Editor 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.

Exploring and Designing Virtual Worlds

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

What can we learn from the creation and exploration of a virtual world? The impulse to create imagined spaces occupies a longstanding tradition in the humanities. Whether it be Plato’s Cave or Mount Olympus or Yoknapatawpha, virtual landscapes hold out the promise to expand our human capacities to create, to imagine, and to analyze beyond our physical constraints. Advancements in computational media enable the production of increasingly sophisticated, multimodal technologies that in turn raise new ethical, political, and methodological questions for humanities scholars. This eighth issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities offers multiple perspectives on the digital and physical worlds we create, inhabit, and study.

Local Programs, Global Audiences

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In the scholarly communication ecosystem, lectures and conference roundtables offer valuable opportunities to share one’s on-going research and reflections with an engaged audience. Although social media, online conference programs, and slideshare sites now boost the signal of scholarly work, talks at conferences are still often limited by the time and place of their delivery. Even as digital humanities forges wider global connections, travel funding at universities and other public humanities institutions is on the decline. Everyone must make increasingly strategic decisions about how and where to invest travel time and money, often to the exclusion of professional events that might be interesting or thought-provoking. Digital networks and the open web, however, transcend boundaries of location and time by allowing for the rapid, broader distribution of transcripts, slides, posters, and audio and video.

Expanding Communities of Practice

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The materials featured in this sixth issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities expose “communities of practice” in digital humanities beyond the constellations of people and institutions directly engaged in experimental and digitally-inflected scholarship. Communities of practice, socially constructed groups that form around shared interests or crafts, often generate forms of tacit knowledge that circulate informally. What distinguishes the works herein is their articulation of tacit knowledge produced during the course of project development. While they originate in diverse sites of digital humanities scholarship, these project strategically engage contingent audiences. Furthermore, each details conscious decisions that tailor its approach to collaborative creation and implementation.

Pacing Scholarly Conversations

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The advancement of scholarship relies on the timely communication of questions, methods, results, and reflections. The iterative publications Digital Humanities Now and the_Journal of Digital Humanities_ are intended to facilitate this process. DHNow surfaces and distributes the conversations weekly in order to invite participation and feedback. The Journal of Digital Humanities then identifies the conversations that need a stable landing on which to pause and reflect before continuing onward.

Respond to JDH 2.1

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Journal of Digital Humanities “catches the good” by surfacing and highlighting valuable material published on the open web. For this issue we will go one step further, and solicit responses to this edition’s take on topic modeling in the digital humanities.

We offer two ways to provide your response. On this page you can post an open comment or a link to longer piece posted elsewhere. You also can tweet a response using #JDHTopics, which we will aggregate on another page.

Bibliography

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Problem Stated

Blais, Joline, Jon Ippolito, and Owen Smith. New Criteria for New Media. New Media Department, University of Maine, January 2007. http://newmedia.umaine.edu/interarchive/new_criteria_for_new_media.html.

Burgess, Helen J., and Jeanne Hamming. “New Media in the Academy: Labor and the Production of Knowledge in Scholarly Multimedia.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5, no. 3 (2011). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/3/000102/000102.html.

Closing the Evaluation Gap

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

With this fourth issue we wrap up the first year of the Journal of Digital Humanities, and with it, our first twelve months of attempting to find and promote digital scholarship from the open web using a system of layered review. The importance of assessment and the scholarly vetting process around digital scholarship has been foremost in our minds, as it has in the minds of many others this year. As digital humanities continues to grow and as more scholars and disciplines become invested in its methods and results, institutions and scholars increasingly have been debating how to maintain academic rigor while accepting new genres and the openness that the web promotes.

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.

Audience, Substance, and Style

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the second issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities. In the introduction to our first issue, we explained how the journal’s content came directly from the writing, coding, and projects of our field’s community of practitioners, without a traditional academic publication’s process of submission. We think it is also useful to share how JDH has been received and used — the demand side as well as the supply side, so to speak. In their open online work, scholars clearly provided a rich supply of high-quality material to choose from; we wondered if the community would in turn provide a large audience for the publication itself.

A Community-Sourced Journal

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We’re pleased to present the inaugural issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities, which represents the best of the work that was posted online by the community of digital humanities scholars and practitioners in the final three months of 2011.

We wish to underline this notion of community. Indeed, this new journal is predicated on the idea that high-quality, peer-reviewed academic work can be sourced from, and vetted by, a mostly decentralized community of scholars rather than a centralized group of publishers. Nothing herein has been submitted to the Journal of Digital Humanities. Instead, as is now common in this emerging discipline, works were posted on the open web. They were then discovered and found worthy of merit by the community and by our team of editors.

Responses from Twitter

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We offer two ways to provide your response. On this page you can see the Twitter conversation surrounding this issue, identified by the #JDHTopics hashtag. On another page, you can see comments and links to longer pieces that respond to the content of this issue.

Vol. 1, No. 2 Spring 2012 Articles Featured Excerpts

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“A new conjunction of scientist, curator, humanist, and artist is what the digital humanities must strive to achieve. It is the only way of ensuring that we do not lose our souls in a world of data.” Andrew Prescott

Yearly ratio of words that entered English before 1150/ words that entered 1150-1699

Vol. 1, No. 2 Spring 2012 Special Section Featured Excerpts

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Games will likely never produce the same opportunities for discourse as a book, but then why should they?” Adam Chapman

Photo by Caro’s Lines

Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 2012 Conversations Featured Excerpts

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“I believe embedded in the discussion of what constitutes an “archives” is a debate over the importance of authenticity and the preservation of context.” Kate Theimer

“It’s no longer just about coding and gender; it’s about the kinds of conversations we’re willing to have about uncomfortable questions.” Miriam Posner

Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 2012, Reviews Featured Excerpts

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Video panels of players during gaming

Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2011 Conversations Featured Excerpts

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“The debates around the role of ‘theory’ in digital humanities are debates about the relationship between saying and doing.” Natalia Cecire

“The Real Faces of White Australia”

Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2011, Reviews Featured Excerpts

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Newspaper strip visualization

Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2011: Featured Article Excerpts

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“Modern humanities scholarship is a direct engagement with a deracinated, Google-ised, Wikipedia-ised, electronic text.” Tim Hitchcock

An ego network from wikipedia.org