In this book, Paul A. Thomas—a seasoned Wikipedia contributor who has accrued about 60,000 edits since he started editing in 2007—breaks down the history of the free encyclopedia and explains the process of becoming an editor. Now a newly minted Ph.D. and a library specialist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, he outlines the many roles a Wikipedia editor can fill. Some editors fix typographical errors, add facts and citations, or clean up the prose on existing articles; others create new articles on topics they find interesting. In Inside Wikipedia: How It Works and How You Can Be an Editor (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Thomas goes behind the familiar Wikipedia article page and looks at the unique brand of collaboration that is constantly at work to expand and improve this global resource.

James Kates is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications.

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 Today I’m speaking with Marcus Golding, historian and Director of Educational Operations at ClioVis. ClioVis is an incredible software and learning tool that allows educators and studies to create digital timelines, network visualizations, and interactive presentations. Founded by UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek, ClioVis is made for professors and teachers by current professors and scholars. I’m thrilled to get the chance today to speak with Marcus about this software to share with our listeners how they can enhance their own work and teaching.

Visit ClioVis' website to learn more: Click Here

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Tyler Neill discusses the new platform Pāṇḍitya, an online graph visualization tool illustrating connections between works and authors in the Pandit Prosopographical Database of Indic Texts. It also facilitates exploration of the Sanskrit E-Text Inventory (SETI) as an overlay on the Pandit network. 

Tyler's blog "Sanskrit and Tech with Tyler" is here. 

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We're pleased to welcome Dr. Peter Krapp, the author of Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation (MIT Press, 2024), to the New Books Network. 

In Computing Legacies, Peter Krapp explores a media history of simulation to excavate three salient aspects of digital culture. Firstly, he profiles simulation as cultural technique, enabling symbolic work and foregrounding hypothetical literacy. Secondly, he positions simulation as crucial for the preservation of cultural memory, where modeling, emulation, and serious play are constitutive in how we relate to our mediated history. And lastly, despite suggestions that we may already live in a simulation, he interrogates how simulation can serve as critique of the computer age. In tracing our digital heritage, Computing Legacies elucidates inflection points where quantitative data becomes tractable for qualitative evaluations: modeling epidemics for scientific study or entertainment, emulating older devices, turning numerical calculations into music, conducting espionage in virtual worlds, and gamifying higher education. Simulation, this book demonstrates, is pivotal not only to high-tech research and to archives, museums, and the preservation of digital culture but also to our understanding of what it is to live and work under the technical conditions of computing.

Dr. Peter Krapp is a Professor of Film & Media Studies, English, and Music at UC-Irvine.

Your host is Dr. Adam Kriesberg, Assistant Professor at the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science. 

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In this episode of High Theory, Jason Schneiderman talks about Nothingism. A term of his own coinage, a tongue-in-cheek manifesto, nothingism is an invitation to refuse the values of digital culture in favor of the values of print.

You can read more about poetry at the end of print culture in Jason’s new book, entitled Nothingism (Michigan UP, 2025).

In the episode Jaason refers to M.B. Parkes’s book Pause and Effect An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West and the poetry of his teacher Agha Shahid Ali.

Jason Schneiderman is a poet and teacher. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). He also edited an anthology of queer theory for first year writing courses called Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford, 2016). He works as a Professor of English at CUNY’s BMCC and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu. It shows a blue blur on a pink floral print background.

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Video (television, film, the moving image generally) is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more often from screens and speakers than through any other means. The Moving Image: A User's Manual (MIT Press, 2025) is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived here, together with the first definitive manual to help writers, educators, and publishers use video more effectively. 

Drawing on decades as an educator, publisher, and producer, MIT’s Peter Kaufman presents new tools, best practices, and community resources for integrating film and sound into media that matters. Kaufman describes video’s vital role in politics, law, education, and entertainment today, only 130 years since the birth of film. He explains how best to produce video, distribute it, clear rights to it, cite it, and, ultimately, archive and preserve it. With detailed guidance on producing and deploying video and sound for publication, finding and using archival video and sound, securing rights and permissions, developing distribution strategies, and addressing questions about citation, preservation, and storage—across the broadest spectrum of platforms, publications, disciplines, and formats—The Moving Image equips readers for the medium’s continued ascendance in education, publishing, and knowledge dissemination in the decades to come. And, modeled in part on Strunk and White’s classic, The Elements of Style, it’s also a highly enjoyable read.

Peter B. Kaufman is Senior Program Officer at MIT Open Learning. He is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge and founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company that works with cultural and educational institutions around the world.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Today we share a podcast episode on the visual epistemology of astronomy by our friends at The World According to Sound. What kind of knowledge do we really gain when we look at images from space?

Longtime listeners to this show will remember The World According to Sound. As we referred to them two years ago, WATS is a team of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. Tired of sound playing second fiddle to narrative on NPR, they launched a micro podcast that held one unique sound under the microscope for 90 seconds each episode. Later, WATS became much more ambitious, producing live sonic odysseys in 8-channel surround sound and live online sound journeys during the pandemic.

Since then, Harnett and Hoff have embarked on another project. For the past couple of years, they have been partnering with different universities to translate humanities research into compelling sound-designed narrative podcasts. The first season of Ways of Knowing was produced in partnership with the University of Washington and it focused on different analytical methods and disciplines in the humanities, from close reading, deconstruction, and translational analysis, to black studies, material culture, and disability studies. The second season just wrapped up. It’s called Cosmic Visions and it’s produced in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and that’s what we’ll hear an episode from today. Just this week, they dropped the last episode of season two and now the entire series is available on The World According to Sound website.

We wanted to draw your attention to this series because turning humanities research and sound art into a sonic narrative experience was the original mission of Phantom Power. We know that many of you are interested in this area of humanities podcasting as well, so if you’re not already a fan of Chris and Sam’s work, check it out. We also wanted to share this particular episode because it also provides one answer to a tricky question: How do you do a sonic explication of something that is entirely visual?

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What is the future of reading? In Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Digital Age (Bloombury, 2024), Karl Berglund, Assistant Professor in Literature at Department of Literature and Rhetoric at Upsala University, examines the rise of audiobooks as a new mode of reading books. The analysis draws on digital humanities methods and a detailed industry case study to show who are the readers of audiobooks, how those readers engage and consume books, what sort of genres are most popular, and crucially how all of this us impacting on the publishing industry. The research also picks up on important themes of continuity and change represented by audiobooks, from ongoing issues of inequalities through to the new forms of writing practice and AI generated narrators. A richly detailed but easily accessible text, the book is essential reading for scholars across academia, as well as anyone interested in reading!

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Visualizing History’s Fragments: A Computational Approach to Humanistic Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) combines a methodological guide with an extended case study to show how digital research methods can be used to explore how ethnicity, gender, and kinship shaped early modern Algerian society and politics. However, the approaches presented have applications far beyond this specific study. More broadly, these methods are relevant for those interested in identifying and studying relational data, demographics, politics, discourse, authorial bias, and social networks of both known and unnamed actors.

Ashley R. Sanders explores how digital research methods can be used to study archival specters - people who lived, breathed, and made their mark on history, but whose presence in the archives and extant documents remains limited, at best, if not altogether lost. Although digital tools cannot metaphorically resurrect the dead nor fill archival gaps, they can help us excavate the people-shaped outlines of those who might have filled these spaces.

The six methodological chapters explain why and how each research method is used, present the visual and quantitative results, and analyze them within the context of the historical case study. In addition, every dataset is available on SpringerLink as Electronic Supplementary Material (ESM), and each chapter is accompanied by one or more video tutorials that demonstrate how to apply each of the techniques described (accessed via the SN More Media App).

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Building on the field of modern archival practice, Transmediation and the Archive: Decoding Objects in the Digital Age (ARC Humanities Press, 2024) explores the possibilities of archival objects. Investigating material as diverse as early modern printed books, death masks, a spirit photograph, and a manuscript choir book, Astrid J. Smith interrogates not only what the objects are now, but also asks what they were before taking material form, and what they can become as their format is transferred to other media. Blending insights from museum, library, archives, and media studies with experiential research, Smith examines the activities that shape the making of heritage objects and asks how an awareness of digitization practices can inform our knowledge of both their digital and physical form. She proposes a new methodological framework for evaluating the way materiality and media can affect our relationship with historical artefacts and book culture and demonstrates its fascinating application.

Astrid J. Smith is Rare Book and Special Collections Digitization Specialist and a Production Coordinator at Stanford Libraries, focusing on medieval objects and fragile archival materials. A life-long creative, she is especially interested in book arts and the philosophy of digitization.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).

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