Reading

Readers are encouraged to browse the material on the following sites either before or after the text in this section.
  1. The Genders Novel Project (Gender Novels Overview and Web Scraping)

See also the sections on Analyses, Corpus, and Development, as well as the Our Team section.

 

These web pages are devoted to a digital humanities project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in which computational techniques were employed to analyze descriptions of gender and gender roles in English language novels written in the period from the 1800s to the early years of the twentieth century.  Many of the techniques discussed on this site are described in various sections of the courses in this certificate program.  For the present purposes, however, the web page on the application of web scraping is particularly relevant.

 

  1. Web 3.0: The Next Evolution of the Internet)

This blog post, while not a scientific article, offers an interesting perspective on the importance of decentralization in Web 3.0, written by Cryptopedia staff members.

 

  1. What is Web 3.0? (Charles Silver)

This brief post by Charles Silver, a member of the Forbes Technology Council explains the relationship between the “old Web”, which Silver calls Web 1.0, the current instantiation of the Web, or Web 2.0, and the proposed future Web 3.0.  Like the Cryptodedia article, Silver emphasizes the goal of decentralization in Web 3.0, and discusses blockchain, one of the technologies potentially enabling this effort.

 

  1. History of the Web

This article offers an historical perspective on the evolution of the Web from the viewpoint of the “inventor” of the Web (n.b. Not the same as the Internet), Tim Berners-Lee.  The article also briefly discusses some of the core supporting technologies of the Web: HTML, URI, and HTTP.

 

  1. Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web? (Sinclair Target)

This web article, slightly longer than the previous ones, carefully traces the unrealized evolution of the Semantic Web, which was to become the cornerstone of Web 3.0.  The technological aspects related to the Semantic Web, such as RDF, JSON, and XML (among others) are presented in a readable, informal, non-technical manner.  Although focusing on Web 3.0, the interrelationships among all the Web instantiations are explored and clarified.  Target also describes the main people involved with Web 3.0, and relates some interesting discussions.  Some of these individuals expressed their thoughts on the topic with colourful terms, such as “semweb hucksters” and “metacrap”.

 

This section introduces the Internet, some of the basic technologies used in the Internet, a brief history of the Internet, and some of the digital tools for the Internet and World Wide Web, such as HTML and JavaScript.  Cloud computing is then discussed.  Characteristics of Web and Internet materials, particularly import for the digital humanities, are presented.  The section concludes with a discussion of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.

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Contemporary Digital Humanities Copyright © 2022 by Mark P. Wachowiak is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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