Digital Humanities Research

Slide 1: NERCOMP March 12, 2008 Supporting Digital Humanities Research: The Collaborative Approach •  Greenberg*, Hamlin°, Mylonas & Yott •  *UVM, °Wheaton, Brown 1

Slide 2: Supporting Digital Humanities Research: The Collaborative Approach This session is being blogged. Please check in on it and add your comments. http://blogs.nercomp.org/blogs/nac 2008/ 2

Slide 3: Projects A Digital Research Project in the Humanities: Engages with a research topic, whether practiced by faculty or students Can be motivated and carried out by faculty and by students Is informed by standards and practices recognized in the growing DH and DL communities Is self conscious in its use of the digital medium and digital rhetoric 3

Slide 4: Roles Content Expert: faculty member/student researcher/archivist/community member Data Creator/Data Encoder Cataloger/Metadata Creator Technology Bridge Person: digital humanities staff/ instructional technologist/digital librarian Technical Expert: programmer, software architect UI and Graphic Designer (accessibility, too!) Data Infrastructure Provider: digital repository Digital Infrastructure Provider: systems staff 4

Slide 5: Characteristics Digital humanities research projects have sometimes contradictory goals: Flexibility ‣Sustainability Individualized ‣Standardized presentation presentation Digital humanities ‣Digital library standards standards and best and best practices practices 5

Slide 6: Digital libraries  Digital projects need resources that are high quality, reliably available and well cataloged  Libraries preserve and disseminate digital resources as they do traditional materials.  Digital projects should build on digital library assets, and drive their development 6

Slide 7: Digital publications  Significant as process and as product  Are a way to transfer (digital) scholarly skills to undergraduate and graduate students  Digital projects become scholarly product  They become assets to be cataloged, preserved and disseminated  They themselves become an object of scholarship 7

Slide 8: Digital Humanities @ Wheaton College Scott Hamlin Director of Technology for Research and Instruction shamlin@wheatonma.edu

Slide 9: Wheaton College Overview  Norton, MA  Small private liberal arts undergraduate college  >1500 students  student faculty ratio: 11.7: 1  3% of classes have over 50 students  LIS division 9

Slide 10: Digital Humanities Projects @ Wheaton Support  Research and Instruction Department  Liaison model Genesis of Digital Humanities Projects  Awards and Grants  Faculty Initiated  Liaison Initiated 10

Slide 11: Character of Digital Humanities Scholarship @ Wheaton  Research and Pedagogy linked  Example from the Sciences  Examples from the Humanities  Recent example where research comes first  Using large, complex technologies in small ways  GIS  TEI  Technology as a way to depth  Projects are Collaborative:  Faculty/Archivist/Librarians/Technologists 11

Slide 12: Character, Part 2  Level of support is high  Challenge: Hardly ever polished or complete  Advantages  Collaborations  Ability to carry out a project quickly  Faculty willingness to experiment with technology for teaching and research  Process over Product 12

Slide 13: Book of Misfortunes and Shipwrecks: A Text Encoding Project (TEI XML) 13

Slide 14: [Map of the world], Vesconte Maggiolo. Neapoly [Naples]: 1511 14

Slide 15: Overview of the Process  Choosing the text (Faculty and sometimes Archivist)  Project Planning (Faculty, IT, and sometimes Archivist)  Transcription (Students)  Structural Tagging (Students)  Content Encoding (Students)  Analytical Encoding and Glossaries (Students)  XML-> HTML Transformation (IT and Students) 15

Slide 16: Transcription Determinado t&etilde;go &dspir; reduzir en e&longs;te vltimo libro algunos ca&longs;os &dspir; infortunios ι naufragios ι co&longs;as acaecidas en la mar: 16

Slide 17: Some of the entities used 17

Slide 18: Encoded Text 18

Slide 19: Transformed text 19

Slide 20: Student Response “I learned not only a new way to represent data electronically, but it allowed me to do a very very close reading of each of the words, phrases, characters, definitions, etc.” “[This work] is more interesting, allows a closer reading, and an online representation of your work, which is very rewarding.” “I usually stink at computers, and this project showed me that I can do something really good with them and come up with a great final product.” “I feel like its a great idea to build on this work we've done. It would be interesting to have more research done on the various people and places that we did not research.” 20

Slide 21: Student Reactions (continued) “It was an interesting new way to analyze a text. I love learning languages and reading, but sometimes the lit classes are too dry. This class allowed us to better analyze the text linguistically and contextually.” “I feel like I better understand the Spanish language. And not just in comprehension, but also the inner workings. For example, I used to put a tilde over a 'n' just because, but now I know what their purpose is. I also feel like I wasn't wasting my time with my work. Projects that can actually be used for something or by someone make me feel like there is a point to doing them.” “I actually like working with TEI because it is a very mechanical process. It gets accomplished in steps so it is not so intimidating, although it is confusing at first.” 21

Slide 22: Digital Humanities at the University of Vermont Hope Greenberg Academic Computing Services Center for Teaching and Learning Learning Resources Group

Slide 23: Digital Humanities at UVM: A History of Failure

Slide 24: “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that haven't worked.” - Thomas Alva Edison

Slide 25: IT Support, serving 12,000 students, 3,000+ faculty and staff: Enterprise Technical Services Departmental IT Groups and then there is us: Learning Resources Group Center for Academic Teaching Computing and Services Learning (ACS) (CTL) Center for Media Development (CMD)

Slide 26: Academic Computing Services “We will explore we will recommend we will encourage you we will teach you how to do it but we can’t do it for you.”

Slide 27: We support PEOPLE WebCT Blackboard MySQL wikis video CSS podcasts ContentDM SPSS blogs EndNote web Word php xml GIS dSpace workshops PowerPoint PhotoShop

Slide 28: But what about digital humanities?

Slide 29: The Idea We can build and support an infrastructure for humanities faculty and students to create the digital resources they need to advance their teaching, learning, and scholarship goals.

Slide 30: Experiment 1: R&D Marketing

Slide 32: Experiment 2: Inspire with exemplars

Slide 35: <HEAD TYPE="article">PERFUMES FOR THE LADIES, AND WHERE THEY COME FROM.</HEAD><DIV2 TYPE="images”> <p>Perfumes appear to have been in general use throughout Asia from the remotest times. Their ~eneral introduction into Europe was of comparatively recent date; and up to the present time, tl~e favorite and costly perfumes are still brought from the EasL</p></DIV2>

Slide 38: Experiment 3: “Grow” student expertise

Slide 40: Experiment 4: Combine forces

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Slide 42: 42

Slide 44: Experiment 5: Image Collections

Slide 48: Experiment 6: A more formal approach…

Slide 49: i.e., get more $$

Slide 51: We have learned…

Slide 52: Looking Ahead…

Slide 53: “If we knew what we were doing it wouldn’t be called research.”

Slide 54: University of Vermont Center for Digital Initiatives: http://cdi.uvm.edu Questions: hope.greenberg@uvm.edu Winona Salesky’s blog on the process of building the CDI: http://thedil.wordpress.com/

Slide 55: Digital Humanities at Brown The semi-permeable membrane… Elli Mylonas, Scholarly Technology Group Patrick Yott, Center for Digital Initiatives

Slide 56: In Brief • “University-College” • 680 faculty • 5800 undergraduates and 2200 graduates • Support for digital activities • CIS-Teaching and Learning Services (6) • CIS-Scholarly Technology Group (3) • Library-Center for Digital Initiatives (5.5)

Slide 57: 1964-Development of Brown Corpus (Linguistics) 1968-Development of Fress Hypertext System (CS) 1983-Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) develops seminal Intermedia hypertext system Late 1980s-> George Landow and later Bob Coover teach hypertext fiction and digital writing. 1994-The Scholarly Technology Group (STG) is formed

Slide 59: • 3 Staff • 4-5 undergraduates, 3-4 graduate students • Attract projects through a “grants” program • Serve as seed projects for external funding • NEH/other grants • Close collaboration with the Women Writers Project • Close collaboration with the library’s Center for Digital Initiatives

Slide 60: Monastic Archaeology Project

Slide 61: Florentine Gazetteer based on 1585 axonometric map.

Slide 62: Fortune Hunting: An art project that plays with the idea of the archive

Slide 64: • 5.5 staff (+ affiliated staff throughout library) • Digitization of library’s special collections • Support for faculty projects • Development of campus-wide digital repository • Development of dl software and tools • Close collaboration with STG

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