3-2s on Journal of Digital Humanities

Digital Contexts

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The digital contexts of our scholarly practice impact not only the kind of work that we may do as humanists, but also how we represent changes in theory and methods over time. Whether we are preserving, analyzing, or representing cultural heritage collections, interpreting digital media, or communicating through open repositories or social media, our activities are doubly informed by digital modes of production and digital professional practice. Every time we participate in a conference panel that others tweet or blog about, deposit our pre-print article in an institutional repository, or even offer an online version of our course syllabus, the technical situation of our work as teachers, researchers, or students responds, knowingly or not, to a digital condition.

Digital Historiography and the Archives

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The following pieces by Joshua Sternfeld, Katharina Hering, Kate Theimer, and Michael Kramer are based on our session at the American Historical Association (AHA) meeting in 2014, “Digital Historiography and the Archives,” and the series of blog posts based on our presentations that we posted on Michael Kramer’s blog, Issues in Digital History, and cross-posted on AHA Today.¹ We are thrilled that JDH invited us to submit our blog posts for publication. We had conceptualized the session as an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion with short presentations by each panelist, followed by a rich and multifaceted discussion with the audience.

On the Origin of “Hack” and “Yack”

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One of the least helpful constructs of our “digital humanities” moment has been a supposed active opposition, drawn out over the course of years in publications, presentations, and social media conversation, between two inane-sounding concepts: “hack” and “yack.” The heralding of digital humanities as the academy’s “next big thing” has been (depending on whom you ask) over-due or overblown, unexpected or contrived, refreshing or retrograde—but one thing is clear: everyone has a rhetorical use for it. The uses of “hack vs. yack,” on the other hand, rapidly became so one-sided that I find it odd the phrase retains any currency for critique.

Review of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media (2014)

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Ryan, Marie-Laure, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. Print.

Current scholarly activity in digital media reflects a convergence of cultural and political critique with technological investigation, engagement, and practice, and the challenge to creating any guide or introduction to digital media that it risks codifying — and thereby diminishing — the diversity of approaches, methodologies, and theoretical approaches to be found. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson, resists collapsing the many and varied potential trajectories of digital media studies into singular narratives by weaving intellectual diversity and vibrancy throughout its representation of the disciplinary fabric of digital media studies.

Historical Understanding in the Quantum Age

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The following remarks were delivered at the _AHA Roundtable Session #83_Digital Historiography and Archives. They have been slightly modified and annotated for the_Journal of Digital Humanities. Please note that the concepts presented here are a work-in-progress of a much larger project about digital historiography; I welcome additional comments or feedback. Finally, the statements and ideas expressed in this presentation do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities, or any federal agency._

Using Computer Vision to Increase the Research Potential of Photo Archives

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In art history research, photographs of art are the lifeblood of study. Since it’s usually impossible for a scholar to travel the globe and visit an artwork as need arises, there is substantial demand for archives of photographs of artworks for reference and study. There are photo archives around the world with millions of photographs in them, including the prestigious Frick Photoarchive. These archives aggregate photographs from many institutions and private collections. It is their job to make sure the photos are maintained and the works of art they document cataloged, changes in attribution or ownership updated, and that they have properly identified and merged duplicate photographs and entries relating to a single artwork.

A Distinction Worth Exploring: “Archives” and “Digital Historical Representations”

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In the original presentation of these papers at the AHA session, I was the final speaker on the panel, and so my talk was framed as a response to and expansion of the points made by the previous speakers.

In preparing for the panel “Digital Historiography and Archives” at the 2014 meeting of the American Historical Association, I had my usual trepidations about how the other speakers and the audience would frame their conception of “archives.” In writing my talk I read an article Josh had written for an archival journal in 2011¹ and was pleased to see his careful usage of the phrase “digital historical representations” as an umbrella term covering some of the resources presented by archives, as well as a range of products from other sources.

Going Meta on Metadata

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I once joked to an archivist that all I really do as a historian is add meta-metadata to the archival database.

What I meant was that if we understand metadata—the information that accompanies artifacts—as not merely descriptive, but also already on its way to interpretation, then what is historical scholarship but a further extension of this elaboration of the evidentiary record? The joke was intended as humorous (at least for the geeky among us) because typically historical work gets separated from, and often privileged over, archival labor. The archive is there, historians mistakenly believe, solely to be mined by them alone for scholarly production. Archivists, of course, know better. The archive serves many other purposes than just fodder for historical inquiry. And as archives move into the digital domain, whether through digitization of artifacts or with born-digital materials, the archive’s many uses expand even more. Might it be more accurate, then, my joke implied, to reverse the hierarchy of archive and historical research as we move into the digital realm? Perhaps the digital archive becomes the final product—something that now absorbs historical research and publishes into it—rather than just a storehouse for information hidden in the stacks; and perhaps in this new context, historical findings become nothing but a new field added to the interactive, accessible, crowdsourced, hyperlinked records management system!

Provenance Meets Source Criticism

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

(This is a slightly revised version of the paper from which I spoke at the AHA. I added links, references, a few images, and an introductory paragraph. I also changed the title.)

Archival and historical theory and methodology emerged in the late 19th century in a related historical and disciplinary context. Yet, to the degree that archives and history have evolved as separate disciplines and professional fields,¹ they tend to be treated as separate traditions. As Joshua Sternfeld and the other panelists have emphasized, however, critical digital historiography brings together elements of both archival and historical theory and methodology. The archival principle of provenance and the historical tradition of source criticism, in particular, complement another in underscoring the importance of providing context for documents, records, collections, archives, and digital historical representations.