ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

Podcaster Ethan Watrall confronts the topic of archaeology and its connection to digital humanities. The reality is that archaeologists currently do not have strong connections to digital humanists. What Watrall brings attention to is the peculiarity of this issue, even when archaeologists often use a a variety of digital technologies their research. Watrall does not bring solutions to his issue, but simply is informing his audience DH participants can take a chance to connect their work and communities to archaeologists.

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.

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 news article highlights the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington's new initiative for facilitating research and education in the digital humanities. The initiative revolves around The Catapult Center, directed by William R. Newman, Distinguished Professor and Ruth N. Halls Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. This center, according to the article, "will bring together a network of scholars from IU and the outside world in the rapidly expanding fields of digital editing, computational analysis of texts and material analysis of textual collections."

This article focuses on the limitations of the traditional method of studying literature. David Smith, assistant professor of computational social science in the College of Computer and Information Science, and Ryan Cordell, assistant professor of English and digital humanities in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University hope to mend the gaps and limitations to the traditional method by encouaging a digitial humanities project for their school.

This online website is a guide that serves as an introduction to the the field of Digital Humanities. On this website hosted by the University of Delaware, there are plenty of resources and links for "topics and discussions about defining and describing DH, tools for projects, and links to the DH community such as blogs, open access journals, and conferences and events."

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.

This article discusses the agenda for the fifth annual Humanities Week at the University of Arizona. The college puts this week on to showcase what the professors and researchers do with digital humanities.

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 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.

This is an interactive question and answer website by the Association for Computers and the Humanities. The question this link leads to is more of a request by Inna Kizhner, a member of this website, for help with DH projects with strong visual/non-linear components. This website shows that in the field of Digital Humanities, many people reach out to each other and collaborate.

The gap between digital humanities and black studies is a fairly wide one and that's where Howard Rambsy II comes in--his goal is to shorten the wall between the two scholastic fields. This blog entry interviews Rambsy, who is the author of books such as the "Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry." He discusses how black writers help the digital humanities movement by spreading enthusiasm. The author states that the best way to thin the gap is to simply create more collaboration between these two fields.

This blog questions its followers how they think libraries can support digital humanities. One alt-ac librarian named Jennifer Vinopal describes the roles she takes in digital humanities while working in the library. Her goal is to improve how scholars can use technology for research, learning, and teaching. She is curious of ways librarians can contribute to digital humanities such as having wider access to collections.

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.

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 article discusses how African-American studies are merging with Digital Humanities at Duke University. The journalist explains the task is not entirely easy, for many of the black studies scholars are not willing to converge with digital humanities, because of their skepticism towards technology. Many of these scholars are older and accustomed to the 1960s Black studies model. A professor of Duke University explains the main challenge is to produce quality material that at the same time will contain critical apparatus.

This is a page of information on Claire Warwick, who is a professor of digital humanities and head of the department of information studies at University College London. Warwick's main research interests are the uses of digital resources in humanities and cultural heritage, reading in physical and digital environments, and the use of social networking in research. Warwick opened the event Annual Research Programme, an event free and open to the public.

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.

Mark Anthony Neal talks with Howard Rambsy II and Jessica Marie Johnson about the state of black studies and digital humanities. The professionals discuss the different ways digital humanities can help expand and make black studies more accessible, and how the digital humanities can strengthen the study of race and black studies.

This article is about on research focusing on "humanities scholars' understandings of the advantages and disadvantages of print versus electronic information resources." It explores how humanities' faculty members use print versus electronic resources and how they feel about electronic resources compared to those in print. The main goal of this study was to assist authors and librarians choose between print and electronic resources to best suit their needs.