Digital humanities

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Example of research including digital means: network analysis as an archival tool.[1]

The Digital Humanities are an area of research, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. Developing from the fields of humanities computing, humanistic computing,[2] and digital humanities praxis (dh praxis[3]) digital humanities embrace a variety of topics, from curating online collections to data mining large cultural data sets. Digital humanities (often abbreviated DH) currently incorporate both digitized and born-digital materials and combine the methodologies from traditional humanities disciplines (such as history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies) and social sciences [4] with tools provided by computing (such as data visualisation, information retrieval, data mining, statistics, text mining) and digital publishing. As well, related subfields of digital humanities have emerged like software studies, platform studies, and critical code studies.

Objectives[edit]

Digital humanities scholars use computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms, generating new questions and pioneering new approaches. One goal is to systematically integrate computer technology into the activities of humanities scholars,[5] as is done in contemporary empirical social sciences. Such technology-based activities might include incorporation into the traditional arts and humanities disciplines use of text-analytic techniques; GIS; commons-based peer collaboration; and interactive games and multimedia.

Despite the significant trend in Digital Humanities towards networked and multimodal spanning social, visual, and haptic media, a substantial amount of Digital Humanities focuses on documents and text in ways that differentiate the field's work from digital research in Media studies, Information studies, Communication studies, and Sociology. Another goal of Digital Humanities is to create scholarship that is more than texts and papers. This includes the integration of multimedia, metadata and dynamic environments. 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 using computational methods for the analysis of large cultural data sets such as the Google Books corpus.[6] Examples of such projects were highlighted by the Humanities High Performance Computing competition sponsored by the Office of Digital Humanities in 2008,[7] and also by the Digging Into Data challenge organized in 2009[8] and 2011[9] by NEH in collaboration with NSF,[10] and in partnership with JISC in the UK, and SSHRC in Canada.[11]

At present, formal academic recognition of digital work in the humanities remains somewhat problematic, although there are signs that this might be changing.[citation needed] Some universities offer programs related to the field[12] and some have dedicated Digital Humanities programmes.[13]

Environments and tools[edit]

Digital humanities is also involved in the creation of software, providing "environments and tools for producing, curating, and interacting with knowledge that is 'born digital' and lives in various digital contexts."[14] In this context, the field is sometimes known as computational humanities. Many such projects share a "commitment to open standards and open source."[15]

History[edit]

Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing, of computationally enabled "formal representations of the human record,"[16] whose origins reach back to the late 1940s in the pioneering work of Roberto Busa.[17][18]

Other aspects of digital humanities were descended from the IRIS Project on hypertext at Brown University in the 1980s.

The Text Encoding Initiative, born from the desire to create a standard encoding scheme for humanities electronic texts, is the outstanding achievement of early humanities computing. The project was launched in 1987 and published the first full version of the TEI Guidelines in May 1994.[18]

In the nineties, major digital text and image archives emerged at centers of humanities computing in the U.S. (e.g. the Women Writers Project,[19] the Rossetti Archive,[20] and The William Blake Archive[21]), which demonstrated the sophistication and robustness of text-encoding for literature.[22]

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 (2004), tried to prevent the field from being viewed as "mere digitization."[23] 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,"[23] and digital humanities, which uses "digital technology in studying traditional humanities objects".[23] The use of computational systems and the study of computational media within the arts and humanities more generally has been termed the 'computational turn'.[24]

In 2006 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the federal granting agency for scholarships in the humanities, launched the Digital Humanities Initiative (renamed Office of Digital Humanities in 2008), which made widespread adoption of the term "digital humanities" all but irreversible in the United States.[25]

Digital humanities emerged from its former niche status and became "big news"[25] at the 2009 MLA convention in Philadelphia, where digital humanists made "some of the liveliest and most visible contributions"[26] and had their field hailed as "the first 'next big thing' in a long time."[27]

Organizations and Institutions[edit]

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.[28]

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.

CenterNet is an international network of about 100 digital humanities centers in 19 countries, working together to benefit digital humanities and related fields.[29][30]

Criticism and controversies[edit]

Many conventional humanities scholars dismiss digital humanities as "whimsical."[10] The literary theorist Stanley Fish claims that the digital humanities pursue a revolutionary agenda and thereby undermine the conventional standards of "pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power."[31]

There has also been some recent controversy amongst practitioners of Digital Humanities around the role that race and/or identity politics plays in digital humanities. Tara McPherson attributes some of the lack of racial diversity in digital humanities to the modality of UNIX and computers, themselves.[32] An open thread on DHpoco.org recently garnered well over 100 comments on the issue of race in digital humanities, with scholars arguing about the amount that racial (and other) biases affect the tools and texts available for digital humanities research.[33] This is a current source of debate within the digital humanities.

See also[edit]

Centers[edit]

Journals[edit]

Meetings[edit]

Miscellaneous[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ League of Nations archives, United Nations Office in Geneva.
  2. ^ Humanistic Computing, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 86, No. 11, November, 1998, Pages 2123-2151.
  3. ^ http://dhpraxisf13.commons.gc.cuny.edu/tag/dhpraxis/
  4. ^ "Digital Humanities Network". University of Cambridge. Retrieved 27 December 2012. 
  5. ^ "Grant Opportunities". National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities Grant Opportunities. Retrieved 25 January 2012. 
  6. ^ Roth, S. (2014), Fashionable functions. A Google ngram view of trends in functional differentiation (1800-2000), International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction, Band 10, Nr. 2, S. 34-58 (online: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2491422).
  7. ^ Bobley, Brett (December 1, 2008). "Grant Announcement for Humanities High Performance Computing Program". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved May 1, 2012. 
  8. ^ "Awardees of 2009 Digging into Data Challenge". Digging into Data. 2009. Retrieved May 1, 2012. 
  9. ^ "NEH Announces Winners of 2011 Digging Into Data Challenge". National Endowment for the Humanities. January 3, 2012. Retrieved May 1, 2012. 
  10. ^ a b Cohen, Patricia (2010-11-16). "Humanities Scholars Embrace Digital Technology". The New York Times (New York). ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2012-06-07. 
  11. ^ Williford, Christa; Henry, Charles (June 2012). "Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A Report on the Experiences of First Respondents to the Digging Into Data Challenge". Council on Library and Information Resources. ISBN 978-1-932326-40-6. 
  12. ^ Borovsky, Zoe. "Programs -- Digital Humanities". UCLA Library. Retrieved 26 February 2013. 
  13. ^ http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/courses/mamsc
  14. ^ Presner, Todd (2010). "Digital Humanities 2.0: A Report on Knowledge". Connexions. Retrieved 2012-06-09. 
  15. ^ Bradley, John (2012). "No job for techies: Technical contributions to research in digital humanities". In Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty (eds.). Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. pp. 11–26 [14]. ISBN 9781409410683. 
  16. ^ Unsworth, John (2002-11-08). "What is Humanities Computing and What is not?". Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie 4. Retrieved 2012-05-31. 
  17. ^ Svensson, Patrik (2009). "Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities". Digital Humanities Quarterly 3 (3). ISSN 1938-4122. Retrieved 2012-05-30. 
  18. ^ a b Hockney, Susan (2004). "The History of Humanities Computing". In Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth (eds.). Companion to Digital Humanities. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 1405103213. 
  19. ^ Women Writers Project, Brown University, retrieved 2012-06-16 
  20. ^ Jerome J. McGann (ed.), Rossetti Archive, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, retrieved 2012-06-16 
  21. ^ Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi (ed.), The William Blake Archive, retrieved 2012-06-16 
  22. ^ Liu, Alan (2004). "Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse". Critical Inquiry 31 (1): 49–84. doi:10.1086/427302. ISSN 0093-1896. Retrieved 2012-06-16. 
  23. ^ a b c Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (2011-05-08). "The humanities, done digitally". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2011-07-10. 
  24. ^ Berry, David (2011-06-01). "The Computational Turn: Thinking About the Digital Humanities". Culture Machine. Retrieved 2012-01-31. 
  25. ^ a b Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2010). "What is Digital Humanities and What's it Doing in English Departments?". ADE Bulletin (150). 
  26. ^ Howard, Jennifer (2009-12-31). "The MLA Convention in Translation". The Chronicle of Higher Education. ISSN 0009-5982. Retrieved 2012-05-31. 
  27. ^ Pannapacker, William (2009-12-28). "The MLA and the Digital Humanities" (The Chronicle of Higher Education). Brainstorm. Retrieved 2012-05-30. 
  28. ^ Vanhoutte, Edward (2011-04-01). "Editorial". Literary and Linguistic Computing 26 (1): 3–4. doi:10.1093/llc/fqr002. Retrieved 2011-07-11. 
  29. ^ "About". CenterNet. Retrieved June 16, 2012. 
  30. ^ Caraco, Benjamin (1 January 2012). "Les digital humanities et les bibliothèques". Le Bulletin des Bibliothèques de France 57 (2). Retrieved 12 April 2012. 
  31. ^ Fish, Stanley (2012-01-09). "The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality". The New York Times (New York). Retrieved 2012-05-30. 
  32. ^ http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29
  33. ^ http://dhpoco.org/blog/2013/05/10/open-thread-the-digital-humanities-as-a-historical-refuge-from-raceclassgendersexualitydisability/

Bibliography[edit]

External links[edit]

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