DIGITAL HUMANITIES

PRIMERMargot Note

Independent Scholar and Digital Humanist

DH SCHOLARSHIP Presented in digital forms Enabled by digital methods and tools About digital technology and culture Building and experimenting with digital

technology Critical of its own digital-ness

VALUES

CRITICAL Digital humanities scholarship is

grounded in theory and critical in the tradition similar to many scholarly practices.

However, and in addition, DH is often also grounded in a humanistic self-criticism, including the criticism of the very tools, technologies, and platforms that enable its own practices and publications.

EXPERIMENTAL As the authors of Digital_Humanities (

2012) write, “one of the strongest attributes of [DH] is that the iterative versioning of digital projects fosters experimentation, risk-taking, redefinition, and sometimes failure. It is important that we do not short-circuit this experimental process in the rush to normalize practices, standardize methodologies, and define evaluative metrics.”

COLLABORATIVE Digital humanities texts often have

multiple authors, but more subtle and robust collaborations are the foundation of many DH projects, involving distributed networks of expertise including scholars, students, programmers, technologists, librarians, designers, and more.

MULTIMODAL Not always confined by the strictures

and structures of print, digital humanities scholarship embraces many modes—text, audio, video, etc.—while also being expressive and performative in and of themselves.

These performative texts use design and multiple modes of expression to put forth an argument, often breaking down the reader/writer dichotomy in new ways.

ACCESSIBLE While not exclusively open access, most

digital humanities scholarship embraces open and public forms of publishing, from the pre- and post-publication peer review of Twitter and blog posts, to Creative Commons-enabled digital publications, curated digital archives, and interactive digital projects.

AUTO-DIDACTIC Digital humanists understand that there

may not be someone immediately available who can teach what is needed to know.

There is a value in figuring it out on one’s own.

DO IT YOURSELF If an immediate tool or authority is not

available, the skill need can be learned, rather than wait for someone else to provide it.

AD HOC Yielding to the impulse of the moment

rather than sticking to a prescriptive notion of the project.

Screwing around can lead to serendipitous discovery.

Developing an idea for a project by thinking about what the field or sub-field needs, but does not have.

ITERATIVE Rather than thinking of scholarly

production as a long process yielding a single, polished whole, DH values shorter time frames yielding a series of gradually-expanded versions of a product.

PROCESS-FOCUSED Traditional forms of academic

scholarship encourage students to work towards a final product that presents the distilled knowledge to the public.

In contrast, the ethos of digital humanities encourages participants to openly discuss the process from the point of ideation.

VALUABLE FAILURES Instead of revising away any failures to

present a “correct” final product, unsuccessful or partially successful attempts are considered to have useful learning potential.

DISSEMINATION Scholarly work should be available to

readers/viewers/users, and that the writer and production of the work is only half of its intended trajectory.

TRANSPARENT Present what is known and learn from it Garner encouragement and feedback

from other DH practitioners and scholarly audiences

Contribute to the larger academic community, even before projects are finished.

Makes all work valuable, as opposed to the final draft.

PUBLIC PEER REVIEW Scholarly review and evaluation benefits

from transparency in terms of creation, revision, and dissemination.

In keeping with the value of public scholarship, digital humanities peer review expands the idea of “peer” to include scholars from various fields, departments, and/or industries.

PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP The notion that scholarly work has

relevance, value, and audiences beyond the bounds of the ivory tower.

METHODS

ENHANCED CRITICAL CURATION Object-based arguments through the

curation of digital media, including collection repositories and scholarly narratives supported by digitized or born-digital primary source materials.

AUGMENTED EDITIONS Digital critical editions, marked up and

encoded texts, often created through crowd-sourced methods and open to perpetual revision, annotation, and remix.

SCALE As data sets grow larger and larger,

humanists hope to create new findings through computational- and algorithmic-enabled interpretations of our digitized and born-digital culture materials.

MACRO/MICRO In contrast to, and often in conjunction

with, close reading, distant reading looks to understand and analyze large corpora across time through “trends, patterns, and relationships.”

AGGREGATION AND DATA-MINING Through computational means, cultural

analytics mines, studies, and displays cultural materials in new aggregated or remixed forms, often including interactive and narrativized visualizations

VISUALIZATION AND DATA DESIGN Arguments made from the visualization

of data, including virtual/spatial representations, geo-referencing and mapping, simulated environments, and other designs constructed from and informed by data.

LOCATIVE INVESTIGATION The creation of “data landscapes”

through connecting real, virtual, and interpretive sites, often manifesting as digital cultural mapping or geographic information systems (GIS).

ANIMATED ARCHIVE In which the static archive of the past is

made alive and virtually experiential, including the active archiving of physical spaces through virtual means, and multi-modal/faceted approaches to collection access and interactivity.

DISTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND PERFORMATIVE ACCESS Digital projects take collaborative teams

that cross both disciplines and borders and that often challenge the idea of “the author” through team contributions, crowdsourcing, and the user-based performance of the “text.”

HUMANITIES GAMING Taking on “historical simulation,”

humanities gaming uses virtual learning environments to create interactive narratives that engage users and enable the exploration of humanist themes.

CODE, SOFTWARE, AND PLATFORM STUDIES Humanists have studied texts, the book,

and many other forms of writing, so what to make of the code programmers write, the software computer users use, and the platforms that shape our social and cultural interactions?

DATABASE DOCUMENTARIES Multi-modal narratives formed from a

database, branching out into multiple paths users explore, possibly incorporating live-feed data, all calling into question authorial control/intent and the role of the reader.

REPURPOSABLE CONTENT Digital content can be read, written, and

rewritten, and as such all digital objects are subject to sample, migration, translation, remix, and other forms of critical reuse.

PERVASIVE INFRASTRUCTURE Digital realities encompass many types

of machines and screens and increasingly objects are stored in the cloud, distributed over servers in multiple locations.

UBIQUITOUS SCHOLARSHIP Print publication no longer is the only

way forward, and as new modes of publishing proliferate, and new players in publishing participate, publishing becomes increasingly ubiquitous and open.