ENGL 481: Digital Humanities

The EBBA Archive is a website with a specific goal in mind in regards to 17th century broadside ballads. The site seeks to make 16th-18th century fully accessible as texts, art, music, and cultural records. Basically the main objective of the EBBA is to transcribe these broadside ballads into usable means that are open, accessible, useful, and applicable to the public.

The English Broadside Ballad Archive is a database of 17th century ballads. These ballads are made available on the website in the form of texts, art, music, and cultural records. The purpose of the database is to preserve the estimated 8,000 surviving ballads from this era for future generations to discover and study again. Several universities have teamed up to work on this archive, include the University of Texas at Dallas.

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.

An interesting website with the sole intent of informing and involving its viewers. Viewers are able to correct, transcribe, tage and comment digitally uploded information. This information comes from archives of cookbooks, diaries, collections, letters, etc. The website also includes an extensive amont of news, tweets, updates, and contributions via the viewers for the viewers, A great website that really involves its audience. Like a modern day wiki.

This is a neat site created to allow viewers to interact with the archives they come in contact with. ALomost like a modern day wiki. The site contains links that enable the participant to correct, transcribe, or tag and comment of the collections they come across. Some of their collections include cookbooks, diaries, collections, letters, etc. The site also contains news updates, contributions, and tweets to and from the viewers themselves.

DIY History is a website for the public to use to help contribute to preserving diaries, letters, cookbooks, and other handwritten documents by transcribing them and posting them to the database. It also allows these users to go through already machine-transcribed documents to check for errors and make corrections when necessary. The diaries and documents included on this website range from Civil War-era documents, World War II items, and college yearbooks.

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.

This bibliography of Lynn H. Nelson was written by virtual and close friends who felt the need to write about his life and his contributions to the World Wide Web. In 1998, the web was very young and it was still possible to imagine that a history network could have been monitored by a team of volunteers that coordinated. Lynn had also developed and organized hyperlinks structure of Bernies Lee's World Wide Web virtual library built in 1991. Lynn was a mentor in the field of transitional digital history and humanities computing in 1998 he wrote an essay for a mono graphic issue of the Italian contemporary history journal Memorie De Ricerca. Lynn created one of the first open Access Digital Library worldwide in Kansas and elsewhere.

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 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.

This is an official website for a project being done at the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship. The area of spatial humanities is very map and image driven. The purpose to produce a better understanding and cultivate new questions that may not have been addresses before mapping.

This article addresses the subject matter of the audiences in Digital Humanities. Working with the Powerhouse online database, researchers have been able separate this audience into four different categories. This includes the familiars, seekers, utilisers, and wanderers making up the largest percentage.

This short statement at the beginning of San Marinos article Literature is not Data: Against Digital Humanities establishes the argument that BIG DATA IS INDEED COMING FOR OUR BOOKS. Marino believes that all Human endeavors have generated its own Monadic mass of data, and through these vast accumulations of ciphers the robots now endlessly scour for significance. He also believes that a smart book with a stupid title offers a fascinatingly general look at the new algorithmic culture. This culture is generated by a step by a step procedure for calculation and of times displayed through technological advancements. Marino ultimately argument is that literature is currently being took over by this "new" culture.

This blog addresses how video games contribute to Digital Humanities. It is a new study that raises questions to how to go about researching and developing this topic. This study can eventually bridge the gap between analog and digital archives, and culture criticism and methods. It can also show how video games are used as a teaching method and the benefits and challenges it entails. This can also encourage discussion about the role of video games in digital humanities.

This blog addresses the challenges with scholarly research that are faced when discussing 18th and 19th British women writers. One challenge is that how is it decided what information is being included in the archive and how accurate is it. Not all digital archives have equal access; this gives a disadvantage for people's research because they do not have access to all the information they need. She answers how to make digital humanities more accurate and how it can be used in a classroom through many different professors prospectives.

A professor came and spoke to students and faculty about how students in higher education can integrate mapping tools into the classroom. They use these projects as organizational templates, spatial analysis, metaphors, graphs, and charts. She posts questions that should be asked before choosing the mapping approach for their projects.

The article by Rob Blades analyzes the role and value of computers from the perspective of a historian, particularly in relation to the shifting notion of agency and history. Much like movements in the field of History pertaining to the reintegration of marginalized groups, such as women or the working class, Blades argues that computers should be seen as having some measure of agency in our handling of them in research. He points to the number of programs coming close to matching Humans in the Turing Test, a test for determining "humanness," and delivers a counter argument to the claim that computers "dumb down" the population in general, and in particular historians who rely on them.

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.

Dene Grigar developed a way to allow digital media scholars to combine their work from different areas of studies. She found that it helped scholars work together and easily understand other's work. This program gives hands on experience for students that teach them that creating a website is more in depth and can potentially impact the modern society. They also need to understand that each students background is combined and implemented with different teaching methods to create a digital media course.

This blogger was asked to create a website over the papers she had been digitizing. Creating a website entailed knowing how to code it, which she had to learn. Her study shows that having the students build a website adds to their learning process and gives them new ways to think. It also allows the students to collaborate with their teachers that can further engage their research process by adding new questions or finding multiple audiences. The future of Digital Humanities lies within the graduate students and how they are being trained so that they can find better and easier ways to teach the younger generation.

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.

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.

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.