Programming » James Gottlieb

An Adventure!

Posted by james at 4:01 pm Digital Humanities, MITH No Responses » Tagged with: JavaScript, Programming

Mar 152012

In my last post, I talked some about the need to look across projects and find common elements that could be factored out. I’d like to start a series of posts in which I talk about some of the work I’m doing at MITH in developing some foundational libraries that we are using to build digital humanities projects. Along the way, I’ll discuss some of the philosophy behind those libraries and our approach to the projects.

Today, I want to walk through the design of an example application I’m working on that implements the classic Adventure game as a JavaScript web application. I’m not finished with it yet, but the framework is there. I’m just adding content and tweaking some behavior now, such as handling darkness. You can go into the hut, pick up the key, and then go down and open the grate to get into the cave.

Coding and Digital Humanities

Posted by james at 11:33 am Digital Humanities 4 Responses » Tagged with: Digital Humanities, Programming

Mar 082012

Miriam Posner’s post, “Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code,” has touched off a series of conversations on twitter and elsewhere. My own feeling is that she’s nailing some things square on the head and, fortunately, doesn’t conclude saying that we should banish coding from the digital humanities. We just need to be careful how we cast the need for coding.

I’ve tossed around a nugget in my mind for the last few weeks, and Mariam’s post is making me focus more intently on it: A digital humanist afraid of the digital is like a scholar of French literature who is afraid of French. You can’t be a digital humanist if you don’t understand the digital. That doesn’t mean you have to be able to code any more than being a scholar of French literature means you have to be able to write French literature. You just have to be able to understand the nuances of what you’re studying and how you are studying it. Otherwise, how can you properly interpret the results?

Thinking Through Some Functional Ideas

Posted by james at 6:48 am Digital Humanities 1 Response » Tagged with: Histogram, Languages, Mathematica, Programming, Prolog

Mar 172011

I’m working through some ideas on how to move the Utukku/Fabulator expression language more into a descriptive, functional style. I want to be able to have the programming be exposed as an editorial statement showing how certain calculations are done or inferences are drawn. The computer’s interpretation of the data can be as important as a person’s, and knowing what the person was expecting the computer to do can be as important as knowing what the person thought they wanted the computer to do.

With that in mind, I want to walk through a few possible ways of constructing phrases and inference rules to see how they go. Since my stereotypical example seems to be a concordance, that’s where I hope to end up.