ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

BMJ is an open online, open access general medical journal, dedicated to publishing medical research from all disciplines and the therapeutic areas. The journal publishes a wide variety of different types of studies, from protocols, to phase 1 trail, to meta-analyses, including small or potentially low impact studies. The publishing procedures are fully open peer review and continuous publication which allows research to published online as soon as the article is ready. BMJ main goal is to promote transperency in the publication process by publishing reviewer reports and previous versions of manuscripts as pre-publication histories.

The Howard Hughes medical institute, Max Plank Soceity, and the welcome Trust are interested in opening a top-tier open access journal for biomedical and life science research. However, the journal lacks a name, an editor-and-chief, and even a business model. Although this is the case, the journal is intended to attract the very best reseach and make contributions that will extend the boundaries of scientific knowledge. This process is very similar to the BMJ Open which allows unpublished work to be posted on an open access website.

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.

This program is designed to fund the implementation of innovative digital-humanities projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and demonstrated their value to the field. These projects help us better understand the central problems in the humanities, and they also raise new questions in the humanities which help develop new digital applications and approaches for the use in the humanities. The digital humanities Implementation Grants programs seeks to identify projects that have successfully completed their startup phase and are well positioned to have a major impact. These grants involve, Implementation of computationally bases methods or techniques for humanities research; implantation of new digital tools for use in humanities research; implementation of new digital tools for use in humanities research, public programming, or educational settings; efforts to ensure the completion and long-term sustainability of existing digital resources; studies that examine the philosophical or practical implications of the use of emerging technologies in specific fields or disciplines of the humanties, or in interdisciplinary collaborations involving several fields or disciplines; or implementation of new digital modes of scholarly communication that facilitate peer review, collaboration, or the dissemination of humanities scholarship for various audiences.

In this article Lee Bessette discusses the challenges that teachers find in digital Humanities. He believes, that most contingent faculty already feel, to a certain extaint, like super-humanists, expected to be able to teach just about any sub-area of their field at the drop pf a hat. Adding DH to the overlaod can become a burdern to those teachers who are not on tenure and can not afford to learn DH because of time, research, and funding.

WILEY Open Access is an online database used to archive journals. This open access library offers peer reviewed journals that easy to use for researchers. Authors are allowed to published these journals to this site and reviewed by an editorial board that determines if the work will be an asset to this open access library. There are journals on various topics but after searching the site, I have noticed that the most popular journals are the ones that concern science and medicine.

Beginning with the explanation of how algorithms have changed technology in many different aspects, this article discusses how Digital Humanities came to be. Also, the "resistance" of literature to data can affect the use of algorithims and why it is seemingly not always accurate. The article also talks about the start of turning literature into data and why the digitization of books is going to be important. The idea of having a completely accessable, professionally reviewed, open access library is any scholars dream. The unlimited access to any written work would change the way people research. Although there are still some changes that need to be done with the algorithims, digital humanities is a huge developmental project.

With the advancement of Digital Humanities and the ability to digitize text, this article talks about Brewster Kahle, the creator of Internet Archive and the home to thousands of books, journals, media, etc. Claiming to be a digital librarian, Internet Archive is an online database, much like Wayback Machine, where users can access out-of-print and out-of-copyrighted works. Kahle believes it is important to digitize these texts because one day they may not be available to the public anymore.

This news article posted by Newsroom America outlines the quiet victory for librarians that occurred pertaining to copyright laws. This event has been described as a major victory for the digital humanities. Earlier in October 2012, a federal court ruled against the Authors Guild in favor of the HathiTrust, a massive digital archive of library materials converted from print that is co-owned and managed by a partnership of more than 60 academic institutions, including the University of Illinois. Publishers Weekly claimed this ruling as a "landmark in copyright" law.

This article introduces the DIGHUMLAB in Denmark. This laboratory is a collaboration between for major Danish universities and will make it much easier for researchers and students to search for and analyze material across research fields, national boundaries, and media. It will increase international collaboration of Danish scholars with the rest of the world for the sake of the humanities. The grant-funded project will help raise public awareness and interest in humanities research.

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.

This article discusses how African-American studies are merging with Digital Humanities at Duke University. The journalist explains the task is not entirely easy, for many of the black studies scholars are not willing to converge with digital humanities, because of their skepticism towards technology. Many of these scholars are older and accustomed to the 1960s Black studies model. A professor of Duke University explains the main challenge is to produce quality material that at the same time will contain critical apparatus.

In this short blog post, Beth Corzo-Duchardt introduces a project she is working on in the Gender Studies Program. She has decided to "ditch" Blackboard, because it does not a smooth functioning user-friendly program for students and her. Instead, she is using Wordpress and is hoping it will work better for her classrooms.

This blog questions its followers how they think libraries can support digital humanities. One alt-ac librarian named Jennifer Vinopal describes the roles she takes in digital humanities while working in the library. Her goal is to improve how scholars can use technology for research, learning, and teaching. She is curious of ways librarians can contribute to digital humanities such as having wider access to collections.

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.

Alan Lu and William G thomass III are humanities chairs with a long involvement in digital issues who have experienced budget cuts in regards to digital technologies, which are driving changes in higher education. They believe humanities faculty members, chairs, and adminstrators right now have a choice. This choice consist of taking no systematic action on the digital humanites front, and to let the long term digital future build for them. The other option is for humanities faculty, chairs, and adminstrators to plan how to intergrate the digital humanities systematically throughout the different departments.

This article focuses on the limitations of the traditional method of studying literature. David Smith, assistant professor of computational social science in the College of Computer and Information Science, and Ryan Cordell, assistant professor of English and digital humanities in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University hope to mend the gaps and limitations to the traditional method by encouaging a digitial humanities project for their school.