ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

Describes digital humanities as an up incoming "buzzword". This growing field is being adapted to many different ideas and fields. This has created a broad base for the digital humanities landscape. Awareness is a main argument here as Partik Svennson believes it is the key for the field to grow.

In this article, Stanley Fish is trying to explain what he believes it means to be in the digital humanities field. There seems to be an undercover snobbery situation when it comes to individuals in the academic world placing a title on themselves. For example, one may prefer to be known as a philosopher rather than a humanist. Not knowing what exactly falls into the term "humanities" is not new.

This webliography provides history and general information on the origin and growth of the field of Digital Humanities, including the Day of DH 2012. It provides many different organizations involved in Digital Humanities, and sorts them according to associations, collaboratories, and funding. There are also links and explanations on tutorials that teach researchers how to go about working in digital humanities, including tutorials on coding. The webliography comes to a close with information on conferences and institutions in the field of DH for researchers to find further information from.

Kirstyn Leuner's blog post announces and links to "The 18th-Century Common Project." She also gives readers a list of what to expect from the project when it is launched. She also talks about her part in the project's growth, which includes reviewing it. This post is just the first part in a 3-part series on "The 18th-Century Common Project."

This article on the National Endowment for the Humanities website contains information on a project directors meeting for the Digital Humanities department that was open to the public. The meeting took place in Washington, D.C. on September 20th, and it included multiple aspects such as lightning-talks and roundtable discussions with librarians, researchers, and funding organizations.

The NEH's Office of Digital Humanities announces 5 institutes that will receive government grants to further their research. Included are the University of Texas at Austin's HiPSTAS, the University of Maryland, College Park's Digital Humanities Data Curation, George Mason University's Another Week | Another Tool - A Digital Humanities Barnraising, Folger Shakespeare Library's Folger Shakespeare Library Summer Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities: "Early Modern Digital Agendas," and Arkansas State University's Humanities Heritage 3D Visualization: Theory and Practice.

This information page on the NEH website is meant to explain the purpose of the Office of Digital Humanities within the National Endowment for the Humanities. It explains the impact that digital technology has had on how scholars do their work and explains that the ODH is meant to "support projects that employ digital technology to improve humanities research." This is done through government grants to those projects that the office sees as most deserving of aid in improving their work. The ODH also collaborates with the scholars and librarians in the DH field through conferences and workshops.

This is the official site for the project known as Mapping St. Petersburg. This project has taken over two centuries of text from St. Petersburg. The purpose in building the site to fill the gap between literature and place. Dr. Young then shares eight keys things she has learned from this project.

Blogger whose identity I could only trace to as John has written into this Digital Humanities website. He shares with us an announcement that Google has now opened their text mining project that allows for better searching using frequency of words and phrases. This tool is compared to a game using a Star Trek example.

This is another blog in the Dan Cohen series. In this one in particular, Cohen opens calling digital journalism and digital humanities "kindred spirits". He believes that these two areas of concentration would greatly benefit from working together. The areas in which would be the most profitable from partnership are listed and discussed. A few include use of common tools, platforms and infrastructures, and the idea that developers and technologists should be partners.

This Dan Cohen blog discusses the weird relationship between the databases purchased by organizations and libraries and how they are utilized in the academic world. Many of these purchases are unwarranted. These buyers are over buying accumulating multiple software programs for more than one 'category". The main problem discussed is that since the buyer is not the user, ignored functional issues arise.

This publication is a write up for a project done of tools for digital humanities and their importance. Since this discipline heavily relies on technology, newer and more efficient tools are always being invented. An example includes identification tools that help analyze word choice and use.

The main topic of this article is criticism. Alan Liu posses the question where is cultural criticism and dies it even exist. Three ideas surround this: digital humanists have not created an effective critical discourse around their work, more rubrics need to be established and because of the uniqueness of the field a new kind of peer review should be utilized.

In this Digital Humanities field, collaboration is seen often. The basic idea that two heads are better than one even in projects where there is one official reseracher rings true in this. However, there seems to be an issue to where credit will be given. The MLA "task force" encourages this and states that suspicion should never occur.

Blogger Dan Cohen discusses how Google is good for history. Historians are simply a group of people who dig through information from the past, put it all together as possible facts or theories, and then share. Cohen then teases Google for a bit when bringing attention to the hand scans that can be occasionally found in Google Books. Their is a question of quality and direction.

This is an government website detailing resources and practices that fall into digital preservation. Digital preservation is a growing area with the advancement of technology. The website features sections that include partners, collections, tools showcase, multimedia & publications, meeting & events, and education & training.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has generously funded the MONK Project. MONK is a digital landscaped designed to help humanities scholars in their research and analysis of text. This projects is publicly available with texts from Indiana University, University of Virginia, Martin Mueller at Northwestern University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Facebook is no stranger to controversy. In this article written by Evgeny Morozov, he describes a legal controversary. Facebook's policy allows for them to keep on file information about your online data even after a user has cancelled their account. French government officials however are not agreeing.

This article is focuses on the mapping side of digital humanities. Digital cartography is an important area allowing for a different understanding. John describes his problems with integrating older mapping technologies and with modern cartography.

The NEH Office of Digital Humanities joined together with the Museum of the City of New York in October to put on a panel presentation. This presentation was over the museum's effort to create a massive collection of digitized photographs. The presentation also covered how using technology can help cultural heritage organizations to enrich an improve access to collections of cultural heritage items.