ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

In his blog, Dan Cohen decided to revisit a topic that was cover in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This data-mining related article discusses the issues with educational testing and growing technology in the humanities field. Devices that can browse an entire database of knowledge pin pointing specific facts. This device is then compared to the relationship between the calculator and math to this device and history. Just as the calculator has made memorizing certain mathematical principles pointless in testing, this device is said to make multiple choice test irrelevant for history. Similarly, cell phones, pdas, and tablets have been able to fill this gap already.

This article discusses and provides a few tips for preserving today's digital records for generations to come. This seemingly easy task has provided some difficulties to the September 11 Digital Archive Project. The main goal of this joint project is to collect and preserve everything from photos to voicemails that relate to the events of September 11. Dan Cohen provides four main points that may be able to solve some of this issues in this preservation along with tips on how to better this process.

Adrianne Wadewitz is featured as a guest writer in this article. She shares with us details about her position as a Digital Humanities postdoc at Occidental College. The freedom provided by her position seems to be her favorite aspect of her job. Wadewitz includes in this article a four point list of her planned tasks and activities for October 1st. This includes working on an article discussing teaching with Wikipedia.

In this article, Susan Garfinkel compares the changes and shifts in American Studies to those in Digital Humanities. As a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania, Garfinkel was able to gain a first hand account of how an ever changing diverse program can evaporate. The changes then witnessed in American Studies can now be seen in Digital Humanities. Both concentrations are growing and hopefully by incorporating each with the other they will continue.

According to the article, DH Answers represents a chance for digital humanists to communicate with fellow digital humanists through a free and community driven Q&A board. Anyone may post and answer freely, and community members are encouraged to tag their posts so as to facilitate the creation of new categories. Questions range from improving the site itself to introducing undergraduate students to the digital humanities. Forums users may also make requests for information, such as "a list of all graduate programs that study DH."

Although alt-ac is not exclusive digital humanities, or even exclusively humanities, the report on the #alt-ac panel for the Digital Humanities 2011 highlights some of the issues and questions relevant to the DH field. Some of the problems are personal in nature, such as the professional differences between#alt-ac and tenure, and others are more institutional, such as the issues with "credential creep." Although the article does not necessarily provide answers, it highlights many of the concerns alt-ac professionals have in pursuing their career.

Bethany Nowviskie's article proposes an overhaul of modern graduate studies by replacing aging practices and methods of education with more modern and technology appropriate forms of education. One of Nowviskie's key points of criticism it that many of these more traditional forms of graduate education are producing humanities PhDs who do not fully understand how modern universities work and are impacted by the outside world. Nowviskie's main proposal for beginning to replace these aging methods is through the cooperation of funding agencies and respected humanities organizations, ones with a good history of inter-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration, to utilize grants to reshape graduate studies.

This article seeks to address the problem of digital humanities being code heavy by nature, but being populated a field not traditionally associated with programming. It introduces two tutorials intended to help new people break into the field of programming: Hackety Hack and "The Rubyist Historian." Hackety Hack is a free program containing a series of interactive lessons for learning to code in the Ruby language, and "The Rubyist Historian" is a blog by graduate student Jason Heppler intended to be an "accessible introduction to Ruby."

This article about the 2011 Digital Humanities meeting highlights three big project announcements from that meeting. The first of these was a then new grant program: Digital Humanities Implementation Grants, a follow up to the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program. The second of these was a collection of alternative academic careers for humanities scholars titled #alt-academy. The last of these was the introduction of Press Forward, an initiative aiming to fuse traditional scholarly review with open-web filters.

This brief article highlights one of the preconvention workshops that was available for MLA 2012. This workshop was hosted by DHCommons, a digital humanist project intended to facilitate the collaboration of either people in the field of digital humanities or people looking to break into the field. The article contains the full announcement for the workshop, highlighting its purpose, its guests, and those sponsoring the project. Including Texas A&M.

The core purpose of this article is the promotion of the digital humanities in academia by informing digital humanists how they might be able to better communicate the value of digital humanities. The four main points are: educate the general audience about the subject matter, the need for reviewers to understand the diverse nature of the field, documentating ones role in collaborative projects for the sake of promotion, and explaining the changing nature of peer review in the field. It also briefly addresses the need for institutions to accept new forms of media.

This brief article highlights a major change in the Digital Humanities that occurred in 2012, an MLA release containing standardized guidelines for evaluating work in the Digital Humanities. Those who stand the most to gain from this release are the DH professors themselves, as the guidelines lay some basic ground rules for evaluating this material for the purposes of promotion or gaining tenure. Although the guidelines are non-enforceable, being that they are from the MLA they are likely to be given some weight.

This is the main page of O'Reilly's website. He is a member of PeerJ's board and has contributed to many open access journals. His focus within DH seems to be the technical aspects, but he his a huge advocator for open access. There are many videos on this page of interviews he has give, videos of his lectures, articles written about him, and articles he has written. His main page also spot lights workshops, conferences, and articles concerning the future of open access, technology, ethical uses of technology, and technological business philosophy. O'Reilly is an extremely active member in the technological world, and is also instrumental in developing the tone for open access.

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.

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.

Sally Chambers, a librarian, put together this powerpoint presentation to talk about digital humanities and research infrastructure in the context of libraries. She begins by defining humanities, digital humanities, infrastructure, and research infrastructure. Along the way, she presents several useful and informational websites for those interested in learning more about the digital humanities. She also specifically talks about DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and its establishment as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium. As the presentation goes on, she shares its role with libraries as well as academics.

This post gives a brief overview of the various topics and articles presented in the third issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities. The focus for this third issue is more on the process of the transition from analog to digital rather than just focusing on the starting points and the end products. Inside, Craig Mod tells how analog to digital is more of a two-way street rather than a one-way street while discussing physical books and ebooks. Matthew Booker shows how digital productions can be used to better understand the past. Three new projects in the digital humanities are also showcased in a special section of the publication.

The NDIIP (National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation) twitter account tweeted a link to a video featuring Kari Kraus giving a speech titled "Phylogenetic Futures: Big Data and Design Fiction" at Big Data & Uncertainty in the Humanities hosted at the University of Kansas. Kraus spoke about the application of digital humanities to phylogenetics, or the study of evolutionary relatedness between various groups of organisms. She presents phylogenetics as a part of the big data segment of digital humanities. Her speech details the applications of phylogenetics in digital humanities through examining cultural materials.

This post presents a link to a new webliography published in C&RL News' October 2012 Issue. This webliography's purpose is to give a brief overview of the history, methods, and uses of Digital Humanities for those newly entering or interested in the field. Gary Price posted the link to infodocket for digital humanities researchers to be able to use to find more resources for themselves to use in their research.

In this brief blog post, Dan Cohen highlights an interesting issue raised by Cliff Lynch at one of the 2007 CNI task force meetings. According to Cohen, Lynch raised the issue of museums holding on to controversial materials and how the digitization of those materials can allow them to be repatriated, either by undermining the arguments museums make or by addressing their concerns. By creating a digital replica, there is no longer a need to withhold artifacts from their originating cultures.