A presentation given by the Digital Humanities Collective, at QuasiCon 2014 (held at the University of Michigan School of Information).

1. A New Mode of
Scholarship:
Digital Humanities,
the Library,
and the Collaboratory
Steven Hoelscher / Alix Keener / Setsuko Yokoyama
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

2. DIGITAL HUMANITIES:
➊ Using digital tools and methods to do
traditional humanities research
➋ Analyzing new digital technologies using
traditional humanities modes of inquiry
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

3. LISA SPIRO:
✪ Provide wide access to cultural
information
✪ Enable manipulation of that data
✪ Transform scholarly communication
✪ Enhance teaching and learning
✪ Make a public impact
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

4. “Using the Digital to Read Literary Texts in Context”
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

5. “COLLABORATORY”
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

6. DATA-CENTRIC VIRTUAL SPACES
TO FACILITATE COMMUNICATION &
DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

7. COUNCIL ON LIBRARY AND INFORMATION RESOURCES’
FOUR EXPERTISES:
➊
➋
➌
➍
DOMAIN
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
DATA MANAGEMENT
ANALYTICAL
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

8. COLLABORATORIES REQUIRE:
➊ COMMUNICATION
➋ DOCUMENTATION
➌ USER-CENTERED DESIGN
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

9. ➊ COMMUNICATION
79 Main Themes; 108 Secondary Themes
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

10. ➋ DOCUMENTATION
Commodities Mentioned:
✪ This includes any commodities mentioned in the text, but only those
exhibiting exchange value, which includes cultural or symbolic capital in
addition to monetary value. It does not, however, include use value.
This section uses the language of the text.
✪ The distinction between use value and exchange value:
✸ “the pretty coat at the ball” has exchange value because it is there
representing a cultural sign of wealth or beauty.
✸ “the coat” that is mentioned as being worn in the winter because it is
cold has use value. It keeps the wearer warm but does not represent
a cultural or exchange value.
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

11. ➌ USER-CENTERED DESIGN
RAPID PROTOTYPING
ITERATIVE DESIGN
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QuasiCon 2014

12. ➌ USER-CENTERED DESIGN
landofsunshine.org
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

13. “COLLABORATORY”
AS A PHYSICAL SPACE TO WONDER IN
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

14. EXPLORATORY NATURE OF
DIGITAL HUMANITIES
RESEARCH & THE
TRADITIONAL FUNCTION
OF THE LIBRARY
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

15. @DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

16. “We’ll never have the chance to work
with programmers who speak the
language of the humanities as well as
Perl, Python, or PHP.”
Mark Sample
“On the Death of the Digital Humanities Center”
26 March 2010
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

17. @DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

18. Workshops to Humanize and Sample Tools
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

19. Workshops to Humanize and Sample Tools
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

20. LIBRARY & LIBRARIANS
AS:
✪ a facilitator of searching and browsing
✪ the access point to the tools
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

21. BEYOND DIGITIZATION:
Digital Humanities,
Academic Libraries, and
Library Publishing
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

22. Moving beyond narrow definitions of
digital humanities as simply text analysis
or digitizing physical material
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

23. ✪ Maryland Institute for Technology in the
Humanities (MITH)
✪ Scholar’s Lab at UVA (established at UVA library)
✪ MATRIX at MSU
✪ Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at
University of Nebraska-Lincoln (partnership
between UNL libraries and College of Arts &
Sciences)
✪ Princeton is in the process of building a center
with library as a main sponsor
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

24. “...a free-floating signifier, one that
increasingly serves to focus the anxiety
and even outrage of individual scholars
over their own lack of agency amid the
turmoil in their institutions and profession.”
Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital
Humanities and What’s It Doing in English
Departments?”
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

25. Library publishing and digital
humanities movements
=
similar origins
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

26. “This [focus of anxiety] is manifested in the intensity
of debates around open-access publishing, where
faculty members increasingly demand the right to
retain ownership of their own scholarship—meaning
their own labor—and disseminate it freely to an
audience apart from or parallel with more traditional
structures of academic publishing.”
Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital
Humanities and What’s It Doing in English
Departments?”
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

27. COMMON THREADS
✪ Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for
publishing; TEI for DH projects
✪ Twitter as peer-review; Twitter to
build community
✪ DH projects as extension of digital
publishing
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

28. @DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

29. Michigan Publishing seeks to create
innovative, sustainable structures for
the broad dissemination and enduring
preservation of the scholarly
conversation.
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

30. @DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

31. @DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

32. @DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

33. FUTURES
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

34. ✪ ACRL DH Discussion Group
Interest Group
✪ dh+lib
✪ New centers and labs
✪ Permanent positions
@DH_Collective
ACRL
QuasiCon 2014

35. “I cannot think of a successful digital humanities center —
anywhere in the world — that did not begin with a bunch of
people who had found each other through various means
and who were committed to the bold and revolutionary
project of talking to one another about their common
interests. Over time, that had morphed into an even bolder
and more revolutionary idea: the idea that perhaps they
could work on something together.”
Stephen Ramsay, “Centers Are People”
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

36. Will—or should—digital
humanities and scholarly
communication find the same
home in the library?
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

37. What kind of expertise is
needed? Collaborator or
supporter?
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

38. Works Cited:
Gold, Matthew K. 2012. Debates in the digital humanities. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Ramsay, Stephen. “Centers are People.” Stephen Ramsay. April 2012. http://stephenramsay.
us/text/2012/04/25/centers-are-people/
---. “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or What You Do with a Million Books.” Stephen Ramsay. 17 April 2010.
http://www.playingwithhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/hermeneutics.pdf
Sample, Mark. “On the Death of the Digital Humanities Center.” Sample Reality: Own Your Ideas. Make Them Free.
26 March 2010. http://www.samplereality.com/2010/03/26/on-the-death-of-the-digital-humanities-center/
Spiro, Lisa. “Why the Digital Humanities?” Digital Scholarship. 7 October 2011. http://digitalscholarship.files.
wordpress.com/2011/10/dhglca-5.pdf
Williford, Christa, and Charles Henry. “One Culture. Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social
Sciences.” June 2012.
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014

39. THANK YOU.
Steven Hoelscher / Alix Keener / Setsuko Yokoyama
@DH_Collective
QuasiCon 2014