Digital humanities

The digital humanities is an area of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. Sometimes called humanities computing, the field has focused on the digitization and analysis of materials related to the traditional disciplines of the humanities. Digital Humanities currently incorporates both digitized and born-digital materials and combines the methodologies from the traditional humanities disciplines (such as history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies) with tools provided by computing (such as data visualisation, information retrieval, data mining computational analysis) and digital publishing.

Objectives

Digital humanities work has a number of goals. One goal is to systematically integrate computer technology into their scholarly activities,^{[citation needed]} such as the use of text-analytic techniques; GIS; commons-based peer collaboration; interactive games and multimedia in the traditional arts and humanities disciplines like it is done in contemporary empirical social sciences.

Another goal is to create scholarship that is more than texts and papers. This includes the integration of multimedia, metadata and dynamic environments. A dynamic scholarly document would no longer resemble a linear narrative.^{[citation needed]} An example of this is The Valley of the Shadow project at the University of Virginia or the Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular at University of Southern California.

A growing number of researchers in digital humanities are working on using computational tools for the analysis of large cultural data sets. For the examples of these projects, see Humanities High Performance Computing competition sponsored by NEH Office of Digital Humanities in 2008, and also Digging Into Data 2009 Challenge awards.

Digital humanities research can also be categorized in another way. Many humanists want to use computational tools to help them answer already existing research questions. Others are interested in how use of computational analysis can challenge the existing theoretical paradigms, generating new questions and leading to new paradigms.

At present formal academic recognition of digital work in the humanities remains somewhat problematic. Socially this has to do with the slow pace of institutional change. Intellectually it has to do with the curious, poorly understood nature of non-verbal knowledge-bearing objects, or what Davis Baird has called thing knowledge. Curatorially it raises the serious problem of how such knowledge-bearing objects are to be preserved for the long term. Culturally it runs afoul of the low status commonly given to works of popular culture -- multimedia, documentaries, interactive games and other visual media -- which tend to be dismissed as entertainment.^{[citation needed]} The increasing volume of important scholarship in the digital humanities suggests, however, that recognition is unavoidable and that serious attention is urgently needed to the understanding and preserving of these digital objects of knowledge.^{[citation needed]}

Standards

Because of the interactive and academic nature of digital scholarship, scholars are particularly concerned with open standards and with generic, durable solutions to academic needs of the community.^{[citation needed]} Rather than relying on a proprietary tool, or writing a specialised program for a particular task in a single project, the Digital Humanities draws on the existing body of expertise on the topic, and tools that have been made freely available and customizable, to build solutions that can be repurposed and in turn shared with the open source community.^{[citation needed]}

Terminology

The terminological change from "humanities computing" to "digital humanities" has been attributed to John Unsworth and Ray Siemens who, as editors of the monograph A Companion to Digital Humanities (2001), tried to prevent the field from being viewed as "mere digitization."^[1] Consequently, the hybrid term has created an overlap between fields like rhetoric and composition, which use "the methods of contemporary humanities in studying digital objects,"^[1] and digital humanities, which uses "digital technology in studying traditional humanities objects".^[1]

Organizations and Institutions

The field of digital humanities is served by several organisations: The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), and the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI), which are joined under the umbrella organisation of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). The alliance funds a number of projects such as the Digital Humanities Quarterly, supports the Text Encoding Initiative, the organisation and sponsoring of workshops and conferences, as well as the funding of small projects, awards and bursaries.^[2]

ADHO also oversees a joint annual conference, which began as the ACH/ALLC (or ALLC/ACH) conference, and is now known as the Digital Humanities conference.

Problems and limitations

The development of digital humanities enforces the building up of digital resources of humanist data, but this also leads to the appearance of legal issues. Due to the (direct or indirect) sensitivity of some of this data more and more restrictions to access of the databases or their parts are going to be introduced.^{[citation needed]}

Another threat faced is the accompanying inevitable underuse of contextual information, which also means the undervaluation of the fundamental semiotic aspects of humanities.^{[citation needed]}

See also

Centers

• Center for History and New Media
• Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, Loyola University, Chicago
• Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London
• Digital Humanities at Oxford University
• Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
• Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
• UCL Centre for Digital Humanities
• Center for Digital Research in the Humanities
• Software Studies Initiative, University of California, San Diego
• Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH)
• Center for Digital Humanities, University of South Carolina, Columbia
• Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville

Journals

• Literary and Linguistic Computing
• Digital Studies
• Digital Medievalist
• Digital Humanities Quarterly
• Southern Spaces

Meetings

• Digital Humanities conference
• THATCamp

Miscellaneous

• Computers and writing
• Computational archaeology
• Cybertext
• Cultural analytics
• Digital Classicist
• Digital library
• Digital Medievalist
• Digital history
• Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
• Electronic literature
• EpiDoc
• Humanistic informatics
• Multimedia literacy
• New media
• Systems theory
• Stylometry
• Text Encoding Initiative
• Transliteracy

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (2011-05-08). "The humanities, done digitally". The Chronicle of Higher Education. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-Done-Digitally/127382/. Retrieved 2011-07-10. 
2. ^ Vanhoutte, Edward (2011-04-01). "Editorial". Literary and Linguistic Computing 26 (1): 3–4. doi:10.1093/llc/fqr002. http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/1/3.short. Retrieved 2011-07-11. 

Bibliography

1. Busa, Roberto. (1980). ‘The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus’, in Computers and the Humanities vol. 14, pp.83-90.
2. Computers and the Humanities (1966-2004)
3. Celentano A., Cortesi A., Mastandrea P. (2004), Informatica Umanistica: una disciplina di confine, Mondo Digitale, vol. 4, pp. 44-55.
4. Condron Frances, Michael Fraser, and Stuart Sutherland, eds. (2001), Oxford University Computing Services Guide to Digital Resources for the Humanities, West Virginia University Press. [1]
5. Hancock, B. & Giarlo, M.J. (2001). Moving to XML: Latin texts XML conversion project at the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Library Hi Tech, 19(3), 257-264. [2]
6. Hockey, Susan. (2001), Electronic Text in the Humanities: Principles and Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
7. Honing, Henkjan (2008). The role of ICT in music research: A bridge too far? International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 1 (1), 67-75.
8. Inman James, Cheryl reed, & Peter Sands, eds. (2003), Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities: Issues and Options, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
9. Kenna, Stephanie and Seamus Ross, eds. (1995), Networking in the humanities: proceedings of the Second Conference on Scholarship and Technology in the Humanities held at Elvetham Hall, Hampshire, UK 13-16 April 1994. London: Bowker-Saur.
10. McCarty, Willard (2005), Humanities Computing, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
11. Mullings, Christine, Stephanie Kenna, Marilyn Deegan, and Seamus Ross, eds. (1996), New Technologies for the Humanities London: Bowker-Saur.
12. Newell, William H., ed. (1998), Interdisciplinarity: Essays from the Literature. New York: College Entrance Examination Board.
13. Schreibman Susan, Siemens Ray, and Unsworth John eds. (2004). A Companion To Digital Humanities Blackwell Publishers. [3]
14. Selfridge-Field, Eleanor (ed). (1997) Beyond MIDI: The Handbook of Musical Codes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
15. Unsworth, John, (2005) Scholarly Primitives: What methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this? http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html

External links

• The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
• A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities