ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

This article highlights the approach and concept of Digital Humanities to a wider audeience. This is a unique summary due to the fact that the there is no clear difinition but a general scope of the direction and trend that this study is heading towards in humanities, The key synapsis as a digital humanist is the reliance on other sources for a framing of the defintion.

It is in this article that the authors Shao Jufang and Shew Huiyan try to find out the outflow of excellent papers and then take measures to stem this flow. They illuminate the academic reward structure in place in China and its most interesting details. While Shao and Shen do not report the salary ranges of Chinese scientists they do describe how the payments work as incentives for publishing. The Shao and Shen article helps Phil Davis the author of Does the Chinese model make sense build his counter argument. This is why this article can also be referenced throughout Davis article.

This site explains the components of cloud computing and the scale of the data centers where all of the information is stored. This article also has videos attached to give you a video tour of the Microsoft Datacenter. The scale of these datacenters is ridiculously large. Only a few companies are setting up these centers and allowing people to see them.

Kevin Colton explains how the use of simulation can increase the fundamental learning of history. By using charts, maps, diagrams, and photos, students can get a different and more effective learning experience. He also goes on to explain the basics of how he created the simulation and gives images to give you an idea of what the maps might look like and a demo simulation video.

This article explains how, with the use of digital humanities and simulations, historians will be able to use animation archives to teach history to students. Like a lot of students, both young and old, we are visual learners. By the use of maps and charts and pictures, one can better understand what is being taught, in this instance it will be history. The picture shown here is an example of what students will use.

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.

This article explains the use of curating early modern texts and how the process of doing so has advanced over the past few years. This new style of curating and archiving is organized to make the digital archive design and the use of the sites much more easy to navigate and explore for certain content. The author of this article believes that archiving and open access is a public service but not all works need to be available.

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 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 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.

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 short article focuses on how visualizing data can be advantageous for the public and what kind of softwares can be used to create such projects. For instance, software "Tabeleau Public" is a desktop application that can post graphs, maps, and table sinto the web. "Flare" is a software relying on Flash and can create interactive data shared with other users. This article basically reveals the many ways to visualize data other than through the use of Microsoft Excel.

Journalist Emily Badger reports of the Map and Geographic Information Center, a project collaborated between Trinity College and University of Connecticut Libraries exploring the geographic changes Conneticut. Images have been collected and stitched together that allows users to see the drastic changes to the U.S.'s geography, such as the Interstate Highway System before and after World War II. These Aerial images they share reveal surprising facets of urbanization.

In this article Kevin Fitchard confronts the negative aspects in collaborating recipes online and explains the specific problems in applications made for recipe sharing. For instance, a recipe library and cooking forum called KeepRecipes is easily accessible when a person wants to share a recipe, but has a weak scraping function. Moreover, other applications such as MacGourmet and Paprika require users to pay instead of allowing free access. Fitchard also argues that there are too many recipe databases competing with each other, which at the end, is quite similar to having too many cookbooks in one bookshelf. For Fitchard, recipe sharing online needs many improvements.

In her blog Erin Bell discusses a digital humanities project called the Cuyahoga County Archives, a collection that focuses on sharing the history of Cuyahoga County. It mainly explores the transportation and infrastructure of Cuyahoga county, but also contains police report documents dealing with the Kent State Shootings in 1970. Undergraduate interns collaborated together to scan and search for these items to share, all for free access.

This website is for the American Heritage Vegetable project, a digital humanities program dedicated to documenting the cultivation practices and cookery of vegetables in the American kitchen. It also shares what kind of vegetables are in the market during different time periods. The information is collected from sources such as agricultural journals, gardening encyclopedias, and even horticultural manuals. With the American Heritage Vegetables project people can learn how we eat, what we eat, and the way American cuisine has changed throughout history.

In China scientist are rewarded with cash for publishing an article in a prestigious general. The more prestigious the journal, the larger the sum. So because of the limited international circulation of Chinese journals, there is a real push to have one's work appear in an international index, such as the science citation index, Engineering index, or the index to scientific & technical proceedings. The author of this article Does the Chinese Model Make Sense, Phil Davis, questions wither or not this model is authentic. He believes that the need for money will eventually exceed the need to produce valid, and original work. Davis is able to justify is argument by mentioning previous works that were written by the chinese that had an extreme amount of plagerism and unoriginal work. From this evidence he was able to persuade readers that the Chinese Model did not make sense nor did it have any valid points. His commentary was a critque of the article The outflow of academic papers from China: Why it happening and can it be stemmed, written by Shao Jufang and Shen Huiyun.

We all have had classes were there is a grade distrubtion and although there maybe a huge distrubtion of A's ultimately we can not determine who has actually retained the information. The article Show Me Your Badge written by Kevin Carey helps us better answer this question. In this article Carey introduces us to this idea of digital badging. Digital badging are portals that leads to a large amount of information about what the bearers know and can do. This new invention has helped to communicate detail information about college graduates.

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 article describes the end to Microsoft's Live Seach Team. This team has indexed the contents of 750,000 books and 80 million scholarly journals. The project scanned books and put them into a database that allowed the contents to come up in a diiferent area online when the content was being searched for. This effort comes as a dissappointment due to its ending of the project.