what are the digital humanities and why should i care

What are the Digital Humanities and Why

Should I Care?Brian R. Gutierrez

Department of English

Instructor in the English Department Teach English 101, 102, and Shakespeare Doctoral Candidate (PhD) and graduate

instructor at the University of Washington

Who am I?

How my teaching and research intersect What are the digital humanities? What does it (or could it) look like at North

Seattle?

Outline of Talk

18th/19th century British literature Dissertation looks at how poets used the

newly forming celebrity apparatus for both self-promotion and to reimagine literary forms, especially poetics

18th century media studies: literature, newspapers and periodicals, and paintings and prints.

Research Interests

Critical pedagogy is an “educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action.”

Teaching (Pedagogical) Interests

Epigraph by Michel Foucault from The Archeology of Knowledge :◦ “Education may well be, as of right, the

instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”

David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University”

First called “humanities computing”: Digital humanities (DH) currently

incorporate both digitized and born-digital materials and combine the methodologies from traditional humanities disciplines and social sciences with tools provided by computing (such as data visualization, information retrieval, data mining, statistics, text mining) and digital publishing.

What Are the Digital Humanities

Collaboration Iterative

development Open-Source DIY Autodidacticism Public Scholarship

and Peer Review Dissemination

Failure as valuable Ad Hoc Transparency *DH Values found at dmdh.org  

Values of DH*

Definitive beginnings: 1946 with Roberto Busa◦ Index Thomisticus

Brief History: Computing in the Humanities

Archive Creation--digital preservation of analog and born-digital materials:

Ex: “Transcribe Bentham” crowdsourcing the transcription of thousands of manuscripts written by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).

*(Omeka---a free, open-source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions)

What Do Digital Humanists Do?

Networked Pedagogy--experiments in multi-campus digital pedagogy (funded by the NEH Office of Humanities)

Ex: “Looking for Whitman,” which uses open-source tools to connect classrooms in multiple institutions, creating a dynamic, social, collaborative learning environment.  

What Do Digital Humanists Do?

Scholarly/Student Communication and Publishing:

Ex: Zotero is an open-source extension to Firefox  and Google Chrome browsers, which enable users to collect manage, cite and share research source.

Ex: The Shakespeare Quarterly conducted an experiment in open peer review for its special issue, 61:3, “Shakespeare and New Media.” (It received coverage in the New York Times.)

What Do Digital Humanists Do?

Text/Data Mining--text analysis tools that can be used to analyze user provided texts.

Ex: TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research)

Ex: Voyant

What Do Digital Humanists Do?

Analysis and Visualization: Ex: Stanford University’s “Republic of Letters”

the project visualizes the “social network” of Enlightenment Writers through analysis of their correspondence.

Ex: HyperCities self defined as “a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.”

What Do Digital Humanists Do?

“Spatial Humanities” where spatial methods, especially geographical information systems (GIS) are being used in humanistic inquiry

What Do Digital Humanists Do?

Project Bamboo: Bamboo Dirt dmdh.org DH Commons dhsi.org ThatCamp DH Pedagogy Twitter (#dh)

DH Resources

The "Position Statement on Multimodal Literacies" approved by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) which holds that "Skills, approaches, and attitudes toward media literacy, visual and aural rhetorics, and critical literacy should be taught in English/language arts classrooms"

Position Statements

“Outcomes statement for First-Year Composition" adopted by the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA), students should understand and exploit the differences in rhetorical strategies and in the affordances available for both print and electronic composing processes and text.

Position Statements

Essential Learning Outcomes North Seattle Community College serves a diverse student

population with a wide variety of educational backgrounds and goals. As a learning community, we foster and promote the following outcomes:

Knowledge Facts, theories, perspectives and methodologies within and

across disciplines Intellectual & Practical Skills, including critical thinking and problem solving communication and self-expression quantitative reasoning information literacy technological proficiency collaboration: group and team work

North’s Mission

Stanford to offer new undergraduate majors integrating humanities, computer science

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/march/facsen-joint-majors-030614.html

Blended Majors

Modern Language Association has recently added criteria for evaluating tenure for professors who pursue DH projects

MLA

We are a community of “makers” Coordinated Studies Requirement Offers new ways to think about humanities Provides students with access to another

academic (and professional) discourse*◦ (*Michel Foucault’s quote on education)

DH at Community Colleges

Are you a DH’er already?

DH at Community Colleges

Thank You!!!!!!