ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

This brief presentation on the Fifth Annual Graduate Student Conference on World History gives an example of some of the things the field of History is looking to track and how the field is expecting to change. The conference is requesting papers on the topics of cultural mobility, political movements, and networks utilized for the transmission of ideas. More of interest to digital humanists though is the category of Mapping Movements, with an explicit focus on the new technologies and digital humanist methods being developed that can be utilized to assist this process.

The Sloan Foundation focuses its grants in science, technology, and economic institutions that they believe will improve American quality of life. Many of the open-access journals and projects that the Sloan foundation provides grants for fall under the initiatives for Information Technology and the Dissemination of Knowledge. The initiative look for projects that expand public access to research journals, archives, and books online.

Literary Cartography attempts to use literary geography to incorporate real place instead of just symbolic space. This cite conveys the importance of seeing the goegraphy in a literary text and the way it shapes our perceptions and culture.

The goal of the collaboration between the Sloan Foundation and Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at U-M's Institute for Social Research is the lessen the gap between the published peer-reviewed articles and the data they cite. They are attempting to make the research data for social sciences to become more transparent and open for researchers. The main goal of this project is to create, implement, and standardize citation that gives the producers proper credit.

This article is providing an update of the advances DPLA has made in creating a digital national public library. DPLA announced the launch of it Digital Hubs Pilot Project in 7 states at DPLA Midwest (a large conference in Chicago. The project was created to help local libraries and communities digitize their collection with technological resources and supportive staff. A prototype will be launched in April of 2013 with topics including civil rights, Native Americans, and immigration. It also announced Appfest (held Nov. 8 & 9) to present ideas, including working models, of possible platforms for the metadata.

The MHL's focus is to digitize and make available a large scale collection of rare medical journals, books, articles, and films. Their goal is to make it a free, open access journal of historical, established, and highly-qualified medical material to advance contemporary understanding of the medical field along with common knowledge of humanity. A majority of the contributors are university libraries, including Harvard an Yale. It is not a forum to publish current or contemporary research and articles.

This forum on digital gaming raises some controversial questions in regards to the gaming world in our culture today. It points out the "serious addictions" and "aggressive tendencies" that most digital games possess today and raises the question, "Could it change?" Would a gaming system that introduces "virtual Peace" catch on in the mainstream gaming culture, or only pool in the more "university study" sites that seek to introduce it? Could a spark catch in peaceful gaming that instead of violence incorporates UNICEF or Red Cross into the virtual gaming world?

OKC is a collaborative effort to "make the record of human knowledge" inclusive. They plan to do this by digitizing printed or physical artifacts in libraries and creating an online collection. It talks about the issues libraries face, such as funding for digitization, and attempt to rectify the issues with the libraries. This page also includes projects OKC suports and is contributing to, such as the Wikipedia Gateway Project. It promotes collaboration between libraries and cultural centers and advocates for the smaller 'non-commercial players.' Their greatest interest concerning technology, is to attempt to advance and integrate existing technical architecture.

Blogger and self proclaimed Digital Humanist Shannon Christine Mattern worries that the technical term "digital humanities" does not do the field any justice. The title was then broken down by Mattern. She says that digital is too broad of a term. If something by chance involves technology, it might be prematurely designated into Digital Humanities. The focus relies too heavily on "digital".

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.

This study highlights the need for raising teacher's awareness of ER-based reading comprehension questions. This study was conducted to determine how frequently critical thinking is used in EFL reading comprehension contexts at the tertiary level in an Iranian University. To collect the data, the researchers observed all reading comprehension courses in one of the universities in Isfan Province. They recorded 30 percent of the total number of sessions using two mini-size MP4 wireless recorders during the spring semester. The findings suggested that the teachers focus on each CRQ type strongly influences student attention when reading different passages.

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 article is an announcement of, and response to statements issued by the AHA on two separate occasions. The author discusses the stagnant nature of attempts to deal with open access with an economic regard to academic journals. He supports a consortium model, and calls for general support for fledgling open access journals from the AHA.

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.

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 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.

GeaCron is a project for mapping the entire world with not just the geography, but the history of the locations as well. Its purpose is to provide a map where researchers and students can select a time period and see what historical events were occurring at that same time period all over the world in as many countries as possible. Currently, the maps cover political events starting at 3000 BC, and the newest events being archived for modern day will be available at the start of 2013. The maps allow for a variety of features including relief maps, zooming, navigating in time, and embedding digital media sites to further enrich the information on the geographical areas through time.

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.