1. MAKING SENSE OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES
- A CONVERSATION STARTER:
Presented by Ingrid Thomson, UCT
Libraries
2. WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED
DIGITAL HUMANITIES OR DH?
Various definitions of Digital Humanities
Previously known as Human Computing
Umbrella term covering a wide range of activities
from online preservation and digital mapping to data
mining and the use of geographic information
systems.
There have been scholars and technologists doing DH
work long before DH was a phrase!
3. QUESTION THAT IS ASKED
There was a moment of asking “Can I use this
technology to further my research?” or saying “This
is what I want to do” and identifies a technology to
help them do that. (Or in some cases, create a tool to
do that)
4. DEFINITIONS....
Day in the Life of Digital Humanities (8 April 2014)
Some definitions:
http://dayofdh2014.matrix.msu.edu/members/
DH is a cover term for a wide variety of activities that attempt to explore and
expand areas of knowledge typically examined in the Humanities by
developing and/or applying computational tools or methods in ways best
suited for these areas. DH is also a cover term for a supporting community of
practitioners who share a common interest in the tools and methods--and
challenges--generated by the activities DH scholars, as well as potentially
useful activities in fields outside the traditional Humanities. - Scott Kleinman California
State University, Northridge
5. DEFINITION
We use “digital humanities” as an umbrella term for a number of
different activities that surround technology and humanities
scholarship. Under the digital humanities rubric, I would include
topics like open access to materials, intellectual property rights,
tool development, digital libraries, data mining, born-digital
preservation, multimedia publication, visualization, GIS, digital
reconstruction, study of the impact of technology on numerous
fields, technology for teaching and learning, sustainability
models, and many others
. -Brett Bobley, NEH, United States (2011)
6. MORE DEFINITIONS
I define the digital humanities as two things. Firstly, I think of it as using
new and emerging technologies to enhance our understanding of our
humanistic fields of inquiry. For me, as a historian, it is learning new
things through technology that we couldn't learn otherwise. Secondly, I
think of it as playing and exploring new methods of scholarly
communication - i.e. putting history online - Ian Milligan, Uni of Waterloo
7. Broadly construed, digital humanities is the use of
digital media and technology to advance the full
range of thought and practice in the humanities,
from the creation of scholarly resources, to research
on those resources, to the communication of
results to colleagues and students.
Dan Cohen – Executive Director, Digital Public
Library of America
9. Other scholars began using mainframe computers to automate tasks like
word-searching, sorting, and counting, which was much faster than
processing information from texts with handwritten or typed index cards
The first specialized journal in the digital humanities was Computers and
the Humanities, which debuted in 1966. The Association for Literary and
Linguistic Computer (ALLC) and the Association for Computers and the
Humanities (ACH) were then founded in 1977 and 1978, respectively.
Soon, there was a need for a standardized protocol for tagging digital
texts, and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was developed. The TEI project
was launched in 1987 and published the first full version of the TEI
Guidelines in May 1994
In the nineties, major digital text and image archives emerged at centres
of humanities computing in the U.S. e.g. the Women Writers Project, the
Rossetti Archive
1992 – 2004 Library digitization and digital humanities centres
2004: 1st Publication on DH: The Blackwell Companion to the Digital
Humanities
11. NETWORK ANALYSIS
Explore the relationships between
individuals, places, topics and
more
e.g. Sex, Race and Allegiance in
The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings
http://www.eduhacker.net/digital-humanities/sex-race-allegiance-hobbit-lord-of-the-rings.html
12. DATA VISUALISATION
Visualise to tell a story, understand, identify trends, make
connections, see patterns .... With great speed
A tool called Palladio which was used to do Mapping the Republic
of Letters
http://palladio.designhumanities.org
13. NGRAM VIEWER (GOOGLE BOOKS)
Displays a graph showing how those phrases have
occurred in a corpus of books over the selected years
https://books.google.com/ngrams/info
14. TEXT ANALYSIS
Studying texts with computers and software to
uncover new patterns, overlooked connections and
deeper meaning
15. GIS
A geographic information system (GIS) integrates
hardware, software and data for capturing, managing,
analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically
referenced information
http://timemapper.okfnlabs.org/
36. DEVELOPMENTS IN SOUTH AFRICA
The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR)
Government support, through the Department of Science and Technology, as well as the
combined effort of many South African Academics, made the establishment of SADiLaR
possible.
SADiLaR runs two programmes:
A digitisation programme, which entails the systematic creation of relevant digital text,
speech and multi-modal resources related to all official languages of South Africa. The
development of appropriate natural language processing software tools for research and
development purposes are included as part of the digitisation programme.
A Digital Humanities programme, which facilitates the building of research capacity by
promoting and supporting the use of digital data and innovative methodological
approaches within the Humanities and Social Sciences.
African Digital Humanities : A call for proposals. The universities of Cape Town,
Pretoria, Stellenbosch, Western Cape and the Witwatersrand have recently been awarded a
generous grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation for a Programme in African Digital
Humanities. The Programme will offer R3 million annually over five years in support of
projects of digitisation, course design and research.
38. CAN’T DO DH WITHOUT
LIBRARIES!
Digitisation
Preservation and Curation of digitally born artefacts
Research Data Management
Text analysis and text encoding
Provision of tools for text mining, 3D
Online Exhibition space
GIS Services (Maps)
Inclusion of Makerspaces
Training on hardware and software tools and working with data (e.g. Library
carpentry)
Provision of dedicated DH Centres or programmes – many of these in different
developmental stages. Staffing of these centres are often confined to a digital
scholarship librarian (who fulfils other roles) and a few IT professionals (many
working on contract or grant funded projects , or have other responsibilities
beyond DH programmes)
39. Adam Crymble describes his Digital Humanities Thesis
in two minutes
“Big Data, Old History “
http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/#047
40. USEFUL READS + LINKS
ACRL Digital Humanities Interest Group http://connect.ala.org/node/158885
Schaffner, Jennifer and Erway, Ricky: Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center? OCLC
http://oclc.org/research/publications/library/2014/oclcresearch-digital-humanities-center-2014-overview.html
Response from Beth Nowviskie to the OCLC Report above http://nowviskie.org/2014/asking-for-it/
Dh+lib: where the Digital Humanities and Librarianship meet http://acrl.ala.org/dh/
Coble, Zach: Make it New? A dh+lib Mini Series zachcoble.com/dhlib/Make-It-New-A-dhlib-Mini-Series.pdf
Hubbard, Melanie: Explore Digital Humanities. Syracuse University. http://melaniehubbard.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/exploredh_plan_20141.pdf
Adams, Jennifer and Gunn, Kevin. Digital Humanities: Where to start. College & Research Libraries News vol. 73 no. 9 536-569 October 2012.
http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/9/536.full
VandeGrif, Michau: What is digital humanities and what is it doing in the library? http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/dhandthelib/
Lease, Eric Morgan: Digital Humanities and Libraries (blog posting on Days in the Life of a Librarian) http://blogs.nd.edu/emorgan/2014/04/dh-and-
libraries/
Unsworth, John: What’s digital humanities and how did it get here? http://blogs.brandeis.edu/lts/2012/10/09/whats-digital-humanities-and-how-did-it-
get-here/
41. USEFUL READS + LINKS
BOOKS
Gold, Matthew: Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Bryson, Tim: Digital Humanities. Washington, DC : Association of Research Libraries, c2011.
EXAMPLES OF DH PROJECTS
Mapping the Republic of Letters http://www.republicofletters.stanford.edu/
First World War Poetry Digital Archives http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/www1lit/
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces
Kindred Britain http://kindred.stanford.edu/#
Old Bailey Proceedings http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/
Charles Darwin’s Library http://www.biodiversity.org/collection/darwinlibrary
Sex, Race and Allegiance in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings http://www.eduhacker.net/digital-humanities/sex-race-allegiance-hobbit-lord-of-the-rings.html
French Revolution Digital Archive https://frda.stanford.edu/
TOOLS TO EXPLORE
Digital Research Tools http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/
Voyant http://www.voyant-tools.org
Tapor http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal
Palladio http://palladio.designhumanities.org
Library Carpentry http://librarycarpentry.org
ORGANISATIONS
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations http://adho.org/
That Camps http://thatcamp.org/
Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA) http://digitalhumanities.org.za/
Editor's Notes
Timemapper
Can use tools like Voyant, and Zotero to do data mining. Called with Criminal Intent Project.