ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

The article explains the potential application of the SMI RED-m, an eye tracking device, in digital classrooms by explaining its use by the Humanities Lab of Lund University in Sweden. According to the article Lund University, in cooperation with other international researchers, installed 25 SMI RED-m devices to build a prototype digital classroom. By utilizing this eye tracking software, researcher sin the visual perception lab hope to analyze how children learn things in a classroom situation, particularly with regards to introducing new technology to the class room. The intent of the researchers is to use data collected from the project to better tailor educational materials to the abilities and interests of children.

This link, rather than an actual article, is an entry for the grant application process for the Digital Humanities, closing on Jan. 23, 2013. Although it lacks any actual discussion of its own on the Digital Humanities, it provides a link to its own entry on the NEH website which has a collection of projects which have applied for grants, such as WordSeer. The grant requires its applicants to be nonprofits or education institutions, meaning its list of applicants may provide insight into modern innovations in the Digital Humanities with regards to education.

This article covers the upcoming launch of a Digital Humanities website/collective, Ars Liberalis. According to the article, Ars Liberalis intends to be a tool for facilitating communication between students within the digital humanities, as well as between the digital humanities community and the outside world. Students will be able to begin discussions about lectures, submit materials to Ars Liberalis, etc., all with the goal of fostering interest in the digital humanities and communication within the community. Ars Liberalis will host both news articles or related essays as well as creative submissions from students.

The UA article introduces a collection of humanities professors, with a focus on Africana studies assistant professor Bryan Carter, who have worked to integrate modern technology such as smart phones with their course. The article provides multiple examples of how these technologies have been specifically integrated into the classrooms, such as iPhones reading out lectures from the syllabus, as well as how online courses have attracted a new group of students who might have otherwise been uninterested in the course. The professors interviewed in the article all agree that integrating new forms of technology with the classroom is important to opening access to education to new students.

Marche's article criticizes digital humanists for a perceived failure to adequately address the human and interpretive nature of literature by treating it as data. Two core issues identified by Marche is that literature, unlike statistics, is terminally incomplete - that parts frequently are missing or shifting - and that data mining efforts fail to account for context in literature. Marche argues that current data mining efforts are flawed because "algorithms are inherently fascistic" and that "meaning is mushy." Marche does not oppose digitization efforts and in fact welcomes the translation of texts into digital formats, rather Marche argues that literary meaning cannot be as readily quantified as numbers - that "insight remains handmade."

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute represents an opportunity for various people involved in the digital humanities to take week long courses covering various kinds of topics, broken into three rough categories: introductory, intermediate, advanced. Referred to as a "grown up nerd camp," the DHSI represents an opportunity for scholars to expand their toolset and learn more about the Digital Humanities. When the article was posted, DHSI has been running for ten years, and continues to run today.

This article explains how, with the use of digital humanities and simulations, historians will be able to use animation archives to teach history to students. Like a lot of students, both young and old, we are visual learners. By the use of maps and charts and pictures, one can better understand what is being taught, in this instance it will be history. The picture shown here is an example of what students will use.

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.

As a program offered by the city of university of new york, who set to showcase the definition and experience of learning of this topic through their incetive, Digital humanities is explained in an open access for an a more specific audience rather than the entire population that the web offers.

It is in this article that the authors Shao Jufang and Shew Huiyan try to find out the outflow of excellent papers and then take measures to stem this flow. They illuminate the academic reward structure in place in China and its most interesting details. While Shao and Shen do not report the salary ranges of Chinese scientists they do describe how the payments work as incentives for publishing. The Shao and Shen article helps Phil Davis the author of Does the Chinese model make sense build his counter argument. This is why this article can also be referenced throughout Davis article.

In this article, there is a comparison between two different archive for fan fiction that allows users to access their favorite fan fiction material. FanFiction.net is a popular site that allows users age 13 and up to view hundreds-of-thousands stories in over 30 languages. Archive of Our Own is a non-profit organization that needs an access code to gain entry. There are all different types of fan fiction material for all ages. Both archives are evaluated into a pro and con list.

Focusing mainly on Science, Technology, and Medicine, open access eprints allow authors of published research papers or paper to archive their literary work. This allows for others to peer-review their work and allows for their work to be used as a research tool. The works are organized and easily abled to be searched.

In this short description, reCAPTCHA is described as a free service that aims to digitize media, such as books, radio shows, and newspapers. With the ability to determine if the user is actually human, the archive is attempting to archive basic human knowledge and make information more accessible.

This article describes the end to Microsoft's Live Seach Team. This team has indexed the contents of 750,000 books and 80 million scholarly journals. The project scanned books and put them into a database that allowed the contents to come up in a diiferent area online when the content was being searched for. This effort comes as a dissappointment due to its ending of the project.

This website is for the American Heritage Vegetable project, a digital humanities program dedicated to documenting the cultivation practices and cookery of vegetables in the American kitchen. It also shares what kind of vegetables are in the market during different time periods. The information is collected from sources such as agricultural journals, gardening encyclopedias, and even horticultural manuals. With the American Heritage Vegetables project people can learn how we eat, what we eat, and the way American cuisine has changed throughout history.

In her blog Erin Bell discusses a digital humanities project called the Cuyahoga County Archives, a collection that focuses on sharing the history of Cuyahoga County. It mainly explores the transportation and infrastructure of Cuyahoga county, but also contains police report documents dealing with the Kent State Shootings in 1970. Undergraduate interns collaborated together to scan and search for these items to share, all for free access.

This blog article is one of the many posts related to Virginia Tech's Culinary History Collection. This project brings together historical information about food culture, customs, eating behaviors, and technological progress in cooking. In this specific article, two Spanish and two German books are highlighted, discussion the types of drinks and cocktails made by these countries.

In this article Kevin Fitchard confronts the negative aspects in collaborating recipes online and explains the specific problems in applications made for recipe sharing. For instance, a recipe library and cooking forum called KeepRecipes is easily accessible when a person wants to share a recipe, but has a weak scraping function. Moreover, other applications such as MacGourmet and Paprika require users to pay instead of allowing free access. Fitchard also argues that there are too many recipe databases competing with each other, which at the end, is quite similar to having too many cookbooks in one bookshelf. For Fitchard, recipe sharing online needs many improvements.

the article summarizes the principles of analysis and compares the potentioal with the digital tools. This article gives a textual comparison of several kinds of search for texts though different archives and programs for a new method of analysis.

This text offers the process and conversion of texts in another language for the digital age. THe XML coding is showcased as a converter not only for latin but other languages. Viewing this example of coding, we can replicate the human experience onto the web.