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Dan Cohen is a popular blogger in the field of digital humanities. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at the George Mason University. He "broadly" studies the effect that new technology and media has on "all aspects of knowledge." He has received a few awards in this field and seems to be one of the most respected blogger based on this website alone. This blog features numerous pages of writing from Cohen that has been used in this project.

This blog post by Dan Cohen discusses the collection of digital ephemera, such as twitter posts, and its legitimate relevance to historical analysis. Cohen leans towards supporting the Library of Congress in their decision to take historical artifacts like this seriously, citing examples of thankful historians rejoicing over the preservation of what was thought to be scrap paper. He then goes on to discuss the problem in terms of costs, noting the relatively cheep nature of the digital texts.

Cohen blogs about the future that he sees for The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). His passion sees to lie in collecting data and content from small, local libraries and museums. He still holds this goal despite recognizing the issues they would face in attempting to convert the material from physical to digital. He also talks about the technical layout and the best way to get it into peoples' hands (incorporating it into an app). He also touches upon technology that we do not have yet or is not yet out of the beta testing stage, and could be in the future of DPLA.

This article discusses and provides a few tips for preserving today's digital records for generations to come. This seemingly easy task has provided some difficulties to the September 11 Digital Archive Project. The main goal of this joint project is to collect and preserve everything from photos to voicemails that relate to the events of September 11. Dan Cohen provides four main points that may be able to solve some of this issues in this preservation along with tips on how to better this process.

In this brief blog post, Dan Cohen highlights an interesting issue raised by Cliff Lynch at one of the 2007 CNI task force meetings. According to Cohen, Lynch raised the issue of museums holding on to controversial materials and how the digitization of those materials can allow them to be repatriated, either by undermining the arguments museums make or by addressing their concerns. By creating a digital replica, there is no longer a need to withhold artifacts from their originating cultures.

This article is an announcement of, and response to statements issued by the AHA on two separate occasions. The author discusses the stagnant nature of attempts to deal with open access with an economic regard to academic journals. He supports a consortium model, and calls for general support for fledgling open access journals from the AHA.

Blogger Dan Cohen discusses how Google is good for history. Historians are simply a group of people who dig through information from the past, put it all together as possible facts or theories, and then share. Cohen then teases Google for a bit when bringing attention to the hand scans that can be occasionally found in Google Books. Their is a question of quality and direction.

This is another blog in the Dan Cohen series. In this one in particular, Cohen opens calling digital journalism and digital humanities "kindred spirits". He believes that these two areas of concentration would greatly benefit from working together. The areas in which would be the most profitable from partnership are listed and discussed. A few include use of common tools, platforms and infrastructures, and the idea that developers and technologists should be partners.

This is a follow-up article to a post Cohen wrote on Wikipedia and its relation to Google and Yahoo. In this post, he discusses the validity of Wikipedia as a tool to create text profiles of subjects for search engines.

Cohen blogs about the emergence of several new ways of publishing within the scientific field that is still considered scholarly and many times peer reviewed. Some of the websites mentioned offer to publish a writer's work for a lifetime, for a few dollars. The emergence of these self-publishing, academic, scientific sites also shows a slight shift in philosophy. By restricting the publication through certain channels, the publishing companies and universities were choosing what will be the topic "of next year." Some times they were right, sometimes they were wrong, but either way, great and important papers were lost because they were not considered "the next big thing" or they are too "normal."

Dan Cohen's transcript of his anonymous speech at Harvard on March 1, 2011 provides insight into the demands scholars have digitization efforts and digital archives. Cohen identifies five major demands on the part of scholars: reliable metadata, the ability to experience serendipity, an interface to handle differing modes of research, a representation of the physical book, and open APIs to accommodate the demands digital libraries cannot anticipate. Dan Cohen's goal is to borrow the best aspects of a physical library - the ability to stumble upon new material readily as well as some measure of its tactile feel - with the ease of use of a well designed digital archive.

This article expands on the subjects discussed in Dan Cohen's earlier article on The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing. He breaks the supply and demand model, introduced in the previous article, into four influential categories that need focus to better both sides. He argues for impartiality when approaching a text, passion for the subject, shame for the lack of sharing compared to other fields, and the shift from narcissistic desires for compensation to a desire for communal knowledge.

This article discusses the extensive nature of scholarly publishing. He explains the industry in terms of a social contract between the supply side, publication, and the demand side, the consumers. The supply side of this contract has enjoyed large growth recently, with the continued growth of digital outlets, while the demand side has remained stationary, maintaining its view of the book as the definitive form of publication. In conclusion, the author argues that curation will solve this problem, and become more important that publication once publication ceases to be limited.

This Dan Cohen blog discusses the weird relationship between the databases purchased by organizations and libraries and how they are utilized in the academic world. Many of these purchases are unwarranted. These buyers are over buying accumulating multiple software programs for more than one 'category". The main problem discussed is that since the buyer is not the user, ignored functional issues arise.

Dan Cohen opens his blog with the announcement that several of his colleagues "taken democratic ownership" and they now have a new interface and editing process. He also provides several screen shots (from his ipad) of the journal to give his readers an idea of the articles and layout. He also notes that they do not use the typical process of publishing in an academic journal; he calls their approach the "catching the good."

In his blog, Dan Cohen decided to revisit a topic that was cover in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This data-mining related article discusses the issues with educational testing and growing technology in the humanities field. Devices that can browse an entire database of knowledge pin pointing specific facts. This device is then compared to the relationship between the calculator and math to this device and history. Just as the calculator has made memorizing certain mathematical principles pointless in testing, this device is said to make multiple choice test irrelevant for history. Similarly, cell phones, pdas, and tablets have been able to fill this gap already.