ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

Jouranlist Steve Kolowich reveals how digital humanities can help education, especially through undergraduate work. He explains that most undergraduate students are unaware of how to use digital tools in their research and the best way to confront this issue is to teach them to work with metadata and design databases. Teaching digital humanities is a fundamental shift as well, because grading items such as crowdsourcing projects is quite different to grading a multiple question exam. Like many other professors in the digital humanities field, Professor Laura McGrane believes if the job is done right, students will be able to conquer research in a more knowledgeable way.

This article explains how Google Books is teaming with digital humanities scholars to spread digital sharing for public use. The company announced they will bankroll 12 university based research projects. Google has been scanning books since 2004, accumulating to over 12 million books. One of the projects Google is supporting is called "Reframing the Victorians," which plans to find out if the Victorian era had an optimistic population by crowdsourcing materials. Google has decided to use one million to support digital humanities in the next two years.

This blog article by Stanley Fish discusses how digital humanities is seen by others in positive and negative ways. Some people find that digital humanities is a "monstrous terrain" because it destroys traditional humanities and that not all authorship of online sources are accurate. On the other hand, digital humanities allows students to use a variety of resources with conducting research. Stanley explains one of the challenges in digital humanities is to spread the awareness of such a field.

This article explains how there has been a discussion about how to evaluate the work of digital humanities and how they are going to do so. First, they will build a bibliography of existing statements and institutional policies in the Digital Humanities Zotero Group Library. Group membership is open and we encourage DHNow readers to add materials and citations to the library. Second, they will solicit new writing on critical assessment for the full breadth of DH scholarship.