ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

D.D. Guttenplan of New York Times covers an article about an ancient Egypt virtual environment created by the digital humanists of Harvard University's Berkman Center of Internet and Society.This virtual tour is called "Giza 3D" where a person can see real life places such as the waves by Ancient Egypt's harbor, funeral rites, and even pyramid burial shafts that have not been seen by humans for over 100 years. The entire tour can even be seen in 3D at home with 3D glasses. Guttenplan compares this project to the works of other digital humanists. He brings up another excellent project titled Hypercities Egypt, created at the University of California, which archives tweets from Cairo. Such an archive allows people to see what is posted in real time and track back tweets back to the start of the protests in Tahrir Square.

This article contains three main reasons why Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) should have Digital Humanities Projects. The three main reasons listed in this article are that Universities without Digital Humanity Centers (or cultures) can share resources, some of the research is bound to be cool, and humanities research builds connections. Each assertion is backed up with some research from Digital Humanities projects and is a very persuasive argument for the digital humanities programs and research.

Dan Cohen opens his blog with the announcement that several of his colleagues "taken democratic ownership" and they now have a new interface and editing process. He also provides several screen shots (from his ipad) of the journal to give his readers an idea of the articles and layout. He also notes that they do not use the typical process of publishing in an academic journal; he calls their approach the "catching the good."

DH answers s is a part of the Association for Computers and Humanities' website that people can register to and join the online conversation about the Digital Humanities. Most of the forum is dedicated to issues digital humanists can run into in the technical side of the field. This link takes you directly to a list of the forums that many people use to ask questions, opinions, and overall discuss an problems or thoughts they may be having about the digital humanities.

This website is the main website for UCLA's Digital Humanities department and area of study. Here you can navigate between the programs the school offers, research projects, and many other aspects of the digital humanities through the school. The website is well thought out and very organized, which makes their program look streamlined and well done.

This website for The Journal of Digital Humanities allows for easy access of the journal. The Journal of Digital Humanities is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter. Here you can view the journal online through your web browser or download it to your computer.

This is the main page of Stanford University's projects in digital humanities, mainly the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). CESTA is a digital humanities project comprised of several projects, that span a wide variety of content areas and use different approaches. Two of the three projects mentioned (Mapping the Republic of Letters and Spatial History Project) seem to be a collaborative research effort to digitally map a concept. The last project under CESTA, Literary Lab, seems to be an archive of papers, dissertaions, and research by the current students and staff members of Stanford.

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 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.

This is the information page from the publisher's website on our class textbook, "Debates in the Digital Humanities." A summary of the text and its usefulness in the classroom is included as well as an excerpt from a New York Times Magazine review of it. It also includes links to pages on related texts for those further interested in the Digital Humanities.

ProfHacker in The Chronicle of Higher Education put a notice out that people new to digital humanities can receive a mentor through DHCommons to help guide them. It also notes that those who have experience in DH can apply to be a mentor. Although ACH has had a mentor program, it seems to have been more unofficial and the technical sign-up was confusing (and funny!). The partnership with ACH and DH Commons allows greater access, and less confusion, for people to sign up.

Website TechLife reports of a diary written during the Great War by a mother of an Irish soldier that is now digitized and transcribed. This diary is shared by the students of a Digital Humanities class of Trinity College Dublin. By dispersing this diary to the public, people can now have a greater understanding about Ireland's cultural heritage. Moreover, it is now a model of what would have been otherwise seen infrequently by the average person.

Julia Schrank is an undergraduate student at The Pennsylvania State University and plans to pursue her French Language and Culture studies by incorporating principles of Digital Humanities. In this blog article she describes her attempt in explaining what her fellowship in HASTAC exactly is to her mother. Schrank knows it is never an easy task describing digital humanities to her friends and family outside of the "tech world" and asks readers for possible ways to explain Digital Humanities to the average person. Her followers reply sympathetically and discuss the possible ways for the DH community as a whole.

Video series "At the Intersection" focuses on the use of big data by large companies, such as popular car companies. Land Rovers has accomplished many awards within only one year greatly due to the use of digital humanities. The old tactics of constructing a new car would be through physical examples such as clay models. With the use of virtual processing, designers could compare nine to eleven designs and examine specific problems. They invented a high computing ecosystem in order to generate over ten terabytes a day and store all their data. All these decisions was a huge change for their company and as a result they were able to create more options for better results in their products.

This short article is about the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's initiative for digital humanities supported by the Center for Digital Research of the Humanities. This new push for digital humanities has opened many new positions for scholarly pursuit and research at the school, which helps to open jobs and boost the economy.

This article specifically analyzes the growth of digital humanities and divides it's lifespan into four parts: Computer Centers (late 1940s through the present), Scholarly Societies and Journals (mid-1960s through the present), Standards efforts (late 1980s to present), Library Digitization & Digital Humanities Centers (1990s to present.) The author dissects what occurs in each time frame beginning with Father Busa's 1949 St. Thomas Aquinas index to the creation of the Blake Archive in 2005.

This post focuses on the group Weigle Information Commons (WIC) and their thoughts and ideas after attending a Digital Humanities event titles "Libraries, Labs, and Classrooms: Locating the Digital Humanitites." The WIC fit into the categories discussed and expanded on the ideas presented at the event by asking themselves, "how can WIC promote DH projects among our students and faculty and provide the resources to make such studies come to life?" The WIC then outlines some ideas and projects they have to promote "digital publics" through digital humanities work.

This news article outlines the ideas of Tri-Co professors who are setting out to change the way that the world and general public views the humanities. To do so, they have set up a new initiative, founded by Bryn Mawr English Professor Katherine Rowe in 2010, called the Tri-Co Digital Humanities (TCDH). TCDH will support independent fellowships and give grants to students, faculty, and staff for humanities-based inquiry and using new technology.