ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

The broad topic of Digitial Humanities is neatly placed as a quick reference in the wiki-database. As a short guide on the subject, main points of focus, sub-topics, and direction are categorized, indicating the audience to be for the general population. The sources range from shcolarly articles to essays conveying the topic across forms of research under it. The contributor of the site is a reseacher for the UCL centre for digital humanities.

Digital humanities has gained popularity this year especially despite recent cuts to the program at certain universities. This distilling of information relies heavily on technology. At a recent NEH symposium, professors discussed projects they were having their students do. These involved heavy research on a subject and performances demonstrating the accumulated knowledge. Students learn through "living out" the roles others played in history. Some try to create visual representations of data. These projects can lead to cross referencing data and an overall deepening of research and information study. The humanities strives to make information widely available and open the scholarly world to a wide range of people.

The openness that museums are striving for will move them forward into the digital age. The sharing of information is something necessary for practices wanting to stay up with the transition our world is making into technology. In health professions, students and professionals rely heavily on conferences and performances to share their research and to learn from the past. The same is necessary and vital to deepening humanities research.

Liberal arts education has a new cutting edge aspect that students from the Tri-College Digital Humanities initiative are exploring. Over a period of about four years they are using technology to adapt liberal arts to a networked world. New media components are being added to classrooms and students are forging ahead onto unchartered territory. Questions and research that has never been done before are being explored by these kids as they use their imaginations and curiosity to aid them in this unique journey.

This article is about on research focusing on "humanities scholars' understandings of the advantages and disadvantages of print versus electronic information resources." It explores how humanities' faculty members use print versus electronic resources and how they feel about electronic resources compared to those in print. The main goal of this study was to assist authors and librarians choose between print and electronic resources to best suit their needs.

I like the definition that Maxwell proposes here. I agree that this is a new "fresh" field and that it is gaining momentum. I think it is fascinating that the field is primarily present in Twitter and think that this social media site is something that can significantly aid digital humanists in their work. Sharing ideas and collaboration is clearly a new way of learning and in my opinion is the most effective way of learning. Creating easy access to information destroys any walls that may keep an individual from pursuing their research of a subject. When any information known is available online, nothing stands in the way of people constantly adding their ideas and input to that data. We all have a different approach to life and different thought processes, and therefore it is very important for us to share information widely and freely and to work in collaboration with one another.

This presentations shows the findings of a fieldwork study that studied "practices, challenges, and directions in contemporary digital humanities scholarship." The study was part of two projects by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Oxford Internet Institute. These two institutions collaborated to focus on developers and users of digital resources for humanities research.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum goes into detail about what digital humanites, and how the humanties can be affectively used in the English department. Kirschenbaum gives ideas on how open acces can be useful in the classroom. In his article he explores the different types of free accessible websites that were used in an English clasroom while students were reading Shakespeare to Second life. Students were able to view the entire thirty-two copy extant quarto copies of Hamlet online. This free accesability allowed students to be quized on the material and to get a better understanding of what they were reading. Kirschenbaum believes that the notion of free accesability will help expand the knowledge of English beyond the classroom.

Unlike the definitional experience with Wikipedia, we are given a hands-on approach with technology influencing the humanities for a specific issue. The article describes the relationship of technology incorperated to make hindered people more accesible with the general activity of reading and the role Digital Humanities plays in intrepurting this interaction. This is a more specialized and focus area for the study but the approach is more practical than theorized.

Mark Anthony Neal talks with Howard Rambsy II and Jessica Marie Johnson about the state of black studies and digital humanities. The professionals discuss the different ways digital humanities can help expand and make black studies more accessible, and how the digital humanities can strengthen the study of race and black studies.

Hyperstudio is a blog written by Digital Humanist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The latest post on the home page seems to be an invite/ad for the Visual Interpretations Conference that was held over two years ago. The purpose of the conference to provide a venue for experts in art and design to collaborate with digital humanist with the goal of the two become dependent on the other. This visualizations should allow for a different view and possibly promote questions and thoughts that were not previously discussed.

This article discusses digital humanities through the works of Todd Carter and his Tagasauris data-curation platform. This program allows people to tag their pictures and other forms of media by the use of crowdsourcing and digital intelligence. He divides Tagasauris into three categories: Findability, Linkability, and Discoverability. With his creation, people such as Valerie Matteau have been able to digitize an art collection, which reveals eighty years of american history such as Correta Scott King's funeral.

This site is designed to organize the writings and events that are done by Alan Liu. Alan Liu is an English Professor at the University of California is Santa Barbara. His new media projects have been centered around digital humanities and the progress that it is making in technology. Other projects have focused on the cultural implications of humanities computing and our society as an information technology society. Also, Alan Liu is the founder on the UC New Media Directory that handles text encoding and human computer technology.

With a book about Academia and its issues being faced today, Kathleen Fitzpatrick (director of Scholarly Communications for MLA) brings to question the adaptation education has to take in order to thrive including that of technology. Her blog orientated around her book gives specific to general Digital Humanities example in a theoretical aspect.

This is an interactive question and answer website by the Association for Computers and the Humanities. The question this link leads to is more of a request by Inna Kizhner, a member of this website, for help with DH projects with strong visual/non-linear components. This website shows that in the field of Digital Humanities, many people reach out to each other and collaborate.

In Making the Digital Humanities More Open, MITH will work with BrailleSC to undertake its second stage of development by designing and deploying a WordPress‐based accessibility tool that will create braille content for end-users who are blind or low vision.

The Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture has received funding as part of the Academic Masters Program. There are three goals presented in the mission statement: 1) To global affect the digital world through multiple content areas 2) Having it easily accessible 3) To utilize TAMU's resources to the best of their capabilities.

Kirstyn Leuner reveals further information about a new Digital Humanities collaboration titled "The 18th-Century Common," the purpose of which is to "provide a medium for eighteenth-century scholars to communicate with an eager public non-academic readership." This projects website's main focus as of the opening is to provide scholarly essays on the arts and science in the 18th century, as well as a blog section for professors to share essays on these topics. The project's creators hope to gain contributions from scholars on the 18th century who would normally publish in journals, books, and other print media to add to their online database. This contributions are also open to students as well, and the author provides a link to gain more information on submitting work to the project.

This link links to Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal's live webcast show website where he discusses black studies in relationship to the digital humanities along with other experts in the field. The live show encourages interaction by use of the twitter hashtag #leftofblack to contribute to the conversations going on throughout the webcast.

This article contains information on Mark Anthony Neal's 3rd season of Left of Black, which premiered on September 17th, 2012. Within the article, the author discusses the importance of connection Black Studies with the Digital Humanities movement because the two cannot be separated from each other in this digital age. Much of the focus is on the use of twitter and Blackness within this social media site.