3. What is this thing called Digital
Humanities or DH?
• Umbrella term covering a wide range of activities, from
online preservation and digital mapping to data mining
and use of GIS technologies , like infrared scans,
geolocation mapping, and optical character recognition
to enrich these resources with related information or
make entirely new discoveries about them.
There have been scholars and technologists doing DH
work long before DH was a word!
Previously known as Human Computing
4. Variety of meanings
• Day in the Life of Digital Humanities (8 April
2013)
• Definitions
http://dayofdh2013.matrix.msu.edu/members/
The humanities, now
with digital.
Using new
methods to
find out more
about old
things
I defined DH for
my aging parents
as "using
computers to
improve the ways I
study, learn, and
write about my
research and my
experiences, even
though I'm not a
rocket scientist."
Digital humanities is the
broader exploration of
how technology can be
integrated into
traditional scholarly
activities and the
creation of new forms of
scholarship and media
10. DH Projects
• What knowledge can digital humanities
scholars produce that their predecessors
could not?
• One of the principle projects was making
historical and literacy texts available online
• Data mining and text encoding projects are
often paired with interesting visual
representations, multimedia, and interactive
tools
Can use tools like Voyant, and Zotero to do data mining. Called with Criminal Intent Project.
Repositories like Dspace, Fedora, Digitool. Display/publishing ones projects - Greenstone, Omeka, Zotero (which can be integrated with other DH research tools)
ADHO international umbrella body of a number of organisations - hosts a number of journals LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities; also Digital Humanities Quarterly; Digital Humanities Summer Institute (a week long bootcamp at U of Victoria in Canada) + sponsors the annual joint conference