ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

This event is a week long opportunity that discusses different topics about digital humanities. Each participant will get extensive material about their topic that pertains to their knowledge about digital humanities. A beginning course would show how project development and humanitites programming which no experience is required.

This guide is for teachers who face the challenge of teaching digitally in K-12 and how it can be used in a creative and collaborative way. Collaboration comes from the students and other teachers and needs to be incorporated into digital teaching so that they can learn from each other. Administrators need to be fully knowledgable about new technology so they can show the teachers who then show the students. They also want to create more study groups with digital tools for the students to collaborate more with each other.

A Canadian school principle created a website for other principles about why social media is important in the teaching of modern students. The principles write blogs that discuss different types of social medias and how they can be incorporated into practical ways in schools. They want to impact the student's learning with the parents help and this can be done through social medias.

The HathiTrust Digital Library is a partnership of research institutions and libraries working to securely preserve historical collections to be accesible long into the future. These collections are open access, and include a wide spectrum of cultures across a variety of different time periods. The partnership has been recently engaged in legal disputes regarding alleged copyright infringement in their Orphan Works Project. In addition to basic access to many of the collections, the HDL offers search functions within the documents that allow for new uses of the texts, such as text mining.

This is article on the HathiTrust verdict explains the extent to which the verdict will affect the use of digitized materials in university libraries. The verdict held that digitizing works for the purpose of providing access to the blind and print-disabled is not only fair, but transformative use. This will allows universities to not only maintain digitized texts for this audience, but to share them among each other, reducing wait times for materials from months to minutes.

This is a guest blogpost on the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) website of TAMU, written by Dr. Jacob heil, a post-doctoral researcher for the IDHMC. He writes in an attempt to express the early modernist's perspective of DH. He starts by discussing the issue of definition ("in" or "out"), His opinion is that, "To my mind, I'm not 'in' or 'out' of DH; I'm just doing my work." He embraces the popular ethos of collaboration and a dedication to open-access, though he admits they might be ideals. He argues that reasearch should become resource, speaking of the way in which teachers share their research.

THATCamp stands for "The Humanities and Technology Camp." Its creators refer to it as an "unconference." They do this to distinguish themselves from typical humanities conferences, in which the reading of papers and overly-thick academia lessens the helpfulness and practicality of it all. The website gives a number of bullets describing the idea: THATCamp is "collaborative, informal, spontaneous, timely, productive, lightweight, inexpensive to organize, not-for-profit, small, non-hierarchical, non-disciplinary, inter-professional, open, online, fun, and engaging. It expresses its desire to not only attract scholars, but people with a broad diversity of backgrounds and skills.

This article gives a brief overview of the environment surrounding the HathiTrust litigation, and gives some added insight to the cases in which Google has been involved. It specifically notes Google's exclusion from the Orphan Works project, citing Judge Denny Chin's assertion that private parties should not be allowed to "establish a mechanism for exploiting unclaimed books.

Matthew Ingram discusses the recent ruling on the Author's Guild's copyright infringement lawsuit. The author points out the decisive nature of the ruling, and goes on to explain the reasons that the project clearly falls under the protection of fair use. He argues that this ruling follows the intent of copyright law, to promote research and knowledge.

This overview of copyright law and the application of fair use discusses the deciding factors as they apply to different types of copyrighted work.