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We might ask three key questions:

What human interactions are most critical for student success?
How can technology enable better versions of those interactions?
Where can technology replace people so that human resources can be redirected to accomplish more of those interactions?

The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce 17 awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program from our September 2014 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 232 grants just announced by the NEH. Congratulations to all the awardees for their terrific projects!

I don't know if the NEH is a bellwether or not, but this is pretty darn exciting!

"Design thinking is an approach to innovation that combines human desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility to develop solutions to society's everyday problems. By putting people at the center, designing thinking and the human-centered design process ask innovators and leaders to tackle problems from multiple perspectives, especially those of people whose needs and desires are at the core of any problem. "

"How do I want to be online? A human open educational resource to those who seek my help navigating this disturbing and ambiguous space so full of wonder."

""We're not doing research into games. I'm not here doing work that will allow humans to play better checkers," said Schaeffer. "We're interested in finding ways to make computers perform tasks that you normally think humans should be doing." Games are just the test bed."

"Robots may replace me as a journalist, but English teachers can rest assured that machines have a long way to go to before being able to offer quality feedback. "

Merging human and machine.

Digital text-mining tools can help researchers understand document collections that are prohibitively large for a close-reading. Our collection of runaway slave advertisements from Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi totals over 2,500 individual ads! Not only would it be extremely time consuming to read this entire collection, the consistently short, boilerplate format of runaway ads can make it difficult to really distinguish between them. The ads from Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi start to all look practically indistinguishable, making it difficult for close-reading alone to recognize pattern breaks between the states, without the assistance of computational data. This is where Voyant comes in. We hoped that the "distant-reading" capabilities of Voyant would be able to pick up on larger word usage trends that are not immediately apparent when reading with the human eye.

"Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines" Really cool digital humanities project

"But we also need to think and question and explore and understand, so that we can take up our particular responsibilities as educators as well as our general responsibilities as human beings. I might be wrong in my thinking, but I'm not going to stop thinking and putting it out there because that too, is an act of resistance."

"Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet-and how the Internet uses them back. By imitating humans in ways both poignant and disorienting, Kazemi's bots focus our attention on the power and the limits of automated technology, as well as reminding us of our own tendency to speak and act in ways that are essentially robotic. While they're more conceptual art than activism, the bots Kazemi is creating are acts of provocation-ones that ask whether, as computers get better at thinking like us and shaping our behavior, they can also be rewired to spring us free. "

Reducing someone to the number of languages he or she speaks trivializes the immense power that language imparts. After all, language is the living testament to a culture's history and world view, not a shiny trophy to be dusted off for someone's self-aggrandizement.

Language is a complex tapestry of trade, conquest and culture to which we each add our own unique piece - whether that be a Shakespearean sonnet or "Lol bae g2g ttyl." As my time in the media spotlight made me realize, saying you "speak" a language can mean a lot of different things: it can mean memorizing verb charts, knowing the slang, even passing for a native. But while I've come to realize I'll never be fluent in 20 languages, I've also understood that language is about being able to converse with people, to see beyond cultural boundaries and find a shared humanity. And that's a lesson well worth learning.

"The emerging digital media ecology is opening/will open indeterminate capacities for thought and action that will shift (again, in a non-determining way) practices of rhetoric/communication, social institutions, the production of knowledge, and our sense of what it means to be human." PONDER THAT FOR A MOMENT...

"A recent Twitter conversation that cast doubt on the conclusions of a genomics study has revived a debate about how best to publicly discuss possible errors in research. Yoav Gilad, a geneticist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, last month wrote on Twitter that fundamental errors in the design and data analysis of a December 2014 study2 led to an unfounded conclusion about the genetic similarities between mice and humans."

""That's our goal: To make a computer much more like a human being, in the sense that it integrates data and can make decisions," Littlewood told me. "So the future definition of computer may be like the original. It may be like a person after all.""

"We're rich in data-but the returns are diminishing rapidly, because after a certain point the more information you have, the harder it becomes to extract meaning from it. Ironically, an excess of information resists analysis and comprehension in much the same way a lack of it does. As a result, the more that new technology floods our world with complex information, the more we end up calling on a much older field of human endeavor, one that has always been devoted to making complexity comprehensible and extracting meaning from chaos, namely, art. "

Really cool mapping tools. *THIS* is what computing + the Web affords by way of augmenting human intelligence.

Website Idea? Inspiration?