Digital Humanities

12 Key excerpts on "Digital Humanities"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities

  • Willard McCarty, Marilyn Deegan, Willard Mccarty, Marilyn Deegan, Willard Mccarty, Marilyn Deegan(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Research in Digital Humanities has already had a significant impact beyond its immediate community of users and beyond humanities disciplines. This impact has led to what I would like to call ‘indirect collaboration’, that is the take-up of knowledge created within the academic world, but not specifically disseminated for the purposes of use outside academia. To examine this further, it is appropriate to consider terminology. The term ‘Digital Humanities’ might be interpreted as humanities computing, that is, the application of computing tools to research and teaching in the humanities. It might also be interpreted in a wide sense to describe all the many web sites that contain material from the humanities, for example, those used by family historians or by schools, or for self-publication. Although the term ‘Digital Humanities’ has now been widely adopted, in the long term, as we move further into a digital world, it may become less meaningful in an academic context. More advances are likely to be made in the manipulation and delivery mechanisms for resources, that is, in the computational methods and tools. For the future a return to the term ‘humanities computing’ might be more appropriate and this term is used here to denote tools and methodologies.

  Research in humanities computing has concentrated on tools and techniques. Two areas have made a substantial impact on the wider world. Firstly, concordances, used by the founder of our discipline, Fr Roberto Busa, are an important component of language analysis, understanding and creation systems. In the early days of humanities computing our conferences included many papers on the linguistic analysis of text. Eventually those working in this area spun off into two separate groups. In the first of these, after many years of mostly ignoring work on real texts, computational linguists began to embrace the benefits of large-scale text analysis and to develop more sophisticated tools. Statistical probabilities based on word frequencies and the contexts of keywords began to be used to separate out the meanings of ambiguous words. These fed into language understanding and creation systems which are now in everyday use, an example being Google’s Translate this Page function. Oddities in the language created by these systems often cause amusement, but in many instances in everyday life it does not matter if the language understanding system is not correct down to the last word, provided that it gives a reasonably accurate gist of the source text. Language understanding systems also form part of voice recognition systems used by airlines, telephone companies and the like. Here they are linked with speech recognition tools, but once some possible interpretations of the spoken words are identified, statistical probabilities based on word frequencies are used to select the appropriate word and meaning. In the long term these tools will become more accurate and they will begin to have a significant impact on the economy as they save costs. At present there appears to be little development work in the use and potential of these tools for humanities material, one major exception being current research at the Perseus Project. See, for example, Bamman and Crane (2008, 2009).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage

  • Erik Champion(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Debating The Digital Humanities: A Reader lists a ‘visual turn’ on page 179. Yet turning to pages 178–179, you will find that Patrik Svensson’s chapter actually decries the lack of reference to visual media projects or to multimedia in general (Svensson, 2013). As Svensson points out, the field of humanities computing has focused on the textual, but this does not mean that other projects were not developed. To quote from Hannah Gillow, who was critiquing Stephen Marce’s article ‘Literature is Not Data: Against Digital Humanities’ (Gillow, 2013):

  The first problem with this article is the title itself. In the best interpretation possible, the title suggests that Digital Humanities is limited to text mining and textual studies. Worst case, it suggests that Digital Humanities’ only purpose is reclassifying all literature as simply data.

  As we are well aware, both these statements are patently untrue. Digital Humanities encompasses an incredibly vast amount of categories, textual studies being only one of them.

  While Marce would be well within his grounds to point out the frequent hype that purports to be DH, to lambast the entire movement through attacking straw men does seem to be a step too far. However, the problem is more insidious than the opinion of just one critic. The low regard in which visualization is held seems to be shared by some of the academic press. For example, according to Lev Manovich (2012), the ‘Cambridge University Press Author Guide’ suggests that authors avoid illustrations as they will detract from the main argument.1

  You might counter that DH derives from the humanities computing field, which is itself heavily indebted to text-based research. After all, Susan Hockey wrote the following in her chapter ‘The History of Humanities Computing’ in one of the first definitive books on DH (Schreibman et al., 2004):

  Applications involving textual sources have taken center stage within the development of humanities computing as defined by its major publications and thus it is inevitable that this essay concentrates on this area. (Hockey, 2004, p. 4)

  On first reading, this seems reasonable. Yet one of the major journals listed was known at the time as Literary and Linguistic Computing

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Amongst Digital Humanists

  An Ethnographic Study of Digital Knowledge Production

  • Smiljana Antonijevi?, Smiljana Antonijevi?, Smiljana Antonijevi?, Smiljana Antonijevi?, Smiljana Antonijevi?, Smiljana Antonijević(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Huggett (2012) remarks that the term “literary comput- ing” peaked in the 1980s and declined in the mid-1990s, when humanities computing and linguist computing took prominence. The term “Digital Humanities” came last to the scene, in the mid- 1990s, but by the year 2005 it was the dominant term for the discipline (ibid.). Vanhoutte (2013) makes a similar terminologi- cal distinction, using the term humanities computing to refer to “the practice of using computing for and in the humanities from the early 1950s to 2004 when ‘Digital Humanities’ became the prominent name for the field” (p. 120; italics in the original). One theory suggests that this discursive shift from the term humanities computing to Digital Humanities indicated the field’s coming of age, its maturation as a fully developed professional and intellectual area of scholarship (Hayles, 2012). Another argument describes a more practical and strategic reason behind the name change. Kirschenbaum (2012) traces this terminologi- cal shift to a specific discussion about the title for a Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities, published in 2004, after the initial title Companion to Digitized Humanities was rejected as too narrowly focused on digitization. Another milestone in the naming of the field occurred in 2005, when the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the Humanities merged into the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). 3 When the US National Endowment for the Humanities launched their fund- ing initiative, Digital Humanities Initiative, in 2006 4 they chose this title over “ehumanities” and “humanities computing.” Most recently, the discursive victory of the term Digital Humanities manifested in the name-change of the longest–standing journal in the field, Literary and Linguistic Computing, renamed Digital Scholarship in the Humanities as of 2015.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Integrative Learning

  International research and practice

  • Daniel Blackshields, James Cronin, Bettie Higgs, Shane Kilcommins, Marian McCarthy, Anthony Ryan, Daniel Blackshields, James Cronin, Bettie Higgs, Shane Kilcommins, Marian McCarthy, Anthony Ryan(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 18 Digital Humanities and integrative learning Julianne Nyhan, Simon Mahony, and Melissa Terras Introduction Whether in universities, cultural heritage organisations such as museums, libraries and archives, commercial contexts, or even in individuals’ homes, the application of computing to cultural heritage is transforming how the human record can be transmitted, shaped, understood, questioned and imagined. The discipline now known as Digital Humanities (hereafter DH) has been carrying out interdisciplinary research involving scholars and practitioners from the aforementioned domains since at least 1949, when Fr Roberto Busa began work on an index variorum of some 11 million words of medieval Latin in the works of St Thomas Aquinas and related authors (Hockey, 2004). An increasingly mainstream area of academic research, in 2011 some 134 different academic courses offering DH were identified (Spiro, 2011), and anecdotally, it is clear that this number has increased since. The MA/MSc in DH in the Department of Information Studies, University College London (UCL), was launched in 2010. 1 It is an interdisciplinary programme, exploring the intersection of digital technologies, humanities scholarship and cultural heritage. Through it, students with humanities backgrounds can develop necessary skills in digital technologies; students with technical backgrounds can develop necessary skills in humanities. It is designed to produce students capable of performing the roles of project manager, information specialist or researcher within the cultural and heritage industry

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  A History of British Working Class Literature

  • John Goodridge, Bridget Keegan(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  chapter 25 Transforming Working Class Writers and Writing Digital Editions, Projects, and Analyses Cole Crawford I work primarily with late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century authors who produced printed texts, but my engagement with working class literary studies has always been mediated through a digital lens. As an undergraduate I double-majored in computer science and British liter- ature, a combination that generally elicits quizzical looks. But as scholars working within the hybrid field of Digital Humanities (DH) have demon- strated, these seemingly unrelated disciplines often overlap to a surpris- ing degree. Though traditional techniques such as close reading, rhetorical analysis, and literary criticism will remain necessary for scholarly research within the humanities, I believe that digital methodologies have increas- ingly become and will remain indispensable tools, both for supporting these established techniques and for asking and answering new questions, including questions that inform the study of laboring class authors. In what follows, I will provide a broad sketch of disciplinary trends in DH, discuss how other scholars of laboring class culture have employed digital meth- ods, and finally discuss two of my own current projects which, in differing ways, demonstrate some possibilities and limitations for digital approaches to the study of the working class writing. Digital Humanities emerged from the older, more narrowly focused sub- discipline of humanities computing, which began as early as the 1940s. 1 John Unsworth coined the term “Digital Humanities” in 2001 during the prepublication process for A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004), pre- ferring this new, broader description to the older label (Kirschenbaum).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Digital Humanities and the Digital Modern

  Humanities and New Media

  • James Smithies(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 1 The Challenge of the Digital Humanities This book is about the Digital Humanities and their relationship to the contemporary world. My primary contention is that the Digital Humanities are historically significant, regardless of their perceived intellectual worth, and have to be explored—and developed—in serious ways. This extends to taking criticism of them seriously and acknowledging commentators’ deep concerns regarding their effect on humanities research. The intriguing thing is, of course, that humanists have used computers, to a greater or lesser degree, for several decades now: it hardly seems like a subject that would warrant another extensive monograph. Novelists and researchers started using word processors in the late 1960s, 1 the first electronic library catalogue systems were installed in university libraries in the late 1970s, 2 and the first major intellectual furore about the use of computational methods surfaced in the 1970s. 3 Regardless of their attitude towards it, older researchers will recognise ‘digital’ as an important theme in their careers, whether it be the transition from hand-written essays to a QWERTY keyboard, the transition from card catalogues and microfiche to OPAC and web browser, corridor conversations about the evils of Wikipedia and Twitter, or disaster stories about dropped stacks of main- frame punch cards. Future historians will be intrigued by how dif ficult it has been for some humanists to reconcile themselves to this reality. Accepting that the humanities are deeply entangled with digital technology represents an important moment of recognition. It renders the adjective ‘digital’ redun- dant and freezes us in time, a generation confronted with new tools that neither we, nor the wider culture, fully understand. It is not a matter of whether we want digital tools in the humanities, but how we use the tools © The Author(s) 2017 J.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  New Publication Cultures in the Humanities

  Exploring the Paradigm Shift

  • Péter Dávidházi(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Galilean ideal of reading Nature in mathematical language; namely, of understanding and foreseeing it in an analytical way, by means of appropriate dif ferential equations, is now in question. To provide some Digital Humanities 23 limited examples, the dynamics of fluids has become a largely computerized discipline, not only because we use computers to solve numerically equa-tions that are analytically unsolvable in most cases (this use of computers corresponds to the extensive meaning of ‘epistemic enhancement’ above), but also because the detail of a turbulent f low cannot be suitably represented and analyzed except via a super-computer. 1 The same consideration of the complexity of data issue applies, even more eloquently in the present context, to the ‘reading’ of the human genome, which can obviously not be done by man alone: the database currently used encompasses more than f ive times the amount of information contained in the Library of Congress. To sum up, the most intriguing features of the Digital Humanities (DH) are currently shared with the classical domains of the hard sciences. One simply has to ask, in the general landscape of this New Kind of Science, what is the specif ic object of the humanistic brand of this general evolution? 2. Philology Aufgehoben The best way of characterizing the Digital Humanities is probably to contrast them with the tradition of the past half-century in ‘continental’ philosophy. People in this trend used to describe their activity as ‘interpretive’ or ‘her-meneutic.’ Considering that the Masters of Suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, to quote some of them) had defin itely deconstructed the traditional idea of philosophy as a variety of the pursuit of truth, they have emphasized the interpretive nature of any enterprise of understanding. The salient issue, in this perspective, is the adjudication of the standards of correctness for the interpretations.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Passwords

  Philology, Security, Authentication

  • Brian Lennon(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  138 • P A S S W O R D S Konnikova in Scientific American. “Stop treating them like one.” 27 Stanley Fish published two columns in the New York Times describing the discourse of Digital Humanities scholars as fundamentally “theological,” promising “to liberate us from the confines of the linear, temporal medium in the context of which knowledge is discrete, partial and situated . . . and deliver us into a spatial universe where knowledge is everywhere available in a full and immediate presence to which everyone has access as a node or relay in the meaning-producing system.” 28 “Literature,” Stephen March é wrote in a widely circulated essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “cannot meaningfully be treated as data. The problem is essential rather than superficial: literature is not data. Literature is the opposite of data.” 29 “We will wait forever,” wrote the editors of The Point magazine, introducing a symposium on the topic “What Is Science For?” “to taste the milk and honey promised by . . . ‘Digital Humanities.’ ” 30 In a widely circulated feature essay in New Re-public, Adam Kirsch characterized the enthusiasm for Digital Humanities as carrying an “undertone of menace, the threat of historical illegitimacy and obsolescence. Here is the future, we are made to understand: we can either get on board or stand athwart it and get run over.” 31 Writing in The Baffler, Catherine Tumber likened it to the confidence of Gen-eral Motors’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, pre-ceding by a mere six months the eruption of yet another worldwide orgy of technologically facilitated self-destruction. 32 Coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, its main competitor, soon followed suit. “What now matters, what le-gitimizes the humanities in the eyes of many ‘stakeholders,’ ” Kathryn Conrad wrote in the former, “is that modifier: digital.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

  • Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These accrue especially to bibliographic study, the preparation of concordances and scholarly editions, archive searches, and statistical word or leitmotif searches through corpuses. The digitisation of scattered, remote or out-of-print materials is an enormous boon. As is the scale and range of material, both written and visual, made accessible now at an unprecedented speed. Simultaneously literary scholars are brought to examine historical, geographical, social and economic records and to enter debates with researchers in other disciplines. Roberto A, Busa, whose work with IBM to create his Index Thomisticus in 1949 (online version 2005) has established him as the acknowledged founder of DH, set out the wider vision as follows: ‘Humanities computing’, he writes, ‘is precisely the automation of every possible analysis of human expression (therefore, it is exquisitely a “humanistic” activity), in the widest sense of the word, from music to the theater, from design and painting to phonetics, but whose nucleus remains the discourse of written texts’ (Foreword, Schreibman, Siemens, Unsworth, eds, 2004). Johanna Drucker, however, comes to qualify her original enthusiasm and to take issue with the implicit assumptions of the procedures, the ‘managerial methods’ of coding with metadata and standard mark–up languages, which, for all their supposed neutrality, work in the name of formal logic. She speaks therefore of ‘the normalizing pressures of digital protocols’ which far from endorsing the ‘undecidability’ introduced by deconstruction, resolve difference into sameness: ‘If Digital Humanities activity were reduced to a single precept’, she avers, ‘it would be the require- ment to disambiguate knowledge representation so that it operates within the codes of computational processing’ (2009). ‘Humanists’, she adds, ‘are skilled at complexity and ambiguity.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Defining Digital Humanities

  A Reader

  • Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, Edward Vanhoutte, Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, Edward Vanhoutte(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages ", http://www.mla.org/resources/documents/rep_it/guidelines_evaluation_digital .
• Shillingsburg, P. (1993). "Polymorphic, Polysemic, Protean, Reliable Electronic Texts", in G.Bornstein and R.G.Williams (eds) Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities , Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Unsworth, J. (2002). "What is Humanities Computing, and What is Not?" in G.Braungart, K.Eibl and F.Jannidis (eds) Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie , 4, Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, http://computerphilologie.uni-muenchen.de/jg02/unsworth.html .
Passage contains an image

CHAPTER 11 Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Digital Humanities

Paul Rosenbloom University of Southern California

Paul Rosenbloom (2012).Originally published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, 6 (2), http://www.digitalhumanities.Org/dhq/vol/6/2/000127/000127.html .

Note from the Editors:

This article contends that there are four 'great scientific domains': Physical, Life, Social, and Computing. It situates Humanities as a subdomain of the Social and situates DH in terms of the Social and Computing domains. A relational architecture that, it is argued, can allow the systematic investigation of overlays between the domains, their disciplines and topics, is presented, as is the Metascience Expression language which can be used for the formal expression of such investigations. This article is set apart from many of the others included in this collection in two ways. Firstly, it seeks to situate, contextualise and contour Digital Humanities not only from the perspective of computing and/or the humanities but also with regard to the other domains and understandings of methodologies, knowledge and structures from the philosophy of science. Secondly, it proposes and draws on a comprehensive framework in order to analyse not only what DH is but also what it could be. This leads to the observation that Svensson (2010)