News: The Promise of Digital Humanities - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views
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Amid financial crises, humanities departments at many public universities have been razed. But even amid cuts, there has been a surge in interest in the digital humanities -- a branch of scholarship that takes the computational rigor that has long undergirded the sciences and applies it the study of history, language, and culture.
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The NEH held a symposium on Tuesday for 60 recipients of its 2011 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants, most of whom were given between $25,000 and $50,000. They were allowed two minutes each to describe their projects.
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“While we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily moving into, and even colonizing, the fields that were supposedly displacing them,”
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One recurring theme in the presentations was the need for “linked open data” — types of research data that are tagged and stored in such a way that they can integrate with other research.
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If one researcher had architectural data about New York City, and another had demographic data about the city, and each were able to cross-reference the other’s data with her own, it would deepen the context and understanding for both.
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“Linked open data is a very technical infrastructure, but the result of that is information that’s shared widely for free. A lot of scholarly data over the last hundred years or so is locked up in expensive journals that the public could never afford to subscribe to.