ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

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.

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.