Vol. 1, No. 3, Summer 2012 on Journal of Digital Humanities

Review of ORBIS

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Quantitative methods matter in the digital humanities, and are coming to play an ever more prominent role in their discourse. This is driven, in part, by a great increase in interest in simulation modelling. Often borrowing methods and software from social scientists, who use them to interrogate vast datasets on populations, historians and archaeologists are coming to use quantitative tools to model historic scenarios. The use of simulation modelling in history and archaeology is still regarded as something of a ‘dark art’ in many quarters. After all, the purpose of historical or archaeological enquiry is to reconstruct the past from evidence, be that evidence textual or material. Simulation, on the other hand, begins with evidential parameters and builds ‘could-be’ hypotheses, which are in some way credible, upon them. Such hypotheses cannot be tested or reproduced from other data, and as such — as methods of understanding the past — they are usually treated as a means to the end of interpretation, not an end in themselves.

The Difference the Digital Makes

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So much of the content of digital humanities begins in the analog world: documents that are scanned and indexed; maps that are recast in GIS; quantities that are converted to machine-readable tables. Although we tend to focus on the final product — the digital construction viewed over the web — we remain cognizant of this transition that artifacts of human expression have taken.

In this issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities, several scholars take a deeper look at that transition. Sarah Werner suggests ways the traditional act of reading is forever altered by the nature of digital texts. From her experience in early modern book scholarship, she builds a case for how book history might inform our understanding of reading beyond the codex. Craig Mod speaks less of a one-way street from analog to digital and more of a two-way street between the virtual and the physical. As a designer of both websites and books, he brings to bear knowledge about the boundaries and content of ebooks and physical books. Both sense a tension between physical and digital sources, methods, and productions.

Where Material Book Culture Meets Digital Humanities

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Discussions about early modern books and digital tools have tended to focus on one of two responses. One of the first things that people focus on is the amazing access to early modern works that digital tools have given us. Instead of schlepping from library to library across the globe — a series of journeys that many scholars can not easily afford — we can access nearly all extant early modern printed English books, and many continental ones, from our desktops. Thanks to digital collections like EEBO (Early English Books Online) and ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) and to catalogs like the USTC (Universal Short Title Catalogue, which links to images from many European collections), digital facsimiles are available for us to consult and download entire works from the early modern printed world.

Review of The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769-1794: Mapping the Trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Mapping the history of ideas against the actual reading practices of early modern Europeans has intrigued (and troubled) historians at least since Roger Chartier focused our attention on the need to consider the reader, not just the text. With the launch of The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769-1794: Mapping the Trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (FBTEE), project directors Simon Burrows and Mark Curran offer stunning new opportunities to probe this old problem. Although only recently publicly launched in June 2012, the site has already attracted wide renown thanks to its soft launch on H-France listserv in September 2010 and through persistent outreach like Burrows and Curran’s July 2011 presentation at the Library of Congress.

The Digital-Physical: On Building Flipboard for iPhone and Finding Edges for Our Digital Narratives

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Weight

We had been on a long journey but it was lost in the bits.

There’s a stage in a product cycle where you know it’s going to ship. Where you can see the end. It’s right there, sitting at the corner of Emerson St. and University Ave. Or maybe sipping coffee at Fraiche.

Oh, hello, it waves — there. In front of you. The End. (Or, An End.) And seeing this puts you in a special space where when you think about it — think about all the work that it took the team to get there, to bring that end so close — you are overwhelmed with a flood of emotions.

Review of Mapping Texts

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Mapping Texts addresses a pressing problem and an exciting opportunity that many working in digital humanities are tackling: now that we have massive amounts of historical evidence digitized, what new questions can we pose and what new knowledge can we produce? Developed though a collaboration of two teams at the University of North Texas and Stanford University — the former led by Andrew Torget and including Mark Phillips, Rada Mihalcea, and Eliza Tze-I Yang; the latter led by Jon Christensen and including Cameron Blevins, Rio Akasaka, Geoff McGhee, Yinfeng Qin, and Jason Ninxuan Wang — the project seeks, to quote their white paper, “to help scholars develop new tools for coping effectively with the growing challenge of doing research in the age of abundance” by marrying two common methods: text mining and geovisualization.

Visualizing San Francisco Bay’s Forgotten Past

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

To begin: One question and one metaphor. The question is, what use is visualization to historians? How does this method add value to the work we do? The metaphor is accretion, the term geologists use to describe the building up of new soils through deposits of materials eroded elsewhere. Accretion works to describe the process by which generations have modified San Francisco Bay without destroying that which came before. That history remains, even if it is invisible to the naked eye. Visualization helps us recapture the forgotten past.

The Impact of Social Media on the Dissemination of Research: Results of an Experiment

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In September 2011 I returned to work after a year on maternity leave. Many things needed sorting out, not least my digital presence at my home institution, which had switched to a content management system that seamlessly linked to University College London’s open-access repository, “Discovery.” The idea was we should upload open-access versions of all our previously published research, and link to it from our home pages, to aid in dissemination.

Building New Windows into Digitized Newspapers

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In building Mapping Texts we wanted to create more transparent windows into the extraordinary wealth of information available in online archives of digitized historical newspapers. We wanted, for example, to be able to see how much information was available for any particular time and place, and then measure just how much of that information was still recognizable — and thus useable — after the digitization process. We also wanted to be able to see the major language patterns coming from these datasets, so that we could use “distant” readings of such massive collections as a way to determine which individual newspapers would likely yield the most useful information from “close” readings. We wanted, in other words, more finely grained methods for indexing both the quantity and quality of information in these archives as they spread out across both time and space.

How Swiss was the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel? A Digital Case Study of French Book Trade Networks

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Should the famous Société typographique de Neuchâtel (1769-1794) (STN) be viewed as a typical and representative ‘European’ publisher-bookseller, a ‘print shop across the border’ that offered the latest product of the mud-raking underground to the French market, or a provincial, peripheral, and Swiss-focused distraction? The question needs revisiting before we both trumpet the value of our recently published French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) database — which recreates the society’s entire knowable bookselling business — and assess its potential for substantially revising scholarly understanding of the eighteenth-century French book trade and, dare we dream, the enlightenment.¹

Mapping Texts: Visualizing American Historical Newspapers

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Mapping Texts is an ambitious project with a simple mission: to experiment with new methods for finding and analyzing meaningful patterns embedded within massive collections of digitized historical newspapers.

Why do we think this is important? Because, quite simply, historical newspapers are being digitized at a rate that is rapidly overwhelming our traditional methods of research. The Chronicling America project, for example, recently digitized its 5 millionth newspaper page, and predicts that more than 20 million pages will be available within a few years. Numerous other programs are also digitizing newspapers at a rapid pace worldwide, making hundreds of millions of words from the historical record readily available in electronic archives that are reaching staggering proportions.

Modeling Networks and Scholarship with ORBIS

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

ORBIS is self-defined as a historical transportation network model of the Roman world, but while it is fundamentally a computational model, it is also part of a genre of objects that could be referred to as interactive scholarly works, and so in explaining how to use ORBIS it becomes necessary to also engage with interactive scholarly works in general. What follows is not solely an explanation of ORBIS, but an exploration of the genre in a broader sense, providing both pragmatic and theoretical examples of the usage of both.

ORBIS: An Interactive Scholarly Work on the Roman World

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There are, broadly speaking, four expressions of digital humanities scholarship: research utilizing digital objects, tools, and methods; the publication of the products of that research; the creation, extension, and annotation of digital archives; and the development or improvement of digital tools. The boundaries between these are fluid; in particular, some products of digital humanities scholarship blur the line between archive, tool, and publication. ORBIS — the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World,¹ is one such hybrid. It is an interactive scholarly work (ISW) that comprises a digital archive of sites and routes, a tool for exploring Roman transportation, and an argument about the dynamic shape of the Roman world and the nature of transport within it. Furthermore, it makes a methodological argument that its representations — its computational model and visualizations — are a useful means for reasoning about those aspects of Roman history.

The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe Project and the STN Database

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) database maps the trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a celebrated Swiss publishing house that operated between 1769 and 1794. The database was published online on June 25, 2012 and is available here. It is intended to be a major new tool for literary and historical research in Enlightenment studies, book and business history, and bibliography.¹