ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

The NEH's Office of Digital Humanities announces 5 institutes that will receive government grants to further their research. Included are the University of Texas at Austin's HiPSTAS, the University of Maryland, College Park's Digital Humanities Data Curation, George Mason University's Another Week | Another Tool - A Digital Humanities Barnraising, Folger Shakespeare Library's Folger Shakespeare Library Summer Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities: "Early Modern Digital Agendas," and Arkansas State University's Humanities Heritage 3D Visualization: Theory and Practice.

This article on the National Endowment for the Humanities website contains information on a project directors meeting for the Digital Humanities department that was open to the public. The meeting took place in Washington, D.C. on September 20th, and it included multiple aspects such as lightning-talks and roundtable discussions with librarians, researchers, and funding organizations.

Although the definition and scope of this humanities studies is expanded or centralized within the blog. This section within the site has many definitions and forming a word cloud would produce a consistant termonolgy used. The highlight of this site is the open access and audience awareness.

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 Dan Cohen blog discusses the weird relationship between the databases purchased by organizations and libraries and how they are utilized in the academic world. Many of these purchases are unwarranted. These buyers are over buying accumulating multiple software programs for more than one 'category". The main problem discussed is that since the buyer is not the user, ignored functional issues arise.

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.

This is another blog in the Dan Cohen series. In this one in particular, Cohen opens calling digital journalism and digital humanities "kindred spirits". He believes that these two areas of concentration would greatly benefit from working together. The areas in which would be the most profitable from partnership are listed and discussed. A few include use of common tools, platforms and infrastructures, and the idea that developers and technologists should be partners.

This webliography provides history and general information on the origin and growth of the field of Digital Humanities, including the Day of DH 2012. It provides many different organizations involved in Digital Humanities, and sorts them according to associations, collaboratories, and funding. There are also links and explanations on tutorials that teach researchers how to go about working in digital humanities, including tutorials on coding. The webliography comes to a close with information on conferences and institutions in the field of DH for researchers to find further information from.

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.

Dan Cohen is a popular blogger in the field of digital humanities. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at the George Mason University. He "broadly" studies the effect that new technology and media has on "all aspects of knowledge." He has received a few awards in this field and seems to be one of the most respected blogger based on this website alone. This blog features numerous pages of writing from Cohen that has been used in this project.

This website is used to "help liberal arts colleges integrate, pedagogy, and technology." Established in 2001, the NITLE is the leading organization for colleges who are wanting to integrate technology into their liberal arts department. The website feature articles to keep researchers up to date in the field. The main headquarters are located at Southwestern University.

This is the official website for the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities. Everything and anything that deals with the partnership of these to disciplines is presented and linked this website. The website features four main sections that include public and digital history, teaching and learning, collaborative projects, and oral history. The website seems to be maintained by the Department of History at Cleveland State University.

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.

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 is an online site for the Center for Digital Research in Humanties at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The main goals of this center is to provide tools for research in the field (reference sources), compose creative digital content, and pushing the use of international standards. The center enjoys working with Digital Humanist to ease their projects by providing a venue for discussing, information, and tools. A lists of activities on the site include scanning, round tables, software, and assistance.

Professor Katherine Rowe teaches a Shakespeare class online and discusses with us the benefits of being able to digitize this course. She says that she has previously taught this exact same course in a lecture hall as well as a theater but believes that it was less effective. Students participate in assignments that allow them to recreate popular Shakespearean scenes digitally for deeper understanding. This article also highlights other projects assigned by various other professors. This includes a digital visualization of the University of Virginia's first library collection and editing of the transcribed online versions of Household Words and All the Year Round.

This 2010 article provides some insight into the grant proposal process for the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants, provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. George Williams describes the process of grant proposals as "lightning rounds" in which the project director is allowed only two minutes and three slides for their presentation. 46 projects were presented, and Williams provides a rough categorization for the projects, such as mapping or publishing projects, and provides a list of examples for each category.

This Digital Memory Box is just what it appears to be. An archive filled with electronic multimedia and digital records of the students who participated in the Uprisings of 1976 in South Africa. The purpose is to preserve to records of the Black townships and promote positivity surrounding the incident. Former students are allowed to return and tell their first hand story of the events that took place including pictures.

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute represents an opportunity for various people involved in the digital humanities to take week long courses covering various kinds of topics, broken into three rough categories: introductory, intermediate, advanced. Referred to as a "grown up nerd camp," the DHSI represents an opportunity for scholars to expand their toolset and learn more about the Digital Humanities. When the article was posted, DHSI has been running for ten years, and continues to run today.

This video talks to students who have been invited to participate in the only Digital Humanities conference for and by undergraduate researchers. Short segments follow students who discuss the meaning of digital humanities, why there are passionate about the field, and different projects they are involved in. For example, a student expresses the difference in publishing for an audience who will be online and the responsibility of the researcher to approach the project in the best way to present it to a larger audience. Collaboration among researchers in the field is noted to be one of the most important aspects in Digital Humanities.