ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

After playing around on the Wayback Machine website in class, I wanted to know more about the site. In this article, we see the man behind the creation of the Wayback Machine site and what exactly the site contains. This archive allows for users to browse through over 160 billions webpages, going as far back as 1996, and keeps the internet past preserved in his online archive. This storage system is reliable and effiecient for users and is really quite interesting to browse through some of our favorite and popular sites today.

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 article explains the dispute between Google and publishers here in the United States. As we have seen in class, Google Books offers internet users the ability to search through their database of scanned books. Publishers are fighting that Google is violating copyright laws by scanning these books and letting people have free open access. Although the project itself is causing an uproar, publishers as well as authors are being given the opportunity to decide what books are included in this project.

This article focuses on the internet users means for obtaining media via an online archive. The Internet Archive gave peer-to-peer file sharing a major boost by making an array of media immediately available as onBitTorrent for downloading content. By using this means of getting media and other data, users are offered a faster delivery regardless of internet connection.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the documents available on this website are ones released by the United States Government. The documents in this database are organized into an interactive archive where users can search through the contents of this site. Containing thousands of files, Project Star Gate aims to digitize documents and contains many resources for any user. The site offers individuals to purchase the 7 volumes of CD's to view this material and use for research or other purposes.

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.

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."