Digital Humanities – ross spencer :: exponentialdecay [-dot-] co [-dot-] uk

Silver birth tree in Ravensburg featuring its characteristic eye-like bark.

Code as memory?

It is very poetic to think about code as it containing the memory of its maintainers. I don’t entirely disagree with the idea, but it’s overly poetic and the reality of maintenance on systems that have become too unwieldy is anything but poetic.

What I will miss about Twitter

People seem to be moving. You’ll find me on Mastodon and BlueSky.

As I happened to be looking through some 2015 archives today, I made notes of the things I will miss.

twitter walls twitter sentiment analysis twitter graphs twitter bots twitter history and its use for activism twitter history and its use for emergent trends twitter knowledge base and advance search twitter serendipity

The history books will be pretty unbelievable when they come to write about it. It may never come back, but it did exist. And it was fun, not until it lasted, because it lasted too long, but until it was no fun no more.

Talk: Using a custom Wikibase with Siegfried

In March I was invited by the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group to talk about my experiences using Wikibase with Siegfried,…

OPFCON: How has OPF contributed to the international digital preservation community? Where would this community be without OPF?

In another life I would have been visiting Vienna again last Wednesday. I visited and lived there for a short…

Digital preservation at the coalface: or how I learned that glamping doesn’t always involve the vast wilderness

The last Friday of March this year I was invited by Elizabeth Kata at the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency)…

Colour Theory… What’s the deal with the palettes I’m using?

Following a recent conversation, I wanted to write this blog to add some final pieces of context to my current…

The Painter Goblin Visits The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Top Five

I’m heading to Houston for the first time this Friday, for ten-days. I can’t wait! To fill my time before…

A disused railway line at the Don River Valley in Toronto

Published: Archives and Manuscripts, Binary Trees

This week (beginning 7 August 2017) marks my second solo published peer-reviewed paper. Binary trees? Automatically identifying the links between born-digital records. I invite everyone to have a read and let me know what you think.

The paper won the Sigrid McCausland Emerging Writers Award late in 2018.

Read the paper and additional thoughts below.