Short presentation to Colleagues/students on Digital Humanities, trying to make sense of Digital Humanities.

1. MAKING SENSE OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES A CONVERSATION STARTER

2. Outline
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Introduction
Brief history
DH Projects
DH Tools
DH Organisations/Conferences/Workshops
DH@UCT
More

3. What is this thing called Digital
Humanities or DH?
• Umbrella term covering a wide range of activities, from
online preservation and digital mapping to data mining
and use of GIS technologies , like infrared scans,
geolocation mapping, and optical character recognition
to enrich these resources with related information or
make entirely new discoveries about them.
There have been scholars and technologists doing DH
work long before DH was a word!
Previously known as Human Computing

4. Variety of meanings
• Day in the Life of Digital Humanities (8 April
2013)
• Definitions
http://dayofdh2013.matrix.msu.edu/members/
The humanities, now
with digital.
Using new
methods to
find out more
about old
things
I defined DH for
my aging parents
as "using
computers to
improve the ways I
study, learn, and
write about my
research and my
experiences, even
though I'm not a
rocket scientist."
Digital humanities is the
broader exploration of
how technology can be
integrated into
traditional scholarly
activities and the
creation of new forms of
scholarship and media

5. Brief History
•
•
•
•
ImageL http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/typo3temp/pics/7212f0d7fe.jpg
Image: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/card2.jpg
Images: http://www.osservatoreromano.va/orportal-portlets-portal/detail/binaries/news/cultura/2011/184q11-lettore-fermati----morto-padre-busa/184q05b.jpg
ImageL http://www.sas-sas.it/Alice/images/Thomis6.jpg

6. Corpus Thomisticum

7. Timeline of DH Developments
• Computer Centres
• Scholarly societies and journals
• Standards (Text Coding Initiative –TEI)
• Library digitization and digital humanities centres
Image: http://atomictoasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Word-Proc-1.jpg

8. Library Digitization and Digital
Humanities Centres

10. DH Projects
• What knowledge can digital humanities
scholars produce that their predecessors
could not?
• One of the principle projects was making
historical and literacy texts available online
• Data mining and text encoding projects are
often paired with interesting visual
representations, multimedia, and interactive
tools

11. Charles Darwin’s Library

12. Mapping the Republic of Letters

13. First World War Poetry Digital Archive

14. Shoah Visual Archives

15. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

16. Kindred Britain

17. Old Bailey Proceedings

18. DH Tools + Technical Resources
• Comprehensive list at Bamboo
DiRT
http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/
• Text editing
• Textual analysis
• Repositories
• Display/Publishing

19. Text analysis

20. DH
Organisations/conferences/journals/
workshops
• Thatcamps http://thatcamp.org/
• Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
(ADHO)
– Journals
– Summer Institutes
– Annual conference

22. DH@UCT

23. • Adam Crymble describes his Digital
Humanities Thesis in two minutes
“Big Data, Old History “
http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/#047