ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

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.

This article explains New York Public Library's project called "What's on the Menu?" This database is created for users across the nation, so easily accessible that no application needs to be downloaded and can be used with a simple click of a button titled "transcribe" on their website.Over 865,660 dishes and 13,440 menus have been transcribed for free access. Already within a year more than three million page views have been recorded. Its use is more than handy for culinary students, but those studying graphic design, history, and health issues.

Like the open access websites reviewed in class, Sage is an open access journal that publishes original research and review articles in an interactive, and access format. These articles span the full spectrum of the social and behavorial sciences and the humanities. The articles are very informative and they can be utilized in classrooms so that students can better understand the purpose of digital humanities and why it can be affective in their everyday learning environment.

Fujitsu's food project brings people to volunteer on almost 40 acres of farms around the Boston area, increasing a sustainable system for living and growing food. Part of the Fujitsu food project is to digitize paperwork such as surveys taken from neighborhoods and information about each individual farm site. Part of the problem with digitizing their paperwork is finding a multi-functioning device, especially for Mac users. Fujitsu technology managers and workers are still working to find a more reliable scanning solution for this project and the Fujitsu company as a whole. Rob Sozanski, the Technology Manager for the Food Project also explains how scanning documents allow people to come together to look at their database and save costs.

In this blog article, scholar Elizabeth Hopwood asks followers how Digital Humanities can be used for food studies. People are paying more attention to what is eaten and it's health benefits/negativeness--incorporating digital humanities to such a field would be greatly useful. Other bloggers and Hopwood agree on the need to digitze projects for food studies and mention the New York Public Library online menu database.

In this article Danielle Gould interviews Justin Massa, the CEO and cofounder of Food Genius, an application which displays and analyzes dishes for users. Each dish in a restaurant is posted with a picture detailed with information such as ingredients used and cooking methods in order to make a more accurate suggestion for users. The goal of Food Genius is to pre-load data as much as possible and to change the way food recommendations are made.

In this article Vicky Gan, a strategic planning office member of The New York Public Library (NYPL), explains the digitized goals of the NYPL. One of the projects called "What's on the Menu" releases digitzed menus of restaurants, even of menus that are not used anymore by the service industry. At one point only a few could actually look at the hard copy collections of these menus, but now over 8,700 are digitally released in only four months. Sharing any information, even restaurant menus, help people across the nation. "What's on the Menu" has already been used by famous chefs such as Mario Batali and even stretches to fourth grade class projects studying food and exercise.

PLOS is a nonprofit publisher that publishes only 7 journals in topics related to science or medicine. Every article that is published is open access and is freely able to be viewed online. The publishers of this website believe that their journals allows for ease of research and is determined to accelerate the advancement of knowledge in these fields.

This digital archive is an archive that allows for content to be open for global access. The content consists of digitized texts, in many languages, and other multimedia material. The material on this site is used in respect to copyrights and the content owners and contributers agreements.

This website is designed to give viewers an inside look at the humanities at Stanford University. With the new technologies through digital humanities, people are able to create virtual archives and interact with source material in a way that has never been done. The use of these interactive archives, like the "Authorial London", scholars are able to use new forms of technology in a more efficient way to research certain material.

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.

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.

Phil Davis, the writer of this impact entry, questions the sustainability of, what he calls, AO Mega Journals. AO Megas are journals that have no real content area to focus on, are generally open access, and prove an alternative to traditional publication. He believes that the impact factors and decline in citations of the site may cause concern for people looking to publish their work. He also addresses the issue of smaller, more meticulous, and content focused journals. This article was written in 2010, and although PLoS One didn't experience the slow deflation of the "citation bubble," (it is still considered the larges scholarly journal), he makes good points on the adavantages and disadvantages of using the "large blob."

CNI's focus is to transfer scholarship into the digital age. It states that it is made of 200 institutions from universities, publishing, and libraries that must pay membership dues. CNI is supported soley through the membership dues. IT encourages collaboration throughout its own community as well as outside of it.

Scholastica is a server that allows people to publish journals and articles. The main point is to bring together "editors, authors, and reviewers" to one area. It also emphasizes the idea that using their system makes the process of getting material published in and peer reviewed is much simpler, less time consuming, and generates genuine interest and collaboration between all parties. It is open for all subjects, and even welcomes people to create a journal in a content area that may be lacking. It is a paid membership, but also provides options of community support with their "The Conversation," what I am assuming is a question-answer section.

Like the archive websites that we viewed in class, this website is designed to archive material from the Renaissance. There are course related material, such as blogs and lesson plans, there are databases with texts and images from this early time period, and there is a "studio" designed to help writers in their research. There are also external links for any other sites that are wished to view. An archive website is useful for research and Stanford University designed this one for research purposes and informational value.

This site is designed to organize the writings and events that are done by Alan Liu. Alan Liu is an English Professor at the University of California is Santa Barbara. His new media projects have been centered around digital humanities and the progress that it is making in technology. Other projects have focused on the cultural implications of humanities computing and our society as an information technology society. Also, Alan Liu is the founder on the UC New Media Directory that handles text encoding and human computer technology.

This article discusses Internet Archive's newest archive that allows researchers "both in and out of the classroom" to look at news over a timeline. Much like the Wayback Machine, this archive has a collection of over 350,000 news broadcasts that allows the exploration of their resources and the viewing of TV news broadcasts just by searching.

PeerJ is an open access journal that researchers in Biological and Medical Sciences publish their works for a one time membership fee, which covers their lifetime. The PeerJ, Inc. has two different publication venues: PeerJ is a peer reviewed journal and PeerJ Preprint is where they can post their unfinished works for feedback.

Open Library is an editable library catalog that is aiming to digitize every book ever published. Any user has the ability to contribute information and make corrections to the catalog. This project allows for the exploration of texts for scholarly or everyday purposes. Much like some archives that we have looked at, this website is a much larger site that wants all books available online.