MAKING SENSE OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES - A CONVERSATION STARTER:

Savvy Researcher SeriesPresented by Ingrid Thomson, UCT Libraries

Outline

• Introduction• Brief history• Tools for Digital Humanities• Examples of Digital Humanities• DH Organisations/Conferences/Workshops• Digital Humanities @ UCT

What is this thing called Digital Humanities or DH?

• Umbrella term • online preservation and digital mapping to data mining

and use of GIS technologies • 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

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

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)

More definitions

The humanities are the humanities. Technology is merely a tool (albeit a powerful one), not a defining factor of a discipline. You use it or you don't. The Digital Humanities do not exist. - Ethan Gruber American Numismatic Society

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

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

Brief History

• Image: 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• Image: http://www.sas-sas.it/Alice/images/Thomis6.jpg

Corpus Thomisticum

Timeline of DH Developments• 1949 – 170 Computer Centres

• 1973 – 1992 Scholarly societies and journalsStandards + Metadata(Text Coding Initiative –TEI)

• 1992 – 2004 Library digitization and digital humanities centres

• 2005 - onwards Mainstreamed

Image: http://atomictoasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Word-Proc-1.jpg

Library Digitization and Digital Humanities Centres

Some thoughts ...Different types of DHers

• Research DH impact on Humanities• How to embed technology into pedagogy• Project managers bringing together experts in

various fields• Study large collections of texts, numeric data

etc• Visualising traditional humanities data using

new data visualisation techniques• Digital content creation

• 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

Digital Humanities Tools

• Comprehensive list at Bamboo DiRT

http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/

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

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

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

Text analysis

• Studying texts with computers and software to uncover new patterns, overlooked connections and deeper meaning

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/

Digital Exhibits

• Digitising of collections

Charles Darwin’s Library

Mapping the Republic of Letters

First World War Poetry Digital Archive

Shoah Visual Archives

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

Old Bailey Proceedings

Project coming out of Old Bailey Proceedings

Key Questions coming out of that project ....

• How can new digital methodologies enhance understandings of existing electronic datasets and the construction of knowledge?

• What were the long and short term impacts of incarceration or convict transportation on the lives of offenders, and their families, and offspring?

• What are the implications of online digital research on ethics, public history, and 'impact'?

DH Centres and Organisations- a handy list

http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/

Digital Humanities @ UCT

But wait....

SNEAK PREVIEW OF WHAT’S COMING SOONISH

HUMANITEC

Perhaps something like this in UCT’s future????

• Adam Crymble describes his Digital Humanities Thesis in two minutes

“Big Data, Old History “

http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/#047

Recommended Reading ....

Useful Reads + Links • ACRL Digital Humanities Interest Group http://connect.ala.org/node/158885

• Task Force on Librarians’ Competencies in Support of E-Research and Scholarly Communication https://www.coar-repositories.org/activities/support-and-training/task-force-competencies/

• 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/

• Alexander,Laurie , Case, Beau David , Downing, Karen E, Gomis, Melissa and Maslowski, Eric: Librarians and Scholars: Partners in Digital Humanities. Educause Review Online, June 2, 2014. http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/librarians-and-scholars-partners-digital-humanities

• 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/

BOOKSGold, Matthew: Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2012.Bryson, Tim: Digital Humanities. Washington, DC : Association of Research Libraries, c2011.

LIBGUIDES• Boston College Libguide to Digital Humanities http://libguides.bc.edu/c.php?g=44359&p=280873• University of Ottawa Libraries: Digital Humanities: Research guide to provide information about the growing field of study called Digital Humanities http://

uottawa.ca.libguides.com/digitalhumanities-en

Useful Reads + Links

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

TOOLS TO EXPLORE• Bamboo Dirt http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/• Voyant http://www.voyant-tools.org• Tapor http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal • Palladio http://palladio.designhumanities.org

ORGANISATIONS• Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations http://adho.org/• That Camps http://thatcamp.org/