ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

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.

This website is used to archive any information, like personal work, including texts, websites, pictures, audio, and video. I recently used this site for a Tech Comm project and it stores anything you want. to put onto the internet. It allows fellow users to access the things you want to archive and share.

This website is an interactive site for anyone interested in The Digital Public LIbrary of America. The Digital Public Library of America hosted one of the largest public event that focused on the building of a digital public library. This event brought together many professionals including students, government leaders, and other humanities professionals. The members began discussing the development of a DPLA prototypes and encouraging the participation of the public. The Digital Public Library of America hosted one of the largest public event that focused on the building of a digital public library. This event brought together many professionals including students, government leaders, and other humanities professionals. The members began discussing the development of a DPLA prototypes and encouraging the participation of the public.

Google Books is a service that allows searches of full-texts of books and magazines that have been scanned by Google. These texts are stored into a digital database and with the use of "character recognition", a user can locate any textual material. This website discusses the legal aspect to Universities access and use of Google Books. With a proposed agreement between AAP and Google Book Search, the proposal was unfortunately rejected.

Peerj offers three different types of memberships, each with their own advantages and restrictions, but all are for life. They emphasis that they do not publish based on possible "impact" or "interest," but focus on scientific soundness. They also offers "No questions asked" waivers for people in certain countries.

arXiv is another open access collection/publication (?) maintained by Cornell University. The publications are based primarily in any field of science and mathematics (such as work on K-Theory and quantitative biology). It does not state if the articles are peer reviewed, but it does say that "Submissions...must conform of Cornell University academic standards." I don't know if this means that all of the work in the collection is by students and teachers, or if the were able to scan in articles from the library.

PLOS One is a open access, peer reviewed journal set up specifically for scientists. PLOS One does not pick and choose which papers are important. It peer reviews all articles/journals to make sure all of the material is sound, then publishes it. This means, that any work that is holds validity and is scientifically sound will get published. Because PLOS One is open access, it allows anyone to download, reprint, copy, etc... as long as a credit is given without fees or other charges. It also keeps the writer/researchers right of ownership.

Cohen blogs about the emergence of several new ways of publishing within the scientific field that is still considered scholarly and many times peer reviewed. Some of the websites mentioned offer to publish a writer's work for a lifetime, for a few dollars. The emergence of these self-publishing, academic, scientific sites also shows a slight shift in philosophy. By restricting the publication through certain channels, the publishing companies and universities were choosing what will be the topic "of next year." Some times they were right, sometimes they were wrong, but either way, great and important papers were lost because they were not considered "the next big thing" or they are too "normal."

Creative Commons is a website, or tool, that you can use to create your our copyright restrictions. Instead of have a traditional blanket copyright, creative commons allows publishers/creators personalize the copyright and protection of their material. For example, a person who uses Creative Commons to set up restrictions for their photographs can allow other the repost and cite his photos. However, it restricts companies from using it in ads (like on facebook).

In this article a case study is shared discussing car manufacturing company Volvo and their strategy in organizing their big data in order to improve their company as a whole. By implementing digitized reports in organized topics such as product design and vehicle diagnostics in to their large Teradata system, data can be processed and completed in one minute, rather than the hour it used to take to process a single query. Moreover, the Volvo company now analyzes a number of issues in an integrated and organized way. For instance analysts can predict failure rates of vehicles over time through the monthly stored collected reports of cars that have experienced specific failures. They can also correlate mechanical failures with the specific geographical areas the vehicle is located in. A car in urban Japan will most likely experience different conditions in rural France, and with DRO error codes (diagnostic read out data recorded in each car about performance and mechanical failures) collected through the Teradata system, analysts can figure out how certain mechanical failures connect to different locations. It is with this strategy in organizing digital information that Volvo can create large goals such as creating vehicles no one will be killed or injured in by 2020.

Brett Zongker of Huffington Post reports how the $1 million federal grant for the Digital Public Library of America helps spread digital humanities for the nation. The plan is not only to digitize books, but to build systems for libraries and incorporate partnerships such as Google Books to maximize free access for everyone. The reality is that such a project will take more than a one million dollar donation, but it is a growing start to this digital library. Zongker reports the possibility of incorporating the European Union's digital library (Europeana digital library collection) with the Digital Public Library of America.

This article written by Rebecca Frost Davis discusses the use of crowdsourcing in order to create a stronger integration with digital humanities and undergraduate curriculum. Having students work on large scale collaborations allows for professors and scholars teach them knowledge in a more creative way. While crowdsource projects may not cause students to take on professional work in the digital humanities field, it will nonetheless cause them to be more aware of how to use digital humanities in their real lives. Frost confronts the problems of such projects, such as the issue of what kind of project best fits into each class and the time constraints encountered. Moreover, whether the students each have access to computers inside and outside of class. With matters such as these properly organized, Frost encourages crowdsourcing projects for undergraduate students.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum goes into detail about what digital humanites, and how the humanties can be affectively used in the English department. Kirschenbaum gives ideas on how open acces can be useful in the classroom. In his article he explores the different types of free accessible websites that were used in an English clasroom while students were reading Shakespeare to Second life. Students were able to view the entire thirty-two copy extant quarto copies of Hamlet online. This free accesability allowed students to be quized on the material and to get a better understanding of what they were reading. Kirschenbaum believes that the notion of free accesability will help expand the knowledge of English beyond the classroom.

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.