ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

Journalist Angelyn Irvin of the Daily Pennsylvanian covers a story about the Digital Humanities Forum (DHF) and about digital humanities as a general topic. One main goal of DHF is to essentially produce a better way to share information between those in technology and scholarly work. This forum is still in it's beginning phases, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation until the year 2014. The people helping funnel this project are professors, scholars, and students.

This website, arts-humanities.net, aims to support and advance the use and understanding of digital tools and methods for research and teaching in the arts and humanities by providing: information on projects creating and using digital content, tools and methods to answer research questions, information on tools and methods for creating and using digital resources, a listing of expert centers and individual researchers, a library documenting lessons learned through case studies, briefing papers, and a bibliography. The website encourages people to become members and to contribute.

This article discusses The University of Canterbury (UC) and its brand new QuakeStudies digital archive to document the Canterbury earthquakes by collecting reports, documents, stories, photos and film. According to the website, the launch is "the culmination of a year's work by a project team from the UC College of Arts Digital Humanities department. The breadth of the content sought for the QuakeStudies archive is unprecedented, and will become a significant record of these major historical events."

D.D. Guttenplan of New York Times covers an article about an ancient Egypt virtual environment created by the digital humanists of Harvard University's Berkman Center of Internet and Society.This virtual tour is called "Giza 3D" where a person can see real life places such as the waves by Ancient Egypt's harbor, funeral rites, and even pyramid burial shafts that have not been seen by humans for over 100 years. The entire tour can even be seen in 3D at home with 3D glasses. Guttenplan compares this project to the works of other digital humanists. He brings up another excellent project titled Hypercities Egypt, created at the University of California, which archives tweets from Cairo. Such an archive allows people to see what is posted in real time and track back tweets back to the start of the protests in Tahrir Square.

Left of Black, a video program from Duke University, reveals a conversation between Professor Mark Anthony Neal, Howard Rambsy II, and Jessica Marie Johnson--all of whom are scholars. The three have an educational discussion over digital humanities and its relation to those who study different cultures and ethnicity, specifically Black Studies. Over this thirty minute conversation Rambsy and Johnson talk about what they have been doing in digital humanities and what can be done to incorporate more Black Studies work. For instance, Rambsy has been creating archival work in Black Studies by posting historical issues of "Negro Digest." Johnson explains how media effects the finance black studies digital humanities receives and that there are a variety of ways to produce black history in powerful ways online. Rambsy believes one great way to spread black studies digital humanities is to introduce and push students into projects in related fields.

This article discusses digital humanities through the works of Todd Carter and his Tagasauris data-curation platform. This program allows people to tag their pictures and other forms of media by the use of crowdsourcing and digital intelligence. He divides Tagasauris into three categories: Findability, Linkability, and Discoverability. With his creation, people such as Valerie Matteau have been able to digitize an art collection, which reveals eighty years of american history such as Correta Scott King's funeral.

In this short blog post, Beth Corzo-Duchardt introduces a project she is working on in the Gender Studies Program. She has decided to "ditch" Blackboard, because it does not a smooth functioning user-friendly program for students and her. Instead, she is using Wordpress and is hoping it will work better for her classrooms.

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.