Abby Mullen

Category: NULab

  • Passing on the Scissors and the Quill

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    Faithful readers of this blog (all one of you) will notice that I haven’t posted in almost a year. It’s not that I’ve had nothing interesting to say, but rather that I’ve been too busy with those interesting things to write about them for the blog. Here’s a brief rundown. In the summer of 2014,…

  • On Newspapers and Being Human

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    Last week, an opinion piece appeared in the New York Times, arguing that the advent of algorithmically derived human-readable content may be destroying our humanity, as the lines between technology and humanity blur. A particular target in this article is the advent of “robo-journalism,” or the use of algorithms to write copy for the news.[ref]The…

  • Passing on the Scissors and the Quill: Editorial Tenure in Viral Texts

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    The newspaper business was highly variable in the nineteenth century (in different ways than it is in the 21st century). Changes in editorship, political affiliation, and even location were frequent. Editorial changes were particularly significant, since very few editors maintained exactly the same newspaper that they inherited from a predecessor. Editors came and went quite…

  • Frontier Editor: Orion Clemens (1825-1897)

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    Though he’s often overshadowed by his younger brother Samuel, Orion Clemens had a colorful and varied career that included agriculture, journalism, and politics on the frontier of the United States. He was the eldest of seven children, though only he, Samuel, and their sister Pamela survived to adulthood. The Clemens family moved from Tennessee to…

  • Editor Vignette: Edward E. Cross

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    In my work on Viral Texts, I run across a host of interesting people, including editors whose lives are just as interesting as the stories they publish. To highlight some of these interesting people, I’m writing short posts about them as I research their papers. This first vignette is about the first editor of the first…

  • Boston-Area Days of DH Wrap-up

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    [cross-posted to HASTAC.org] Now that it’s been almost a month since the Boston-Area Days of DH, I figured I’d better write a wrap-up of the conference. It was my very great pleasure to help Prof. Ryan Cordell organize the conference, and along the way I learned a lot about DH and about scholarly work in…

  • Developing High- and Low-Tech Digital Competencies

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    Last week, Ben Schmidt gave a talk at Northeastern, part of which was about developing technical competency in digital methods. This semester, I’ve had the chance to develop my technical competency in working with data, mostly by jumping in with both feet and flailing around in all directions. The task I was given in the…