A short 10,000 foot view of Digital Humanities and an introduction to the ongoing planning project to start the Claremont Center for Digital Humanities
2. A not-so-new “community of practice”
Sixty years ago, the field called “humanities computing”
made its debut with the appearance of Father Roberto
Busa’s Index Thomisticus, a computer-compiled
concordance to the works of Thomas Aquinas (Adams
and Gunn).
All the ways that the humanities and digital
technologies intersect.
—Rebecca Davis
Digital Humanities is the critical study of how
the technologies and techniques associated
with the digital medium intersect with and
alter humanities scholarship and scholarly
communication.
—Julia Flanders
3. DH vs. DP
Digital Pedagogy • Deals with
• Can apply across Humanities, except…
divisions • Doesn’t have to deal
• Focus on a reflective with teaching, per se
teaching practice • Asks students to think
• MOOCs/DOCCs about how the tools
change the questions
they’re asking
Digital Humanities
4. A new/old practice
STC and Wing Catalogues Early English Books
Online (EEBO)
Begins in 1998
TCP Partnership 1999
9. Electronic Literature and Digital Poetics
Oulipo “potential literature”
On the fly Video/GPS/Lyric: The Wilderness Downtown
Produced multimedia poetry: Tao
13. DH in the Undergrad Classroom
Collaborative/Student Authored Work
University of Richmond History Engine
Soweto Project (Angel Nieves, Hamilton College)
Archive
3D Environment
15. The “we” in Claremont
But also the Working Group:
Alex Juhasz, Pitzer
Rachel Mayeri, HMC
Richard McKirahan, Pomona
Steven Casper, KGI
Lori Ann Ferrel, CGU
Audrey Bilger, CMC
16. Defining “DH Center”
“A digital humanities center is an entity where
new media and technologies are used for
humanities-based research, teaching, and
intellectual engagement and experimentation.
The goals of the center are to further
humanities scholarship, create new forms of
knowledge, and explore technology's impact
on humanities-based disciplines”
http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub143abst.html
18. Another kind: the regional center
• NY6: Hamilton, St. Lawrence, Colgate, Hobart
and William Smith, Skidmore, and Union
colleges
• “The 5 Colleges:” Hampshire, Amherst, Mount
Holyoke and Smith Colleges and the University
of Massachusetts Amherst
19. CCDH – what kind?
A regional, thematic center with
(proposed) areas of strategic focus
Relationships between “the digital” and “the material”
Material and digital culture are often held in opposition despite the
materialities of digital technologies and the strong influence that local
cultures have on the use of all technologies.
We want to encourage projects that play with, break, and denaturalize the
digital/material dichotomy, as well as those that focus critical attention on
movements between digital and analog.
Vibrant or ethical data
We want to encourage projects that think about the ethics of data and
information management, particularly the interfaces between “the human”
and “data” and those that enact a particular vision of ethical data.
20. Proposed Research Clusters
Advanced
• Competitively funded projects of 1-4 semesters
• Southland faculty, staff, graduate students, and
undergraduate students
• Faculty from USC and the Claremont Colleges will
be eligible for one semester of course release
• Must include at least two faculty members and
two undergraduate research associates
• At least two campuses must be represented in
the cluster
21. Proposed Research Clusters
Undergraduate
• Competitively funded projects of no more than
one semester
• undergraduates from across the 5C campuses in
order to work on a digital humanities project,
seminar, or tools workshop.
• Projects must include students from at least two
Claremont campuses and have the support of a
faculty project lead.
• The team is expected to find a venue in which to
present their work, either locally or at a national
conference.
22. Other ideas
• Postbac opportunities at USC/IML for students
• USC postdoc replacements for faculty leaves
• A CCDH Humanities Clinic, which would
support projects
• Yours??
23. Timeline and Process
Fall Spring
• 7C conversations • refine scope
• finish infrastructure • write grant to fund
surveys center
• site visits • establish firm
• identify a design team collaborative
• scope the center and infrastructure
collaborations • work with design
team
24. Timeline and Process
Summer
Dialogue with Mellon
September 2013
Grant request goes before the Mellon Board
2014
Grant is funded, CCDH work begins!
25. Keep in touch, share your ideas
Claremontdh.wordpress.com
Jacque Wernimont:
Jwernimo@scrippscollege.edu
Presentation: http://bit.ly/S9ksIZ
26. Citations
Cohen, Patrician. “Digital Keys for Unlocking Humanities’ Riches”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html
Adams, Jennifer and Kevin B. Gunn. “Digital Humanities: Where to Starthttp://crln.acrl.org/content/73/9/536.full
2012 Day of Digital Humanities Blog
http://dayofdh2012.artsrn.ualberta.ca/dh/
Projects:
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/
http://oralhistorias.wordpress.com/
http://wwp.brown.edu
http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home
http://scriptorium.english.cam.ac.uk/
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/
http://www.nous.org.uk/oulipo.html
http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/strasser_sondheim__tao/tao.html
https://republicofletters.stanford.edu/
http://datavisualization.ch/tools/selected-tools/
http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/choosepart.html
http://www.coastal.edu/ashes2art/
http://historyengine.richmond.edu/
http://www.soweto76archive.org/
http://prezi.com/hjkj8ztj-clv/map-of-digital-humanities/
http://mith.umd.edu/
http://chnm.gmu.edu/
http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/scholarslab/about/projects.html
http://invisibleaustralians.org/faces/
http://wheatoncollege.edu/technology/academic/projects/anderson-diderot/
335 registered participants in 2012 Day of DH – and the list of definitions aggregates the definitions from the last three years of the event.
A topic of debate in the field, nevertheless there are some distinctions.Humanities – but History is a social science…Don’t always live up to theseClickers are a helpful example – using them in the classroom to create a different kind of interactive environment – that’s DP, not DH; you aren’t asking the students to think about how the clickers change the kinds of questions they’re asking of the material, because they aren’t asking anything of it with the clickers.All that said – it can be pretty murky terrain
Whatever they are, digital humanities are not as new as Fish would have us believe.Among the earliest cornerstone projects are those concerned with access – digital surrogacy kinds of projects. Print mediaThe major digitization of the STC catalogues by the Early English Books Online (Chadwyck-Healey/ProQuest operation) began in 1998 and now contains more than 125,000 full text items. Shawn Mullins argues that this digital work should be understood as an extension of the bibliographic work begun in the 1920s to create the STC and Wing catalogues and then extended in the late 1930s and early 40s by transfer to microfilm. In 1999 ProQuest teamed up with the University of Michigan and Oxford University in the “Text Creation Partnership” to create fully-searchable, TEI compliant SGML/XML texts. The goal of the first two phases of this partnership is to have 69,000 texts in full-text format. (ttp://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=library_papers). So, the new is a bit old. Perhaps not in the long history of textual scholarship of the sort represented here. A forty-year old endeavor is certainly young when measured against studies of antiquity. But it is not all as new as it might seem. In some sense this kind digital literary studies is about data which already, in some sense, exist, are repackaged, resorted, made searchable, and, above all, made accessible by the tools. It’s about new ways of accessing existing data. The Dryden ode here is a digital surrogate for the artifact housed in Harvard’s library.
Askingwhether this new technosocial environment changes how we understand literary (or material) artifacts and/or our own scholarly practices.
But it’s also about asking ourselves what the translation from the codex, the manuscript, the scroll means for our objects of study; it’s about asking whether digital tools can really provide us with new or different insights (not assuming that they do) and, to borrow a phrase from STS, whether this new technosocial environment changes how we understand literary (or material) artifacts and/or our own scholarly practices.I have a bias toward a theoretical engagement with technology and tools – which is not to say high theory of the 1980s type, but a reflexive use of technology rather than taking for granted that the technology is helpful or that it’s transparent in its effects.Critical digital literacy: not just use of tools, but ability to interrogate the effects and contexts of those tools and their uses
ManuscriptScriptorium – both paleographic and primary text resourceshttp://scriptorium.english.cam.ac.uk/Ordinance of Pottage – 125 recipes with a table of contentsManuscript image, all of its metadata, and a transcription of contentsClicking on the text image gets you a zoomable high resolution image like thisGreat for teaching and research – demonstrates the commonplace book (poems, health directives, recipes, legal contracts, etc) Archimedes Palimpsesthttp://archimedespalimpsest.org/digital/ Archimedes Palimpsesthttp://archimedespalimpsest.org/digital/
Archimedes Palimpsest1229 Prayer book written over 174 parchment folios that contain at least 7 treatises by Archimedes, including the unique On Floating BodiesDigital imaging technique known as multispectral imaging – numerous photos are taken at different wavelengths of light resulting in a digital stack of images, algorithms are then written to enhance various elements – so in this case an algorithm was written to get the prayer book ink to fade into the parchment, allowing the “under text” to be read (separated out the spectral signature of the Archimedes ink)
“born digital”Oulipo: french writing collaborative 1960sJoe Keenan’s Moment, or the collaborative I was in the darkWilderness downtown is a google/chromeexperiementTao is a Sondheim/Strasser collaboration in e-lit
Visualizations of historical networks : Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters Project1698-1789 – all correspondents in all citiesBig data projects are attempting to leverage the volume of digitized work and computing speed in the service of a much larger scope of researchFor some this is half of a dialogic move between close (1 text) and distant (many) reading.
Voyant analytics – entire Shakespeare corpus: word cloud, searchable full text, frequency analysis, comparative analysis of quantifiables
1820 in History engine, pins indicate articles writtenSoweto’s 3D simulator and digital “memory box” – community participation.
Moving out of the literary and into historiographic projectsAyer’s project utilizes a primary text database along with a fairly simple mapping to allow people to move through time and space in a virtual exploration of the Civil WarFlaten’s project is working to preserve at least a digital surrogate of vanishing archeological sites. This project is centered around a long running course, which students can take multiple times. It is entirely UG driven; all content is student created. Some of the students come in with knowledge of 3D modeling, but most learn in the course of the class. They sometimes spend an entire term creating a cap or cornice and that has to be ok.
MITH, UVA Scholar’s Lab (come one come all), Center for History and New Media (thematic)Angel’s project, WWP,Laura Mandel, 700,000.00+ project TAMU’s Early Modern OCR project “eMOP”Anderson: course basedBagnall: uses facial recognition script to comb through Australia’s national archive.
But no one else is tackling the issues around regional collaboration between LAC and R1
Hardware, software, programmer time, cloud server or computing, other materials