Thursday 13 January 2011

When one does not do her/his homework...

... one risks to produce seriously wrong results. According to the principle of "garbage in, garbage out" here is an amusing result of Google Books uncorrected OCR:

When OCR Goes Bad: Google’s Ngram Viewer & The F-Word

For my students: if you take shortcuts you may find that you have to take along, long route after all, or, as someone just told me, "there is never time to do it once, but there is always time to do it over".

Sunday 9 January 2011

Tom Yum recipe

Yes, I know I promise to post only DH related stuff, but, ehi after the second person that tells me that my Tom Yum recipe is great, I though to share it. 
The initial inspiration comes from a book of Thai recipes from Blue Elephant, then I added a few things myself. 


400ml chicken stock
400 ml coconut milk
40gr galangal (or ginger) finely sliced
1 stem lemongrass, finely sliced
4 kaffir lime leaves crushed
200 gr chicken breast cut into thin slices
100gr mushrooms, quartered,
5 green chilies crushed
4tbsp fish sauce
4tbsp tamarind juice
2tsbp lemon juice

sprinkling coriander leaves 


I also normally add: 
200 gr pak choi
1 bag (400 gr?) of bean sprouts 
2 peppers finely sliced


Put all ingredients but chicken, mushrooms, bean sprouts, chilies and lemon into a pot. 
Bring to boil, add the rest of ingredients a part for lemon and cook for 5 mins. Add lemon, boil for a second (!) then take out from the heat and add coriander (I don't: coriander tastes of soap!).
Enjoy!

Tuesday 4 January 2011

Digital Humanities: a definition

I know that many have already attempted it, and I know that it people thinks that is very boring to try to do so, but I think it is kind of important as well. 
Preparing the new web presentation for the MA in Digital Humanities at King's I had to give a definition of what Digital Humaniteis actually is (the version which is on the web now is very carefully avoiding the issue) and here is my definition:
Digital Humanities is the discipline born from the intersection between humanities scholarship and computational technologies. 
It aims at investigating how digital methodologies can be used to enhance research in disciplines such a History, Literature, Languages, Art History, Music, Cultural Studies and many others. 
Digital Humanities holds a very strong practical component as it includes the concrete creation of digital resources for the study of specific disciplines.
Comments?