ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

A doctoral student in English whose focus is modernist studies, textual studies, and projects in the digital humanities shows how teaching can be used with technology to make the students question their influences with their writing. His project is to track and evaluate modernists texts that reveal the influence of its history. In finishing his project he hopes to show that electronic editions of books reveal more information that show how books can be unstable and uncomplete.

In this article a group of researchers are asked to describe the function that their blogs will serve to them and researchers that are going to viewing their blogs. These researchers blogs are motivated by the possibility to share knowledge, aid creativity and provide a feeling of being connected in their research. Ultimately the analysis brings out the blog's combination of function and possibility it offers to each multiple audience.

This artical poses the question of "Why do people join virtual communities?" Across 27 communities in 5 different broad types, 569 different from 399 people indicatged that most sought either friendship or exchange of information, and a markedly lower percent sought social support lower or recreation. In all the communities types information exchange was the most popular reasoning for joining.

This opportunity is offered electronically to gather information on different games that can be used in teaching literature, languages, and writing. Some of the games are not done digitally but others focus around teaching with video games or social networks. Virtual worlds and spatial games (foursquare, geocaching, ect) will also be used as a teaching method. Selection of people who will be asked to present their findings will be based on different styles of classrooms, student experiences, successes, and failures.

This event is promoting digital teaching to show how looking at an object or text digitally can produce different aspects that would not have been found otherwise. Undergrads typically are able to do some work digitally but lack how to interpret it. Through the collaboration with students they are able to build digital artifacts instead of using technology for media purposes only. This event will show students how to build and interpret digital humanities by showing different projects from scholars that are knowledgable in digital humanities

Tim Hitchcock begins this article by stating that books are dead. He goes on to explain his statement, qualifying that the process of creating a 'book' is lengthy and redundant, especially in the digital age. In our current state, we still think of data in reference to standard book form (book, chapter, page, line). He also criticizes modern humanists' approach/integration of scholarship and technology. Hitchcock believes that many utilize technical shortcuts (such as Google Books), but refuse to recognize it. Or they reference an article that they found online, but cite the paper version. His greatest criticism is the path that he believes digital humanities is going. He beleves that it is following the progress of the book too closely and that in an attempt to make things accessible, they have not utilized the versatility of digital publishing. He notes that how we currently view books depends on how digital humanities progresses. At the end of the article, Hitchcock describes his original tone and intention of the article. He also describes the editing and peer-review process.

This is an opportunity for people who want to learn more about digital humanities and how to research and teach it. Digital expertises will show their digital projects and form small groups that shows technologies and skills to get started on their digital project. At the end of this event, participants will have a plan how to start their digital humanities project and have resources that can help them in their field.

James J. O'Donnel wrote this insert in the Chronicle Review in order to see how people respond to reading on Kindle. O'Donnel discovered that in contemporary America more and more readers are purchasing kindles because they are very accessible and very affordable. This insert explores the various opinions from different professors and students who find kindle affective. These reviews helps O'Donnel come to the conclusion that kindles should be used for replacement of Text books.

A literature teacher and researcher who is very fond of books and texts has realized the importance of a digital education. She likes the digital aspect of researching information because if information is given digitally it gives people around the world access to it. This can create a better education for people around the world and connect people who have the same interests. She focuses on discussing Digital Humanities that focus around literature and arts so that once more people become digitally connected, humanities people can demonstrate their skills and expertise that are relatable to people around the world outside of a classroom or library. She knows the importance it is for the 21st century to have easier access to more humanities knowledge that can be shown everywhere.

This is a follow-up article to a post Cohen wrote on Wikipedia and its relation to Google and Yahoo. In this post, he discusses the validity of Wikipedia as a tool to create text profiles of subjects for search engines.

This website has been created which will serve to scholars in the United States that will provide free information that pertains to the history of women's education. The material off their website can be used for teaching, research, or other interests. They also have work that undergraduate students have compiled such as lesson plans and digital scrapbooks. On their website they also announce upcoming exhibitions and events that pertain to Digital Humanities and also essay contests.

This is a a blog by Peter Bradley, a digital humanist whose focus is in philosophy. He makes the observation that there is a definite lack of philosophers in the DH. He notes that there are philosophers who work in technological advancement, and philosophers who use technology to advance philosophy, but he states there is no one doing philosophy. For example, philosophers may analyze the concept of open-access and Logicians may help with coding, but people are not utilizing the technical aspects for their research such as map trends.

A professor at Georgetown University is collaborating with students to further develop the Wikipedia Arabic program that has very few data covering materials in this language. Students will work with people who speak Arabic, mostly those that live in Egypt, to create and translate Arabic articles. This professor plans to show others her students research so that they can influence other scholars research and further develop research in translating media information around the world.

This Article discusses the interests that Google and Yahoo have in Wikipedia. The story that Cohen claimsis being missed is the generosity exhibited towards Wikipedia by these two corporations with little or no apparent compensation. He then explains the benefits that Wkipedia can offer to the field of data mining.

Mark Sample writes about the inaugural issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities, topics ranging from arguments about humanists interpretations of quantitative data to a review of WordSeer. The journal's aim is to catch the good-or finding substantive and valuable digital humanities work "in whatever format, and wherever, it exists." This includes podcasts, blog posts, twitter conversations, slideshows, and any other relevant work, layered with evaluation from the authors.

This blog post by Dan Cohen discusses the collection of digital ephemera, such as twitter posts, and its legitimate relevance to historical analysis. Cohen leans towards supporting the Library of Congress in their decision to take historical artifacts like this seriously, citing examples of thankful historians rejoicing over the preservation of what was thought to be scrap paper. He then goes on to discuss the problem in terms of costs, noting the relatively cheep nature of the digital texts.

The two annoted biblographies present in this publication document sparks future discussions toward the activity of modeling the social edition. THis annotated biblography first explores reading devices, tools and social media issues and second, social networking tools for professional readers in the Humanities.

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.

This website provides information about several programs, websites, and formats that show promise in long-term sustainability of digital information. It also describes formats that they do not believe will be the best option of sustainability. It also covers formats in consideration of copy right laws, collecting the information, and how to adjust a format to fit the Library of Congress recommendations.

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.