MAKING SENSE OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES - A CONVERSATION STARTER

Outline

• Introduction• Brief history• DH Projects• DH Tools• DH Organisations/Conferences/Workshops• DH@UCT• More

What is this thing called Digital Humanities or DH?

• Umbrella term covering a wide range of activities, from online preservation and digital mapping to data mining and use of GIS technologies , like infrared scans, geolocation mapping, and optical character recognition to enrich these resources with related information or make entirely new discoveries about them.

There have been scholars and technologists doing DH work long before DH was a word!

Previously known as Human Computing

Variety of meanings

• Day in the Life of Digital Humanities (8 April 2013)

• Definitions http://dayofdh2013.matrix.msu.edu/members/

The humanities, now with digital.

Using new methods to

find out more about old

things

Digital humanities is the broader exploration of how technology can be

integrated into traditional scholarly

activities and the creation of new forms of scholarship and media

I defined DH for my aging parents

as "using computers to

improve the ways I study, learn, and write about my

research and my experiences, even though I'm not a rocket scientist."

Brief History

• ImageL http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/typo3temp/pics/7212f0d7fe.jpg• Image: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/card2.jpg• Images: http://www.osservatoreromano.va/orportal-portlets-portal/detail/binaries/news/cultura/2011/184q11-lettore-fermati----morto-padre-busa/184q05b.jpg• ImageL http://www.sas-sas.it/Alice/images/Thomis6.jpg

Corpus Thomisticum

Timeline of DH Developments

• Computer Centres

• Scholarly societies and journals

• Standards (Text Coding Initiative –TEI)

• Library digitization and digital humanities centres

Image: http://atomictoasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Word-Proc-1.jpg

Library Digitization and Digital Humanities Centres

DH Projects

• What knowledge can digital humanities scholars produce that their predecessors could not?

• One of the principle projects was making historical and literacy texts available online

• Data mining and text encoding projects are often paired with interesting visual representations, multimedia, and interactive tools

Charles Darwin’s Library

Mapping the Republic of Letters

First World War Poetry Digital Archive

Shoah Visual Archives

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

Kindred Britain

Old Bailey Proceedings

DH Tools + Technical Resources

• Comprehensive list at Bamboo DiRThttp://dirt.projectbamboo.org/• Text editing• Textual analysis• Repositories• Display/Publishing

Text analysis

DH Organisations/conferences/journals/workshops

• Thatcamps http://thatcamp.org/• Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations

(ADHO) – Journals– Summer Institutes– Annual conference

DH@UCT

• Adam Crymble describes his Digital Humanities Thesis in two minutes

“Big Data, Old History “

http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/#047