ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

Professor John Unsworth summarizes an academic approach by outlining the schamatics of defining this study. The site inherits an authorial presence and gives the content credibility. the site is explained in a manner for a broad audience to view and understand with examples and practice explanation.

Professor Katherine Rowe teaches a Shakespeare class online and discusses with us the benefits of being able to digitize this course. She says that she has previously taught this exact same course in a lecture hall as well as a theater but believes that it was less effective. Students participate in assignments that allow them to recreate popular Shakespearean scenes digitally for deeper understanding. This article also highlights other projects assigned by various other professors. This includes a digital visualization of the University of Virginia's first library collection and editing of the transcribed online versions of Household Words and All the Year Round.

This Digital Memory Box is just what it appears to be. An archive filled with electronic multimedia and digital records of the students who participated in the Uprisings of 1976 in South Africa. The purpose is to preserve to records of the Black townships and promote positivity surrounding the incident. Former students are allowed to return and tell their first hand story of the events that took place including pictures.

Mark Sample writes about the inaugural issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities, topics ranging from arguments about humanists interpretations of quantitative data to a review of WordSeer. The journal's aim is to catch the good-or finding substantive and valuable digital humanities work "in whatever format, and wherever, it exists." This includes podcasts, blog posts, twitter conversations, slideshows, and any other relevant work, layered with evaluation from the authors.

This is the main page of O'Reilly's website. He is a member of PeerJ's board and has contributed to many open access journals. His focus within DH seems to be the technical aspects, but he his a huge advocator for open access. There are many videos on this page of interviews he has give, videos of his lectures, articles written about him, and articles he has written. His main page also spot lights workshops, conferences, and articles concerning the future of open access, technology, ethical uses of technology, and technological business philosophy. O'Reilly is an extremely active member in the technological world, and is also instrumental in developing the tone for open access.

This brief article highlights a major change in the Digital Humanities that occurred in 2012, an MLA release containing standardized guidelines for evaluating work in the Digital Humanities. Those who stand the most to gain from this release are the DH professors themselves, as the guidelines lay some basic ground rules for evaluating this material for the purposes of promotion or gaining tenure. Although the guidelines are non-enforceable, being that they are from the MLA they are likely to be given some weight.

The core purpose of this article is the promotion of the digital humanities in academia by informing digital humanists how they might be able to better communicate the value of digital humanities. The four main points are: educate the general audience about the subject matter, the need for reviewers to understand the diverse nature of the field, documentating ones role in collaborative projects for the sake of promotion, and explaining the changing nature of peer review in the field. It also briefly addresses the need for institutions to accept new forms of media.

This brief article highlights one of the preconvention workshops that was available for MLA 2012. This workshop was hosted by DHCommons, a digital humanist project intended to facilitate the collaboration of either people in the field of digital humanities or people looking to break into the field. The article contains the full announcement for the workshop, highlighting its purpose, its guests, and those sponsoring the project. Including Texas A&M.

This article about the 2011 Digital Humanities meeting highlights three big project announcements from that meeting. The first of these was a then new grant program: Digital Humanities Implementation Grants, a follow up to the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program. The second of these was a collection of alternative academic careers for humanities scholars titled #alt-academy. The last of these was the introduction of Press Forward, an initiative aiming to fuse traditional scholarly review with open-web filters.

This article seeks to address the problem of digital humanities being code heavy by nature, but being populated a field not traditionally associated with programming. It introduces two tutorials intended to help new people break into the field of programming: Hackety Hack and "The Rubyist Historian." Hackety Hack is a free program containing a series of interactive lessons for learning to code in the Ruby language, and "The Rubyist Historian" is a blog by graduate student Jason Heppler intended to be an "accessible introduction to Ruby."

Bethany Nowviskie's article proposes an overhaul of modern graduate studies by replacing aging practices and methods of education with more modern and technology appropriate forms of education. One of Nowviskie's key points of criticism it that many of these more traditional forms of graduate education are producing humanities PhDs who do not fully understand how modern universities work and are impacted by the outside world. Nowviskie's main proposal for beginning to replace these aging methods is through the cooperation of funding agencies and respected humanities organizations, ones with a good history of inter-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration, to utilize grants to reshape graduate studies.

Although alt-ac is not exclusive digital humanities, or even exclusively humanities, the report on the #alt-ac panel for the Digital Humanities 2011 highlights some of the issues and questions relevant to the DH field. Some of the problems are personal in nature, such as the professional differences between#alt-ac and tenure, and others are more institutional, such as the issues with "credential creep." Although the article does not necessarily provide answers, it highlights many of the concerns alt-ac professionals have in pursuing their career.

According to the article, DH Answers represents a chance for digital humanists to communicate with fellow digital humanists through a free and community driven Q&A board. Anyone may post and answer freely, and community members are encouraged to tag their posts so as to facilitate the creation of new categories. Questions range from improving the site itself to introducing undergraduate students to the digital humanities. Forums users may also make requests for information, such as "a list of all graduate programs that study DH."

In this brief blog post, Dan Cohen highlights an interesting issue raised by Cliff Lynch at one of the 2007 CNI task force meetings. According to Cohen, Lynch raised the issue of museums holding on to controversial materials and how the digitization of those materials can allow them to be repatriated, either by undermining the arguments museums make or by addressing their concerns. By creating a digital replica, there is no longer a need to withhold artifacts from their originating cultures.

Dan Cohen's transcript of his anonymous speech at Harvard on March 1, 2011 provides insight into the demands scholars have digitization efforts and digital archives. Cohen identifies five major demands on the part of scholars: reliable metadata, the ability to experience serendipity, an interface to handle differing modes of research, a representation of the physical book, and open APIs to accommodate the demands digital libraries cannot anticipate. Dan Cohen's goal is to borrow the best aspects of a physical library - the ability to stumble upon new material readily as well as some measure of its tactile feel - with the ease of use of a well designed digital archive.

This video talks to students who have been invited to participate in the only Digital Humanities conference for and by undergraduate researchers. Short segments follow students who discuss the meaning of digital humanities, why there are passionate about the field, and different projects they are involved in. For example, a student expresses the difference in publishing for an audience who will be online and the responsibility of the researcher to approach the project in the best way to present it to a larger audience. Collaboration among researchers in the field is noted to be one of the most important aspects in Digital Humanities.

In his blog, Dan Cohen decided to revisit a topic that was cover in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This data-mining related article discusses the issues with educational testing and growing technology in the humanities field. Devices that can browse an entire database of knowledge pin pointing specific facts. This device is then compared to the relationship between the calculator and math to this device and history. Just as the calculator has made memorizing certain mathematical principles pointless in testing, this device is said to make multiple choice test irrelevant for history. Similarly, cell phones, pdas, and tablets have been able to fill this gap already.

This article discusses and provides a few tips for preserving today's digital records for generations to come. This seemingly easy task has provided some difficulties to the September 11 Digital Archive Project. The main goal of this joint project is to collect and preserve everything from photos to voicemails that relate to the events of September 11. Dan Cohen provides four main points that may be able to solve some of this issues in this preservation along with tips on how to better this process.

In this article, Susan Garfinkel compares the changes and shifts in American Studies to those in Digital Humanities. As a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania, Garfinkel was able to gain a first hand account of how an ever changing diverse program can evaporate. The changes then witnessed in American Studies can now be seen in Digital Humanities. Both concentrations are growing and hopefully by incorporating each with the other they will continue.

Adrianne Wadewitz is featured as a guest writer in this article. She shares with us details about her position as a Digital Humanities postdoc at Occidental College. The freedom provided by her position seems to be her favorite aspect of her job. Wadewitz includes in this article a four point list of her planned tasks and activities for October 1st. This includes working on an article discussing teaching with Wikipedia.