ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

This article comments on common ideas found in many definitions of digital humanities. The author uses the collaborative aspects of digital humanities to draw connections to a broader description of what he calls the open humanities. This new distinction includes the "aspects of the humanities aimed at democratizing production and consumption of humanities research," but excludes the purely digital elements of the digital humanities, such as code, markup, and hardware.

This article provides a brief description and thematic discussion of THATCamp, a gathering of digital humanists of diverse backgrounds and varying positions on the technical spectra. The author first discusses the ability of collaboration to crush division, specifically in the case of relieved tension between faculty and librarians. She then goes on to discuss the forward-looking nature of THATCamp, noting that action is part of the digital humanities ethos. Finally, she praises the unconference model adopted by THATCamp, encouraging creativity and collaboration.

This article is an announcement of, and response to statements issued by the AHA on two separate occasions. The author discusses the stagnant nature of attempts to deal with open access with an economic regard to academic journals. He supports a consortium model, and calls for general support for fledgling open access journals from the AHA.

This website is, as its title suggests, a directory of open access journals. These journals are free, full text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals that cover a wide range of subjects. It features search fields for both journals and articles, with the ability to search by title, ISSN, author, keywords, and abstract.

This article discusses the economic nature of publishing from the viewpoint of an author and editor of the works of others. The author explains the legitimacy of publishing companies' practices in the past, but calls into question those of modern for-profit publishers. He rejects the current model, in which his readers would pay more for a day's use of his article than for either of his books, and supports a billable-hours system like that of lawyers or psychiatrists.

This article discusses the extensive nature of scholarly publishing. He explains the industry in terms of a social contract between the supply side, publication, and the demand side, the consumers. The supply side of this contract has enjoyed large growth recently, with the continued growth of digital outlets, while the demand side has remained stationary, maintaining its view of the book as the definitive form of publication. In conclusion, the author argues that curation will solve this problem, and become more important that publication once publication ceases to be limited.

This article expands on the subjects discussed in Dan Cohen's earlier article on The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing. He breaks the supply and demand model, introduced in the previous article, into four influential categories that need focus to better both sides. He argues for impartiality when approaching a text, passion for the subject, shame for the lack of sharing compared to other fields, and the shift from narcissistic desires for compensation to a desire for communal knowledge.

This article discusses Microsoft's departure, for lack of potential business, from the digitization of books. He argues that Google's vast lead in this area will allow them to continue to dominate it with its competitors failing to find sufficient outside funding. The article concludes hoping for a joint funding by leading institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

This site offers information on how to curate data, in regards to the humanities. Data curation is a new problem for the humanities as both data and analytical practices become increasingly digital. This site is directed towards teaching students about the field of data curation and how the multiple resources on this site will offer assistance with data curation challenges.

This article presents an examination of how digital humanities is currently conceived and described, and examines the discursive shift from humanities computing to digital humanities.

Kevin Colton explains how the use of simulation can increase the fundamental learning of history. By using charts, maps, diagrams, and photos, students can get a different and more effective learning experience. He also goes on to explain the basics of how he created the simulation and gives images to give you an idea of what the maps might look like and a demo simulation video.

This article highlights the approach and concept of Digital Humanities to a wider audeience. This is a unique summary due to the fact that the there is no clear difinition but a general scope of the direction and trend that this study is heading towards in humanities, The key synapsis as a digital humanist is the reliance on other sources for a framing of the defintion.