ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities 2012 was a conference held in July of 2012 with the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. ADHO is an umbrella organization meant to promote digital research and teaching within the humanities disciplines. Originating in 1989, the Digital Humanities 2012 conference was held at the University of Hamburg in Germany this year. The website contains all of the conference activities as well as many of the presentations in the form of podcasts.

A professor used her Women's Studies class as a way to test out the use of digital humanities in the undergraduate classroom. The assignment was to create an online archive of every issue of the feminist magazine "Conditions" as well as a presentation over the issue they chose. In doing so, they were required to scan in every page of the magazine and edit them on computer to fit together uniformly. At the end of the assignment period, she submitted the archive into the "Lesbian Poetry Archive" for public viewing and use. Through working on this archive, she became convinced that the PDF format will continue to be the main format for converting physical documents into the digital medium. This is due to the format being almost universal in digital humanities and the likelihood of it continuing to be a relevant file format for many years to come.

Elizabeth Hopwood of Northeastern University blogs about the process of digitizing 19th century Caribbean texts for an archive. Due to her involvement in the archive, she was required to take a TEI encoding course along with others on the project so that they could learn to properly code everything themselves. As the workshop went on, she began to notice how intricate coding could be as well as how selective you must be in coding to choose what will be coded and what will not be coded. It is up to the individual coder to decide what kinds of things in the text need to be coded, whether that be mentions of gender, commodities, slaves, etc. She ends this blog post with some links to quick tutorials on TEI for those interested in getting into TEI coding for the Digital Humanities.

This blog article tied to the Special Collections of Virginia Tech's Culinary program discusses a two volume set book they have posted online for readers to share. The books are called "Modernist Cuisine at Home" and contains 456 pages for cooks to examine how food can be examined differently and broken down into separate chemical reactions. The blog poster explains to readers that this addition to their collections is immensely helpful for readers, even when it at first seems intimidating to read.

The topic of Digital Humanities is discussed as a new teaching a research method. Since it is has been newly founded many people find it difficult to use and leave it to scholars and researchers to do most of the work. There are six factors that go into researching humanities that have been found also in researching sciences: publication practices, data, research methods, collaboration, incentives, and learning. By using this process one can easily understand Digital Humanities.

Data visualization is the study of the visual representation of data, meaning "information that has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information". A subtopic of the broader concet with which defining the structure and scope of it will align perspectives for other topics as an example.

Information retrieval is the activity of obtaining information resources relevant to an information need from a collection of information resources. Searches can be based on metadata or on full-text indexing. A subtopic of the broader concet with which defining the structure and scope of it will align perspectives for other topics as an example.

This blog is over a first year teachers proposal to teach a writing course that is digitally based. By teaching this way allows for students to focus more on analyzing, archiving, and transforming into a more modern method. Instead of composing through a word documents, students will use the XML program which does not tell any computer what to do with the information. This program requires students to describe what they are doing as they do it. It also allows students to see all of their editing work and has other advantages that Word does not.

300 students in the UK had the opportunity to learn more about digital skills, such as coding and reporting, away from a classroom setting. They were broken up into small groups and ask to create a report about a certain event. This helped the students collaborate and share their skills in an enviornment they were more comfortable then with students who had similar skills and interests as them.

This blog is about how to teach digital editions more like a seminar. Digital editions are about pedagody, culture preservation, and interpreting. She uses this term as a broader Digital Humanities method to create a network that uses interpretive knowledge and connected skills to reach a certain audience. By making this teaching more like a graduate seminar students are able to contribute more to the class because they will be more easily self-motivated. Students will understand that there is one instructor and that they contribute to their project while also remembering who the audience is.

5100 college professors took a survey about their attitudes to the digital approach to technology. Some interesting facts and comments were about using e-books and about 1/3 of professors are giving students access to this. One statistic was about 47% regularly use videos or similations in their course, 36% use it occasionallyand the rest never use any videos when teaching. Professors who teach online and blended courses give their students two times the advantage of other students who are not taught online courses.

HASTAC Scholar Rebecca Nesvest announces her work in testing out new software meant to be a digital accompaniment to texts. In her example, she is using "The String of Pearls, or the Barber of Fleet Street" to map out the locations from the story onto a map of the actual Fleet Street in London where the Demon Barber Sweeney Todd was said to live and work. Her work will also include historical evidence for and against the reality of the events depicted in the story that have always been said to be entirely true.

The Haiti Digital Library is an online library available in English, French, and Kreyol that is meant to serve as a guide and portal to resources all about Haiti, for both its citizens and scholars interested in the country. The content hosted on the website includes both historical materials related to the country as well as published works by Haitian authors throughout time. They are currently accepting comments and suggestions for works that the public would like to see digitized and uploaded to the archive.

The 126th annual American Historical Association meeting held in Chicago was one of the largest meetings ever. This year, the NEH Office of Digital Humanities sent a representative to the meeting to discuss the relevance of Digital Humanities in the field of history.

Richard E. Miller, an English professor at Rutgers University, gives a presentation to the Rutgers University Board of Governors on Digital Humanities. He argues that the English department is moving towards that of Digital Humanities due in large part to the internet becoming increasingly involved in English and humanities education. His presentation defines and discusses Web 2.0 (the web as used for creation rather than just research) and how the use of things such as Wikipedia, blogs, etc. are pushing everyone towards creation-mode on the internet. Through this presentation, Miller hopes to convince the Board of Governors to allow for the creation of a Digital Humanities department at Rutgers University.

Audrey Altman is set to give a presentation at the University of Iowa entitled, "Attck of the Digital Map! The Wonderful Monsters We Create When Humanities and Technology Collide." In her upcoming presentation Audrey will discuss both historical analysis and digital mapping and the requirements that both bring to the table individually in any given project. Both are individually composed of different aspects and Audrey will try to discuss the pros and cons of both tools when used together simultaneously for one project. Altman will also highlight on the project that she and her undergraduate students have embarked upon this semester that attempts to utilize the two aspects into one project. She will attepmt to delve into the findings, triumphs, ailures, and education gained by she and her students throughout the whole experience.

This short blog post announces and advertises Audrey Altman's upcoming talk about digital mapping. This talk is designed to discuss how historical analysis of maps and digital mapping require different sets of skills and methodologies. She is speaking from the context of a project she is heading which is which is involving undergraduate students in to creation of map-based documents for an archive on Iowa Latino/a history. Her talk is going to talk about both problems and surprises involved with the project and digital mapping.

This blog post created in anticipation of a panel on undergraduate work and research in the digital humanities creates many questions and ideas for discussion at the panel. The author invites others to share input in hopes of turning it into a discussion to bring forward to the panel at the 2013 Digital Humanities conference. Among these questions and ideas are questions of the best way to incorporate project-based digital humanities research approaches in the undergraduate classroom as well as designing curricula to incorporate Digital Humanities into the coursework while still including traditional humanities disciplines.

This post highlights a project by Sanna Dullaway to recolor old black-and-white photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries in order to recreate the vibrant, colorful worlds that we usually imagine in sepia-tone. In addition to the praise of the project, Yvonne Seale questions if it takes away our historical imaginations and violates the artifacts' historical integrity. Either way, she concedes that this project makes the past more tangible to newer and younger audiences used to seeing everything in color and gets them thinking about history.

At the Digital Studio for Public Humanities, Kyle Moody attempted to define digital humanities in one sentence: "open and accessible research and content creation, distribution, and evaluation by persons able to use or utilize technology." In his definition, all people are included whether they are coders or not, a notable difference from many other digital humanists' definitions. Moody discusses how the digital humanities and technology are helping to blur the line between those accessing and consuming content and those creating content. This active reaction to what is being consumed helps developers to see what is wanted and needed and adjust their content based on public reaction. He left his audience with the open question of whether or not the academy has the responsibility to give the public more control over what scholars produce as well as if the academy should be the benevolent curator of cultural content.

The Berkeley Folk Music Festival Collection is an archive of audio recordings, documents, film footage, and photographs from the Special Collections Library at Northwestern University. The archive's purpose is to preserve the collection, present it to a wider audience, interpret its significance and importance, and allow users to learn more about the cultural heritage and history in the digital age. It is also functioning as a sort of prototype for an historically-infused digital folk music festival and a research workshop.