Making sense of digital humanities

1. MAKING SENSE OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES - A
CONVERSATION STARTER:
Savvy Researcher Series
Presented by Ingrid Thomson, UCT Libraries

2. Outline
• Introduction
• Brief history
• Tools for Digital Humanities
• Examples of Digital Humanities
• DH Organisations/Conferences/Workshops
• Digital Humanities @ UCT

3. What is this thing called Digital
Humanities or DH?
• Umbrella term
• online preservation and digital mapping to data
mining and use of GIS technologies
• 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. Definitions....
• Day in the Life of Digital Humanities (8 April
2014)
• Some definitions: http://dayofdh2014.matrix.msu.edu/members/
DH is a cover term for a wide variety of activities that attempt to explore and
expand areas of knowledge typically examined in the Humanities by developing
and/or applying computational tools or methods in ways best suited for these
areas. DH is also a cover term for a supporting community of practitioners who
share a common interest in the tools and methods--and challenges--generated by
the activities DH scholars, as well as potentially useful activities in fields outside the
traditional Humanities. - Scott Kleinman California State University, Northridge

5. Definition
We use “digital humanities” as an umbrella term for a number of
different activities that surround technology and humanities
scholarship. Under the digital humanities rubric, I would include topics
like open access to materials, intellectual property rights, tool
development, digital libraries, data mining, born-digital preservation,
multimedia publication, visualization, GIS, digital reconstruction, study
of the impact of technology on numerous fields, technology for
teaching and learning, sustainability models, and many others
. -Brett Bobley, NEH, United States (2011)

6. More definitions
The humanities are the
humanities. Technology is merely
a tool (albeit a powerful one), not
a defining factor of a discipline.
You use it or you don't. The
Digital Humanities do not exist. -
Ethan Gruber American Numismatic Society
I define the digital humanities as two things. Firstly, I think of it as using new
and emerging technologies to enhance our understanding of our humanistic
fields of inquiry. For me, as a historian, it is learning new things through
technology that we couldn't learn otherwise. Secondly, I think of it as playing
and exploring new methods of scholarly communication - i.e. putting history
online - Ian Milligan, Uni of Waterloo

8. Broadly construed, digital humanities is the use of
digital media and technology to advance the full range
of thought and practice in the humanities, from the
creation of scholarly resources, to research on those
resources, to the communication of results to
colleagues and students.
Dan Cohen – Executive Director, Digital Public Library of
America

9. Brief History
• Image: http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/typo3temp/pics/7212f0d7fe.jpg
• Image: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/card2.jpg
• Images: http://www.osservatoreromano.va/orportal-portlets-portal/detail/binaries/news/cultura/2011/184q11-lettore-fermati----morto-padre-busa/184q05b.jpg
• Image: http://www.sas-sas.it/Alice/images/Thomis6.jpg

10. Corpus Thomisticum

11. Timeline of DH Developments
• 1949 – 170 Computer Centres
• 1973 – 1992 Scholarly societies and journals
Standards + Metadata(Text Coding Initiative –TEI)
• 1992 – 2004 Library digitization and digital humanities centres
• 2005 - onwards Mainstreamed
Image: http://atomictoasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Word-Proc-1.jpg

12. Library Digitization and Digital
Humanities Centres

14. Some thoughts ...Different types of
DHers
• Research DH impact on Humanities
• How to embed technology into pedagogy
• Project managers bringing together experts in
various fields
• Study large collections of texts, numeric data etc
• Visualising traditional humanities data using new
data visualisation techniques
• Digital content creation

15. • 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

16. Digital Humanities Tools
• Comprehensive list at Bamboo
DiRT
http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/

17. Network analysis
• Explore the relationships between individuals,
places, topics and more e.g. Sex, Race and
Allegiance in the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings
http://www.eduhacker.net/digital-humanities/sex-race-allegiance-hobbit-lord-of-the-rings.html

18. Data Visualisation
• Visualise to tell a story, understand, identify
trends, make connections, see patterns ....
With great speed
• A tool called Palladio which was used to do
Mapping the Republic of Letters http://palladio.designhumanities.org

19. Ngram Viewer (Google Books)
• Displays a graph showing how those phrases
have occurred in a corpus of books over the
selected years
https://books.google.com/ngrams/info

20. Text analysis
• Studying texts with computers and software
to uncover new patterns, overlooked
connections and deeper meaning

21. GIS
• A geographic information system (GIS)
integrates hardware, software and data for
capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying
all forms of geographically referenced
information
http://timemapper.okfnlabs.org/

22. Digital Exhibits
• Digitising of collections

23. Charles Darwin’s Library

24. Mapping the Republic of Letters

25. First World War Poetry Digital Archive

26. Shoah Visual Archives

27. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

28. Old Bailey Proceedings

29. Project coming out of Old Bailey
Proceedings

30. Key Questions coming out of that
project ....
• How can new digital methodologies enhance
understandings of existing electronic datasets
and the construction of knowledge?
• What were the long and short term impacts of
incarceration or convict transportation on the
lives of offenders, and their families, and
offspring?
• What are the implications of online digital
research on ethics, public history, and 'impact'?

31. DH Centres and Organisations
- a handy list

34. http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/

35. Digital Humanities @ UCT

36. But wait....
SNEAK PREVIEW OF WHAT’S COMING SOONISH

38. HUMANITEC

39. Perhaps something like this in UCT’s
future????

40. • Adam Crymble describes his Digital
Humanities Thesis in two minutes
“Big Data, Old History “
http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/#047

41. Recommended Reading ....

42. Useful Reads + Links
• ACRL Digital Humanities Interest Group http://connect.ala.org/node/158885
• Task Force on Librarians’ Competencies in Support of E-Research and Scholarly Communication
https://www.coar-repositories.org/activities/support-and-training/task-force-competencies/
• Schaffner, Jennifer and Erway, Ricky: Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center? OCLC
http://oclc.org/research/publications/library/2014/oclcresearch-digital-humanities-center-2014-overview.html
• Response from Beth Nowviskie to the OCLC Report above http://nowviskie.org/2014/asking-for-it/
• Dh+lib: where the Digital Humanities and Librarianship meet http://acrl.ala.org/dh/
• Coble, Zach: Make it New? A dh+lib Mini Series zachcoble.com/dhlib/Make-It-New-A-dhlib-Mini-Series.pdf
• Hubbard, Melanie: Explore Digital Humanities. Syracuse University. http://melaniehubbard.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/exploredh_plan_20141.pdf
• Adams, Jennifer and Gunn, Kevin. Digital Humanities: Where to start. College & Research Libraries News vol. 73 no. 9 536-569 October 2012.
http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/9/536.full
• VandeGrif, Michau: What is digital humanities and what is it doing in the library? http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/dhandthelib/
• Alexander,Laurie , Case, Beau David , Downing, Karen E, Gomis, Melissa and Maslowski, Eric: Librarians and Scholars: Partners in Digital Humanities. Educause
Review Online, June 2, 2014. http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/librarians-and-scholars-partners-digital-humanities
• Lease, Eric Morgan: Digital Humanities and Libraries (blog posting on Days in the Life of a Librarian) http://blogs.nd.edu/emorgan/2014/04/dh-and-libraries/
• Unsworth, John: What’s digital humanities and how did it get here? http://blogs.brandeis.edu/lts/2012/10/09/whats-digital-humanities-and-how-did-it-get-here/
BOOKS
Gold, Matthew: Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Bryson, Tim: Digital Humanities. Washington, DC : Association of Research Libraries, c2011.
LIBGUIDES
• Boston College Libguide to Digital Humanities http://libguides.bc.edu/c.php?g=44359&p=280873
• University of Ottawa Libraries: Digital Humanities: Research guide to provide information about the growing field of study called Digital Humanities
http://uottawa.ca.libguides.com/digitalhumanities-en

43. Useful Reads + Links
EXAMPLES OF DH PROJECTS
• Mapping the Republic of Letters http://www.republicofletters.stanford.edu/
• First World War Poetry Digital Archives http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/www1lit/
• Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces
• Kindred Britain http://kindred.stanford.edu/#
• Old Bailey Proceedings http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/
• Charles Darwin’s Library http://www.biodiversity.org/collection/darwinlibrary
• Sex, Race and Allegiance in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings http://www.eduhacker.net/digital-humanities/sex-race-allegiance-hobbit-
lord-of-the-rings.html
• French Revolution
TOOLS TO EXPLORE
• Bamboo Dirt http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/
• Voyant http://www.voyant-tools.org
• Tapor http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal
• Palladio http://palladio.designhumanities.org
ORGANISATIONS
• Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations http://adho.org/
• That Camps http://thatcamp.org/