ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

This is an interview with Andrew Stauffer, the director of the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship at the University of Virginia, which is one of the most important projects in the Digital Humanities field. Through this project, he is exploring how books where written in the past by looking at the human interaction taking place on the pages. That is, he examines messages recorded through annotations by both readers and authors. He is also currently working on examining the effect that Google Books is having on libraries and what information is being lost as we move from analog to digital. Despite the push towards the digital age, Stauffer believes that we will still be reading physical books for many more years.

This is the main page of UK-based Digital Humanities project DIGHUMLAB. This project's purpose is to "contribute to skills development, internationalisation and innovation through a national focus on Digital Humanities in research, education and knowledge transfer." In other words, it is a project designed to further the importance of research in the Digital Humanities field through the development of a variety of new methods for use in the Digital Humanities.

DH now is a PressForward Publication that according to their mission statment "showcases the scholarship and news of interest to the digital humanities community, through a process of aggregation, discovery, curation, and review." This is a great website to keep up with news and to submit work to to keep up with the fast paced world of digital humanities.

This article written by Rebecca Frost Davis discusses the use of crowdsourcing in order to create a stronger integration with digital humanities and undergraduate curriculum. Having students work on large scale collaborations allows for professors and scholars teach them knowledge in a more creative way. While crowdsource projects may not cause students to take on professional work in the digital humanities field, it will nonetheless cause them to be more aware of how to use digital humanities in their real lives. Frost confronts the problems of such projects, such as the issue of what kind of project best fits into each class and the time constraints encountered. Moreover, whether the students each have access to computers inside and outside of class. With matters such as these properly organized, Frost encourages crowdsourcing projects for undergraduate students.

AHDO, or the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization offers this website to "promote and support digital research and teaching across all arts and humanities disciplines, acting as a community-based advisory force, and supporting excellence in research, publication, collaboration and training." The website organizes news and current events in the field of digital humanities, making it very user friendly and a valuable source for those wishing to keep up to date. There are also sections on the website for publications, other resources, conferences, awards, committees, and how to join ADHO.

The article explores the visions and expectations associated with the digital humanities. The author also explains how the digital humanities often becomes a laboratory as well as a means for thinkining about the state and the future of the humanities. It has been argued that this forward sentiment comes from both inside and outside the field of the humanities. This idea creates an important leason for the attraction. The author outlines a visionary slope for the digital humanities and he also offers a personal visionary statement at the end of the article to make it more serious.

This link will take you to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation official website. This site then presents an invitation and overview of the Digital Humanities Summit that took place in Lincoln from April 19-20, 2012 hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. These two hosts invited campus representatives including librarians, deans, and directors of digital humanities. It is very important for people in the Digital Humanities field to meet and collaborate with each other on projects. This fosters the growth of this newer discipline.

This blog addresses the challenges with scholarly research that are faced when discussing 18th and 19th British women writers. One challenge is that how is it decided what information is being included in the archive and how accurate is it. Not all digital archives have equal access; this gives a disadvantage for people's research because they do not have access to all the information they need. She answers how to make digital humanities more accurate and how it can be used in a classroom through many different professors prospectives.

This brief presentation on the Fifth Annual Graduate Student Conference on World History gives an example of some of the things the field of History is looking to track and how the field is expecting to change. The conference is requesting papers on the topics of cultural mobility, political movements, and networks utilized for the transmission of ideas. More of interest to digital humanists though is the category of Mapping Movements, with an explicit focus on the new technologies and digital humanist methods being developed that can be utilized to assist this process.

This brief news article from 2011 highlights an agreement between the Digital Public Libraries of America and Europeana to code their systems in such a way as to be interoperable and similar to each other. This change allows the two databases to be readily accessed and aggregated by the user, to "have access to the combined riches... at a single click." One of the major projects arising from this collaboration was a virtual exhibition about the migration of Europeans to America.

This short article for the 2012 American Studies Association Annual Meeting represents a call for digital humanists to collaborate and propose ways in which American Studies and Digital Humanities can be transformed to be better address concerns such a marginalization. Provided proof that this is possible, the article highlights such "digital collectives and social movements" such as Crunk Feminist Collective, "shit [people] say" and artists offering a "productive [exploration] of digital productions and methods." The article also highlights in particular the #transformDH movement, and provides links to some of the articles and websites utilized by the group.

In this 2011 article, Moya Z. Bailey analyzes the racial and gender makeup of the digital humanities, the navigation of marginalized groups within society, and their interactions with academia. Problems, such as the use of ableist language and the assumption that a few token minorities will eradicate marginalization, are addressed within the article. Bailey also highlights some of the ways in which Digital Humanities are being used to transform the humanities, such as Crunk Feminist Collective communicating with groups that the collective "felt accountable to outside academia."

Alex Wright introduces the idea of the radiated library. This system would allows acess to all the world's communication systems at one time, similar to the internet, but on a macro-scale. Books, magazines, films, music, etc. would all be readily acessible simultaneously.

This article by Elexis Lothian is partly a response to another article, "Does DH Really Need to be Transformed?" by Roger Whitson. The article argues that although people in the field may have had good experiences with regards to acceptance, that there is still room for growth in areas such as queer studies, critical race studies, feminist studies, etc. The article also illuminates a little on the process behind choosing the tag #transformDH as well as some of the groups, such as HASTAC, which have collaborated to support the project.

This article by Roger Whitson is a response to calls from groups such as #transformDH to work harder to incorporate marginalized groups. The core of the argument being made is that the Digital Humanities are, by their nature, collaborative and that this will be the means by which the digital humanities is opened fully to marginalized groups. The argument is not that it doesn't need to happen, but that the systems are already in place which will bring it about.

This article represents the popularization of the #transformDH movement following ASA 2011. The article highlights the launching of the #transformDH Tumblr, as well as containing a section at the end with a collection of articles written by digital humanists related to the concerns of the #transformDH movement. The remainder of the article discusses the sessions the article writer personally participated in, as well as the people met related to the #transformDH movement.

Although not always on topic, the #transformDH tumblr contains a large archive of numerous works within the field of digital humanities related to race and gender. Projects highlighted by the Tumblr include "Swag Diplomacy," a mapping project tracking "200 African American autobiographers who wrote international travel memoirs," and "BlackGirlsCode," a project working "to meet the needs of young women of color who are underrepresented in the... field of technology." The archive also occasionally reblogs and communicates with other tumblrs.

In this article, William Pannapacker discusses his personal "come to DH moment," his interactions with the field, his concerns about Digital Humanities, and some of the projects appearing that are interesting and address his concerns. One major project highlighted by Pannapacker is the DH Commons project, described "as the match.com for digital humanists." The article ends with a call for uninvolved scholars at institutions, particularly those that do not have DH centers, to utilize these various projects to collaborate and join the digital humanities.

Literary Cartography attempts to use literary geography to incorporate real place instead of just symbolic space. This cite conveys the importance of seeing the goegraphy in a literary text and the way it shapes our perceptions and culture.

The Sloan Foundation focuses its grants in science, technology, and economic institutions that they believe will improve American quality of life. Many of the open-access journals and projects that the Sloan foundation provides grants for fall under the initiatives for Information Technology and the Dissemination of Knowledge. The initiative look for projects that expand public access to research journals, archives, and books online.