Miami Demystifying DH session 1 slides-FINAL

What are the digital humanities, and why should I care?

Paige Morgan

Digital Humanities Librarian

February 12, 2016

Goals: what I can do

• Provide necessary background and strategic

advice.

• Allow you to begin charting your own course.

• Help make UM Libraries a supportive space for

experimenting and learning about DH.

• Continue building a digital humanities cohort at

Miami.

Limits: what I can’t do

CAN BECOME

A DIGITAL HUMANIST

But don’t worry...

The point of this

workshop is not to

convert you to digital

humanities.

There is no single

way of being a digital

humanist.

Defining DH

• By the start of the “first DH project” (1946,

approximately: date of Roberto Busa’s plan for

the Codex Thomisticus, a digital concordance

of the works of Aquinas)

• By its stability, or lack thereof

• According to its friction with traditional (a.k.a.

“analog”) humanities

Defining DH

• “the use of digital evidence, [and/or] methods

of inquiry, [and/or] research, [and/or]

publication and[/or] preservation to achieve

scholarly and research goals.” (Scholarly Communication

Institute, University of Virginia)

• “research that uses information technology as

a central part of its methodology, for creating

and/or processing data.” (University of Oxford)

DH goals and

methodologies depend on

the specific subject matter,

and the availability of

primary/secondary source

materials and tools.

Alternatives to the “What is DH?” question• How does this project/essay/argument

engage with current and previous

scholarship in my discipline?

• What sort of critical thinking and

interpretive work is involved in this

project?

• How does this project fit into the

existing environment of projects and

resources?

Why values?

• While the tools, projects, and methods are

diverse, values tend to be more holistic

• Understanding motivations allows more

people to join the conversation

Values behind DH• adaptive

• sustainable/resource-

aware

• multimodal

• interdisciplinary

• auto-didactic

• collaborative

• ad hoc

• process & product-

driven

• accessible

• public & transparent

• project-oriented

• social

Most DH projects are,

in essence, sources,

processed and

presented.*• “Sources, processed and presented” is the framework used by Miriam Posner in “How Did They Make T

hat? The

Video,” http://miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that-the-video/

They’re also

designed with a

specific audience (or

audiences) in mind.

Websites for EvaluationOld Bailey Online

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org

Letters of 1916

http://dh.tcd.ie/letters1916/

Visualizing Emancipation

http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation/

Price One Penny

http://www.priceonepenny.info/database/

Plagiary Poets

http://plagiarypoets.io/

Coptic Scriptorium

http://data.copticscriptorium.org/

I Love E-Poetry

http://iloveepoetry.com/

Questions for Evaluation• What is the project doing? Why are its

creators doing this?

• Who made the project?

• What aspects of it work well? What aspects

could be improved?

• Which DH values do you see exhibited

within the project?

What is DH?(a humbler definition)

Thinking about the available materials;

how digital tools will allow you to process

them and present them to audiences in

ways that weren’t previously possible (or

at least, weren’t easy) – and acting on

your thoughts.

Why should you care?

• Opportunities for scholarship in new forms.

• Better understanding of how digital scholarly

sources are made.

• Even if you’re not planning to build digital

tools, your scholarly expertise is relevant to

digital humanities research.

The big question:

What do you want to

do with digital

scholarship?

Flash Project Development

Brainstorm a DH project with your team!

(Students at Cabrini College brainstorm a DH project on porn. Image c/o Adeline Koh.)

Will it focus on one distinct topic? Or on

bringing multiple topics together?

What artefacts will it contain, or collect?

How will users interact

and/or contribute?

What forms (modes) will it take?

Flash Project Brainstorming

What perspectives do you want it to explore?

Resources for further training and

collaboration• Florida Digital Humanities

Consortium (http://fldh.org/)

• HASTAC: http://www.hastac.org

• DHNow:

http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org

• TransformDH: http://transformdh.org

• Profhacker:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker

/

• How Did They Make That?

http://miriamposner.com/blog/how-

did-they-make-that-the-video/

• Digital Humanities on Twitter -- no

account needed

https://twitter.com/paigecmorgan/digi

tal-humanities and

https://twitter.com/GrandjeanMartin/li

sts/digital-humanities

• Digital Research Tools (DiRT)

http://dirtdirectory.org

• DHCommons

http://www.dhcommons.org

• DHSI: http://www.dhsi.org

• TEI Seminars at Brown University:

http://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/ou

treach/seminars/

Thank you!Upcoming Workshops

Data Wrangling I: Exploring Programming in the Digital

Humanities

Data Wrangling II: Programming on the Whiteboard

Want to chat more about DH?

Email me ([email protected] )

or

make an appointment (http://paigecmorgan.youcanbook.me)