: Building blocks for process-based GIS?"

A brief summary of the panel discussion follows.

Geospatial narrative: Perspectives from the humanities, cartography and geographic information science

In order of presentation, the panelists were Karl Grossner (Stanford, CIDR), Anne Knowles and Levi Westerveld (Middlebury College Geography), Erik Steiner (Stanford, Spatial History Project/CESTA), David O’Sullivan (UC Berkeley Geography), Nicole Coleman (Stanford, Humanities+Design/CESTA), and Nicholas Bauch (Stanford, Spatial History Project/CESTA).

In advance of the upcoming "Humanities + Digital Tools" panel discussion, the Stanford Humanities Center has produced a series of videos that detail the different exciting projects, many of which were created with support from or even led by members of the Stanford University Libraries' Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR). Below, I've embedded the videos that feature support from Academic Technology Specialists and Digital Humanities Research Developers, all core members of CIDR. Rather than list the entire team for each project, I have only highlighted the contributions of the CIDR-affiliated members. Please watch the videos (listed in no particular order) to learn more about all the talented individuals who are working on these exciting projects.

Lacuna Stories features Mike Widner, the Academic Technology Specialist for the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages

As digital humanities scholarship matures, it behooves us to look to thinkers outside the field for help in crafting our research agenda and planning our projects. One of those thinkers is Donald Rumsfeld, the Socrates of Strategery, whose insightful rhetoric can guide us in our treatment of this young field. Some of you might be thinking, “Who’s Donald Rumsfeld?” If you don’t know who Donald Rumsfeld is, you can skip reading this, since you’re not firmly enough ensconced in the fear, uncertainty and doubt that comes from trying to understand the place of humanities scholarship in relation to new technologies, new media, and new modes of engagement.
 
For those who do know Donald Rumsfeld, you know that he had a way of expressing the complex, postmodern world in a way that was simultaneously accessible and fertile. Like a modern Laozi, his seemingly blaise descriptions of complex systems contain multilayered wisdom of the kind necessary for identifying the key features of such systems.
 
Lesson 1: Known Unknowns

The final chapter of my book, D3.js in Action, is focused on explaining using the D3 data visualization library for mobile development. It was a bit of a stretch for me, since I hadn’t done very much mobile development, and I expected to write a short chapter outlining the functions like d3.touches that exist to handle touch interface.