ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

This presentations shows the findings of a fieldwork study that studied "practices, challenges, and directions in contemporary digital humanities scholarship." The study was part of two projects by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Oxford Internet Institute. These two institutions collaborated to focus on developers and users of digital resources for humanities research.

Liberal arts education has a new cutting edge aspect that students from the Tri-College Digital Humanities initiative are exploring. Over a period of about four years they are using technology to adapt liberal arts to a networked world. New media components are being added to classrooms and students are forging ahead onto unchartered territory. Questions and research that has never been done before are being explored by these kids as they use their imaginations and curiosity to aid them in this unique journey.

I like the definition that Maxwell proposes here. I agree that this is a new "fresh" field and that it is gaining momentum. I think it is fascinating that the field is primarily present in Twitter and think that this social media site is something that can significantly aid digital humanists in their work. Sharing ideas and collaboration is clearly a new way of learning and in my opinion is the most effective way of learning. Creating easy access to information destroys any walls that may keep an individual from pursuing their research of a subject. When any information known is available online, nothing stands in the way of people constantly adding their ideas and input to that data. We all have a different approach to life and different thought processes, and therefore it is very important for us to share information widely and freely and to work in collaboration with one another.

The openness that museums are striving for will move them forward into the digital age. The sharing of information is something necessary for practices wanting to stay up with the transition our world is making into technology. In health professions, students and professionals rely heavily on conferences and performances to share their research and to learn from the past. The same is necessary and vital to deepening humanities research.

Digital humanities has gained popularity this year especially despite recent cuts to the program at certain universities. This distilling of information relies heavily on technology. At a recent NEH symposium, professors discussed projects they were having their students do. These involved heavy research on a subject and performances demonstrating the accumulated knowledge. Students learn through "living out" the roles others played in history. Some try to create visual representations of data. These projects can lead to cross referencing data and an overall deepening of research and information study. The humanities strives to make information widely available and open the scholarly world to a wide range of people.

With a book about Academia and its issues being faced today, Kathleen Fitzpatrick (director of Scholarly Communications for MLA) brings to question the adaptation education has to take in order to thrive including that of technology. Her blog orientated around her book gives specific to general Digital Humanities example in a theoretical aspect.

In Making the Digital Humanities More Open, MITH will work with BrailleSC to undertake its second stage of development by designing and deploying a WordPress‐based accessibility tool that will create braille content for end-users who are blind or low vision.

The broad topic of Digitial Humanities is neatly placed as a quick reference in the wiki-database. As a short guide on the subject, main points of focus, sub-topics, and direction are categorized, indicating the audience to be for the general population. The sources range from shcolarly articles to essays conveying the topic across forms of research under it. The contributor of the site is a reseacher for the UCL centre for digital humanities.