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.

An Introduction to Alex McDowell’s “World Building”

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

An influential designer changes the way others design. A deeply influential designer shifts how we think about design by fundamentally changing the role design plays in the creative process, potentially altering audiences’ expectations of creative work that ranges from architecture to computer games. Alex McDowell is a deeply influential designer.

Drawing on a literary metaphor — “world-building” — to describe his approach to design, McDowell’s methods represent a cultural shift in his industry’s production process. Taking this metaphor seriously, we might be reminded that engaging literary fiction originates less often in plot outlines than it does in imagined worlds. Sometimes these fictional worlds closely resemble our own. Others are speculative and represent realities far-removed from the world we know. Either way, most fictional worlds present us with lenses with which to view familiar aspects of our own that have been accentuated, transformed, and lain bare.

DH@WIT: Digital Humanities for Undergraduate Design, Engineering, and Management Students

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 5.88MB)

Abstract

Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT), an independent, co-educational, technical design and engineering college located in Boston, Massachusetts, offers a comprehensive interdisciplinary, project-based education that integrates classroom, laboratory, studio, cooperative and experiential learning. Our department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HUSS) is currently working to develop and promote a digital humanities-inflected undergraduate curriculum. Unlike more traditional humanities programs, we are using digital humanities to prepare students for careers outside of academia. This poster highlights the aspects of DH@WIT that we consider to be unique.

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.

Pudding Lane: Recreating Seventeenth-Century London

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

Introduction

In early 2013, Crytek, GameCity, and The British Library teamed up to launch a competition that challenged students to create interactive environments using maps from The British Library and Crytek’s CryENGINE 3, a suite of tools used to develop video games. The six of us, final-year students studying Game Art Design at De Montfort University, Leicester, were invited to take part in the competition, titled Off the Map.

Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities

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

This paper is about data in the humanities.¹ Most of my colleagues in literary and cultural studies would not necessarily speak of their objects of study as “data.” If you ask them what it is they are studying, they would rather speak of books, paintings and movies; of drama and crime fiction, of still lives and action painting; of German expressionist movies and romantic comedy. They would mention Denis Diderot or Toni Morrison, Chardin or Jackson Pollock, Fritz Lang or Diane Keaton. Maybe they would talk about what they are studying as texts, images, and sounds. But rarely would they consider their objects of study to be “data.” However, in the humanities just as in other areas of research, we are increasingly dealing with “data.” With digitization efforts in the private and public sectors going on around the world, more and more data relevant to our fields of study exists, and, if the data has been licensed appropriately, it is available for research.² The digital humanities aim to raise to the challenge and realize the potential of this data for humanistic inquiry. As Christine Borgman has shown in her book on Scholarship in the Digital Age, this is as much a theoretical, methodological and social issue as it is a technical issue.³

Digital Humanities Keywords: A Collaborative Community Web-based Project

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 373KB)

Abstract

As the field of digital humanities has expanded dramatically in recent years, it has also struggled to define—or perhaps more correctly, to redefine—itself across a seemingly divergent set of its practitioners’ backgrounds, interests, priorities, methodologies, and institutional settings that yet still have something fundamental in common. From critical code studies to corpus linguistics to tool creation to online pedagogy, digital humanities practitioners surely share the digital and the humanities yet may work within different fundamental paradigms, asking different questions and using different methodologies in the service of achieving very different final goals (Gold, Kirschenbaum). How, beneath the shared surface of this broadly cast “big tent” of digital humanities, can such a diverse community of practice come together in fruitful and mutually beneficial ways? What can we as scholars do to facilitate this convergence in a broad discursive space where the ethic of “more hack, less yack” can sometimes discourage the meaningful exchanges of ideas that still need to happen, the collective negotiations of purpose that so often serve as the source of new insights?

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.

Changing Medium, Transforming Composition

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

Figure 1: Class Corpus Home Page

Knowing only that they had registered for a first-year writing course, my Spring 2013 students walked into the first class meeting to discover that they had signed up for “Codes: An XML-based Composition Course” (Figure 1). Although most at the time weren’t familiar with extensible markup language or even its acronym (XML), all could infer its nature as some kind of coding language. Popular media often represent code as profoundly illegible to the point that one can “read” it only as an aesthetic object (think of the vertical crush of green symbols that ostensibly constitute the virtual world in the Matrix franchise). My course, however, argued that XML facilitates hyper legibility in the writing class. XML is a deeply rhetorical language, and it presents an opportunity to teach writing as a metacognitive, iterative, and collaborative process.

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.

Review: Commons In A Box

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

One of my teaching goals is to end the practice of “Cul-de-Sac Pedagogy,” where students travel down sheltered roads, drop off assignments, and then make anxious return loops to collect their grades. Much to the students’ detriment, no one outside the cul-de-sac sees their work. I’ve recently promised my students that all major assignments would invite an audience larger than me, but achieving this goal would require a technological boost: enter Commons In A Box (CBOX), a free software project developed by Matthew K. Gold’s team at the City University of New York (CUNY). In one semester’s time CBOX’s functional versatility, as well as its open, non-proprietary environment, have helped improve the practical and philosophical elements of my teaching.

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.

Review of MALLET, produced by Andrew Kachites McCallum

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

MALLET Version: 2.0.7
Requirements: Java

Reviewed: 15 February 2013
Tested on: Mac OS X v. 10.8.2, and Windows 7

The MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit, or MALLET, has been one of the “hottest” tools in digital humanities research. A product of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, written by Andrew McCallum and a team of collaborators, MALLET was originally released in 2002 but has received considerable renewed interest of late.¹ Fruitfully employing Latent Dirichlet Allocation [pdf], or LDA, MALLET can help navigate large bodies of information. It does so by finding clusters of words that frequently appear together, or “topics.” The algorithm imagines that any possible text or document within a corpus is a mixture of different topics; each topic is imagined to be a probability distribution of terms within and across that corpus. This leads to a variety of outputs, including lists of topics and their constituent words, and list of documents and their constituent topics. These results can often be astounding, and have even been (tongue-in-cheek) described as “magic.”

Topic Modeling and Digital Humanities

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

Introduction

Topic modeling provides a suite of algorithms to discover hidden thematic structure in large collections of texts. The results of topic modeling algorithms can be used to summarize, visualize, explore, and theorize about a corpus.

A topic model takes a collection of texts as input. It discovers a set of “topics” — recurring themes that are discussed in the collection — and the degree to which each document exhibits those topics. Figure 1 illustrates topics found by running a topic model on 1.8 million articles from the New York Times. The model gives us a framework in which to explore and analyze the texts, but we did not need to decide on the topics in advance or painstakingly code each document according to them. The model algorithmically finds a way of representing documents that is useful for navigating and understanding the collection.

Topic Modeling and Figurative Language

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

… to have them for an instant in her hands both at once,
the story and its undoing…
from “Self Portrait as Hurry and Delay” [Penelope at her loom]

Located at the center of Jorie Graham’s collection The End of Beauty, “Self Portrait as Hurray and Delay” crafts a portrait of the artist, poised at a precarious moment in which thought begins to take shape. Like Penelope, Graham entertains the illusion, if only momentarily, of a choice between bringing a creative impulse into form or allowing it to come undone. A weaver of language, Graham subtly, deftly, but unsuccessfully attempts to delay the inevitable moment in poetic creation in which complexity of thought adopts form through language, and so realized is also reduced. In The End of Beauty, the beginning of the creative act signals an inevitable descent into meaning — language’s ultimate impulse.

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.

How to Evaluate Digital Scholarship

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

The purpose of this document is to provide a set of guidelines for the evaluation of digital scholarship in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts, and related disciplines. The document is aimed, foremost, at Academic Review Committees, Chairs, Deans, and Provosts who want to know how to assess and evaluate digital scholarship in the hiring, tenure, and promotion process. Secondarily, the document is intended to inform the development of university-wide policies for supporting and evaluating such scholarship.

Living in a Digital World: Rethinking Peer Review, Collaboration, and Open Access

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

It’s no secret that times are tough for scholars in the humanities. Jobs are scarce, resources are stretched, and institutions of tertiary education are facing untold challenges. Those of us fortunate enough to hold tenured positions at financially stable colleges and universities may be the last faculty to enjoy such comparative privilege. The future shape of the academy is hard to predict, except to acknowledge that it is unlikely to remain static. Our profession is being rapidly reconfigured, but many changes are not happening quickly enough. In the realm of the digital, for example, entrenched traditional standards of assessment, support, and recognition still fail to encourage the kind of exciting new research that keeps our disciplines vibrant.

Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Historian

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

Building on conversations within their respective organizations, in 2007 the American Historical Association, National Council on Public History, and Organization of American Historians organized a working group to evaluate public history scholarship.

Representing the American Historical Association were Kristin Ahlberg, Edward Countryman, and Debbie Ann Doyle; from the National Council on Public History were Bill Bryans, Kathleen Franz, and John R. Dichtl; and from the Organization of American Historians were Constance B. Schulz, Gregory E. Smoak, and Susan Ferentinos.

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.

An Electric Current of the Imagination: What the Digital Humanities Are and What They Might Become

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

It is a great honour for me to become head of this academic department devoted to the study of the digital humanities. When I first saw experiments in the digital imaging of books and manuscripts in the British Library twenty years ago, it was impossible to imagine that they would develop into an intellectual activity on a scale warranting an academic department. The fact that King’s College London has led the way in this process is due to the work of many pioneers, and I cannot start this lecture without acknowledging their achievements and saying what a pleasure it is to join them now as a colleague. Above all, it is essential to honour the contribution of Professor Harold Short who is without doubt the father of the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Harold has been an outstanding international pioneer of the digital humanities, and I feel honoured and humbled to follow in his footsteps.

Archives in Context and as Context

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

Approaching the field of digital humanities as an outsider is an interesting experience. It is best compared, I think, to being a tourist in a foreign country for which there are no reliable guidebooks. It is a country in which the language is almost the same as the one you speak, and yet words are used to mean somewhat different things. It is also a relatively young country, still trying to define its national identity.

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.

Games and Historical Narratives

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

The academic study of games — from board games of strategy to online multi-player video games — challenges and disrupts epistemologies held dear in the humanities. Traditional scholarly products such as monographs and journal articles, and to a lesser degree blog posts, are meant to be passively read, whereas games are meant to be actively played. Games may present a narrative like the traditional texts studied and written by academics, but player influence on the selection of narrative choices presents unique questions about authority and interpretation.

QRator at the Grant Museum of Zoology

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

As you approach University College London’s Grant Museum of Zoology through the streets of Bloomsbury, the first hint that there is something unusual inside the stately Rockefeller Building appears in the banners celebrating its re-opening. The line of silhouetted animals is punctuated with the occasional outline of an iPad, the “screen” revealing the skeleton of an animal and hinting at the role of iPads in the museum experience.

External view, Grant Museum

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.

Academic History Writing and its Disconnects

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

The last ten years have seen the development of what looks like a coherent format for the publication of inherited texts online – in particular, ‘books’. The project of putting billions of words of keyword searchable text is now nearing completion (at least in a Western context); and the hard intellectual work that went into this project is now done. We are within sight of that moment when all printed text produced between 1455 and 1923 (when US copyright provisions mean that the needs of modern corporations and IP owners outweigh those of simple scholarship), will be available online to search and to read. The vast majority of this digital text is currently configured to pretend to be made up of ‘books’ and other print artifacts. But, of course, it is not books. At some level it is just text – the difference between one book and the next is a single line of metadata. The hard leather covers that traditionally divided one group of words from another are gone; and while scholars continue to pretend to be reading books, even when seated comfortably in front of their office computer, this is a charade. Modern humanities scholarship is a direct engagement with a deracinated, Google-ised, Wikipedia-ised, electronic text.

Introduction: Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities

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

I came to theory because I was hurting—
the pain within me was so intense I could not go on living.

—bell hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice”¹

The silicon chip is a surface for writing.

—Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”²

The debates around the role of “theory” in digital humanities are debates about the relationship between saying and doing. It therefore seems appropriately inappropriate to introduce a special section on digital humanities and theory with poetry, a kind of utterance in which language, it is still conceded, may do as well as say. Marianne Moore’s “In the Days of Prismatic Color” begins:

Review of WordSeer, produced by Aditi Muralidharan, Marti Hearst, and Bryan Wagner

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

The WordSeer tool, developed at the University of California, Berkley by Aditi Muralidharan and Marti Hearst with research partner Bryan Wagner, is an exploratory analysis or “sensemaking” environment for literary texts. The tool is based on an understanding of literary analysis as a cyclical, rather than a linear, process, a notion that has been underemphasized in tool development where visualizations and datamining have generally been seen as exposing the text for scholarly treatment. WordSeer allows you to read a text, search for relationships between words and phrases, examine grammatical relationships, and examine produced heat map and tree visualizations.

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.

“World Building”

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

Alex McDowell — World Building

Video of this presentation to the Media Systems convening at the University of California, Santa Cruz on August 27, 2012 originally published on September 11, 2013.

Modelling the Interpretation of Literary Allusion with Machine Learning Techniques

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 3.5MB)

Abstract

A Computational Perspective on Allusion

Most literary allusion, the deliberate evocation by one text of a passage in another, is based upon text reuse. Yet most instances of textual similarity are not meaningful literary allusions. The goal of the Tesserae project is to automatically detect allusion in a corpus of literary texts, primarily Classical Latin poetry. We begin with a large set of textual parallels, and then attempt to model which of these instances of text reuse are meaningful literary allusions and which are not, according to a group of human readers. While initial attempts with a few basic textual features have proven surprisingly effective, here we employ a more complex feature set and machine learning techniques drawn from the field of computer vision in an attempt to improve the results. Novel applications of machine learning, beyond the well known but constrained textual classification tasks of attribution and categorization, have the potential to be transformative for complex analysis tasks in the Digital Humanities.

Transforming the Object of our Study: The Early Modern Sermon and the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project

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

Scholars of early modern England have recently begun to pay more attention to sermons. (McCullough, Adlington, Rhatigan 2011). Scholars have recognized that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Jeanne Shami has put it, sermons were “the mass media of their day,” providing their listeners with reports of “breaking news,” while satisfying “appetites for . . . entertainment, social interaction, politics, and, of course, religious education” (Shami 2011, 323). Since attendance at services of the Church of England was required by law, and sermons figured prominently in the practice of worship, they were inescapable parts of everyday life. Yet their popularity is undeniable; as many as 5,000 to 6,000 people came on their own to Paul’s Churchyard outside St Paul’s Cathedral on Sundays for additional sermons that lasted for two hours (Figure 1).

Data Curation as Publishing for the Digital Humanities

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

“Publishing” has assumed a large role in discussions of how scholarship is changing. One reason is that, in these discussions, the mechanisms of publishing come to stand in for the larger and more complex processes of creating, vetting, and circulating knowledge. Some of the sense of unmet need that arises in considerations of the emerging, alternative publishing methods for those working in digital humanities comes from the problems with this shorthand.

Networking the Belfast Group through the Automated Semantic Enhancement of Existing Digital Content

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 1.63MB)

Abstract

There is increasing work on and interest in social networks in the digital humanities community (Meeks 2011). Analysis is frequently done on digital content—including images (Akdag Salah et al. 2012); email (Hangal et al. 2012); and citation networks (Visconti 2012) — because the data lend themselves to aggregation, conversion, and analysis. Yet despite this flurry of activity, the possibility exists for an exponential jump in network analysis. After all, the holdings and catalogs of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) include traces of vast paper-based networks, but the data are locked away in forms that don’t easily lend themselves to analysis. What if we could open up that content? In this poster, we will report on an attempt to provide tools for archivists to expose the information embedded in the descriptions of their collections as well as a test case for analyzing that data: an examination of the networks of the Irish poets collectively known as “the Belfast Group.”

Code Appendix for “Changing Medium, Transforming Composition”

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

Appendix A: Selections from Major Assignment Markup Schemes

Primary Source Analysis

In at least one paragraph match evidence (details) from the primary source with the interpretations you draw from them:

<seg type="ev_interp">

<seg type="evidence">evidence (details) from the primary source</seg>

<seg type="interpretation">interpretation based on corresponding evidence</seg>

</seg>

Tag all research questions at the end of the PSA with unique xml:id identifiers:

<seg type="research_question" xml:id="surname_rq_#">research question</seg>

Tag a moment of the PSA when you complicate the seemingly obvious:

<seg type="complication">text here</seg>

Integrating Architecture into Digital and Public Humanities: Sites and Sounds + MediaNOLA

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

“Did you know @Tipitinas building has been a gym, radio station, juice bar, restaurant, & brothel? Not all at the same time, of course…”¹

In the fall of 2012, I taught an experimental and exploratory upper-level seminar at the Tulane School of Architecture entitled “Sites and Sounds: Public History.” The course grew out of an independent, applied research project that I am conducting through the Tulane City Center, which investigates the cultural geography of New Orleans’ musical landscape. I began the seminar’s conversation on spatial and digital humanities with the above quote, tweeted by Tipitina’s — a music venue in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans — on August 16, 2012. Embodied in that quote of 140 characters (or less) is a nuanced and layered understanding of how the site has served the New Orleans community in multiple capacities. My students’ task in the course was to uncover the hidden histories of place at musical sites and to share them through new media techniques with a larger public audience. By presenting their research through MediaNOLA, a “portal for histories of culture and cultural production in New Orleans,” my students foregrounded and contextualized architecture as a central type of culture production.

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.

Review of Paper Machines, produced by Chris Johnson-Roberson and Jo Guldi

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

Paper Machines Version: 0.3.6
Requirements: Zotero, Python 2.7.3, Java.

Reviewed: 25 February 2013
Tested on: Mac OS X v. 10.6.8, and Windows 7
Tested with Zotero for Firefox 3.0 and Zotero Standalone 3.0

Paper Machines is an interactive multi-tool that allows users to perform textual analyses on their Zotero notes, tags, HTML snapshots, or attached pdfs (if OCR layer is present) directly in Zotero. The project provides users with an effective way to get an intellectual grasp of a corpus relatively quickly. This Zotero add-on currently ships with five different tools, which make it possible to determine anything from the topics found in a user’s Zotero library to the geographic distribution of the references present. The project works in both Zotero’s Firefox and standalone versions, which makes it particularly convenient for Zotero users but considerably less appealing for anyone who stores their research material in another program or format. Paper Machines is a promising and visually appealing teaching tool that would be particularly useful for introducing students to topic modeling, but needs some improvements to the code and documentation to be world class.

The Digital Humanities Contribution to Topic Modeling

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

Topic modeling could stand in as a synecdoche of digital humanities. It is distant reading in the most pure sense: focused on corpora and not individual texts, treating the works themselves as unceremonious “buckets of words,” and providing seductive but obscure results in the forms of easily interpreted (and manipulated) “topics.” In its most commonly used tool, it runs in the command line. To achieve its results, it leverages occult statistical methods like “dirichlet priors” and “bayesian models.” Were a critic of digital humanities to dream up the worst stereotype of the field, he or she would likely create something very much like this, and then name a popular implementation of it after a hammer.

Topic Model Data for Topic Modeling and Figurative Language

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

The topic model discussed in “Topic Modeling and Figurative Language” was created with MALLET. Drawing from 4,500 English-language poems from the “Revising Ekphrasis” corpus, the model was generated using the following parameters:

mallet train-topics --input poems-seq.mallet --num-threads 2 --num-topics 60 --optimize-interval 10 --output-model poems08072012test1.model --output-doc-topics poems08072012_test1.txt --output-topic-keys poems08072012-test1keys.txt

The following table contains the number of the topic (0-59); hyper-parameter estimation; and top 20 key words most likely to be found in each topic.

Topic Modeling: A Basic Introduction

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

The purpose of this post is to help explain some of the basic concepts of topic modeling, introduce some topic modeling tools, and point out some other posts on topic modeling. The intended audience is historians, but it will hopefully prove useful to the general reader.

What is Topic Modeling?

Topic modeling is a form of text mining, a way of identifying patterns in a corpus. You take your corpus and run it through a tool which groups words across the corpus into ‘topics’. Miriam Posner has described topic modeling as “a method for finding and tracing clusters of words (called “topics” in shorthand) in large bodies of texts.”

Evaluating Collaborative Digital Scholarship (or, Where Credit is Due)

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

This is the lightly edited text of a talk given at the 2011 NINES Summer Institute, a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded workshop on evaluating digital scholarship for purposes of tenure and promotion, hosted by the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship. It builds on a more formal essay written for an open-access cluster of articles on the topic in Profession, the journal of the Modern Language Association (MLA). A pre-print of that essay was provided to NINES attendees in advance of the Institute.

Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media

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

Introduction

The following guidelines are designed to help departments and faculty members implement effective evaluation procedures for hiring, reappointment, tenure, and promotion. They apply to scholars working with digital media as their subject matter and to those who use digital methods or whose work takes digital form.

Digital media are transforming literacy, scholarship, teaching, and service, as well as providing new venues for research, communication, and the creation of networked academic communities. Information technology is an integral part of the intellectual environment for all humanities faculty members, but for those working closely in new media it creates special challenges and opportunities. Digital media have expanded the objects and forms of inquiry of modern language departments to include images, sounds, data, kinetic attributes like animation, and new kinds of engagement with textual representation and analysis. These innovations have considerably broadened notions of language, language teaching, text, textual studies, and literary and media objects, the traditional purview of modern language departments.

Short Guide To Evaluation Of Digital Work

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

This short guide gathers a collection of questions evaluators can ask about a project, a check list of what to look for in a project, and some ideas about how to find experts in one place. This assumes that evaluators who are assessing digital work for promotion and tenure are:

new to the review of digital scholarly work and therefore could use a framework of questions to start with;
prepared to review the materials submitted by a candidate in the form it was meant to be accessed but need ideas of what to look for; and
will also ask for expert reviews from others and therefore need suggestions on where to look for relevant expertise.

This is an annotated expansion of Evaluating Digital Work (PDF) which was prepared as a one page checklist.

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.

Playing Through the “Art of Video Games” Exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

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

The new “Art of Video Games” exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is exceptional for its venue, if not its content or interpretation. Although The Strong International Center for the History of Electronic Games and The American Classic Arcade Museum hold collections of video games and offer venues for playable histories of the medium, the exhibition of video games in the Smithsonian marks an institutional endorsement of the medium as art form.

Privileging Form Over Content: Analysing Historical Videogames

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

It is my hope that by now few deny that contemporary game series like Civilization_or_Assassin’s Creed constitute history.¹ However, such a broad term does not convey the approach that analysis of these new historical texts requires. At this early stage in the serious study of historical videogames, we must be sure to adopt an approach that privileges understanding the videogame form (and the varying structures this entails) and its integral rolein the production and reception of historical meaning, rather than solely, or even primarily, on the content of specific products as historical narratives. Simply focusing on the accuracy of the game often re-informs us about popular history rather than recognizing the opportunities for engaging with discourse about the past (and the nature of this discourse) that this new historical form can offer.

The Emergence of Literary Diction

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

Literary criticism used to be, in great part, an attempt to define the distinctive character of “literary language.” The project preoccupied Russian Formalists and American New Critics, and dates back to the nineteenth century. In recent years, critics have largely abandoned the attempt to define literary language, since it is now clear that the category of literature itself is historically unstable. But if we could trace the transformation of literary language in a detailed way, this instability might become interesting: we could use the changing characteristics that have marked language as literary to illuminate the transformation of literature as a social category.

Think Talk Make Do: Power and the Digital Humanities

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

How cowardly to begin with a disclaimer! And yet. It seems worth saying that I wrote the original post from which this is derived in a fury at job-market news from friends, as well as the latest statistics from VIDA about women’s representation in magazines and book reviews. I probably would have been more temperate if I’d known what kind of reaction this post would provoke — but then again, who knows? Maybe not.

Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?

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

Data seems to be the word of the moment for scholarship. The National Endowment for the Humanities and a range of other funders are inviting scholars to “dig data” in their “Digging into Data” grant program. Data itself is now often discussed as representing a fourth paradigm for scientific discovery and scholarship (PDF). What is a humanist to do in such a situation? Does data, in particular big data, require humanists to adopt a new methodological paradigm? Or, are the kinds of questions humanities scholars traditionally have explored through close reading and hermeneutic interpretation relevant to big data? In this brief essay I suggest some of the ways that humanists already think about and analyze their sources can be employed to understand, explore, and question data.

Getting Started in Digital Humanities

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

When I presented at the Great Lakes College Association’s New Directions workshop on digital humanities (DH) in October, I tried to answer the question “Why digital humanities?” But I discovered that an equally important question is “How do you do digital humanities?” Although participants seemed to be excited about the potential of digital humanities, some weren’t sure how to get started and where to go for support and training. Building on the slides I presented at the workshop, I’d like to offer some ideas for how a newcomer might get acquainted with the community and dive into digital humanities work. I should emphasize that many in the digital humanities community are to some extent self-taught and/or gained their knowledge through work on projects rather than through formal training. In my view, what’s most important is being open-minded, experimental, and playful, as well as grounding your learning in a specific project and finding insightful people with whom you can discuss your work.

Review of Bookworm, produced by Benjamin Schmidt, Martin Camacho, et al.

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

Bookworm is a tool that allows users to create visualizations charting the use of words or phrases in selected large corpora over specified periods of time. The software was developed by a group of researchers at the Harvard University Cultural Observatory ¹ as a follow-up to the 2010 project that resulted in a cover story in Science, the Google Books Ngram Viewer, and the coining of the term ‘culturomics’. Bookworm development is still in its alpha phase, but already the software shows great promise as a tool for scholarly exploration of historical trends in large collections of books.

When Digital Humanities Was in Vogue

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

“More hack, less yack,” they say. I understand the impulse, and to some degree admire the rough-and-tumble attitude of those in digital humanities whose first priority is getting things done. Hell, I like getting things done. But I cannot agree with the distinction between theory (little-t) and practice that this sets up, nor the zero-sum logic that it implies—i.e., that in order to do more we must speak less. “More hack, less yack” is, of course, just a slogan, a “spontaneous philosophy,” a stopgap. But stopgaps won’t do now that digital humanities is in vogue.

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.

“Making the Digital Humanities More Open”: Modeling Digital Humanities for a Wider Audience

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 1.83MB)

Abstract

“Making the Digital Humanities More Open,” a NEH ODH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant Project, is creating a free and easy-to-use tool that enables end-users with a variety of disabilities and abilities to access online humanities resources, allowing digital humanities projects to share the products of their text-based projects with this often-neglected audience of readers. During the year previous to DH 2013, our team designed and deployed a WordPress-based accessibility tool that created braille content for end-users who are blind or low vision. Specifically, we extended the use of Anthologize — a free and open source plug-in for WordPress that currently translates any RSS text into PDF, ePub, HTML, or TEI — to include the conversion of text to braille. As a result, we not only made it easy for digital research content creators to convert a text into braille, thereby extending humanities content to hundreds of thousands of visually disabled readers, but we also experimented with making braille available visually through the WordPress interface. This tool will also make it possible to translate the textual content of an Omeka archive into braille provided the site — like most that use Omeka — publishes an RSS feed. We conducted initial tests of the tool by translating the existing BrailleSC oral histories into braille, and then reached out to other Omeka- and WordPress-based humanities computing projects to ask for their cooperation and collaboration in translating their content.

Digital Ethnography Toward Augmented Empiricism: A New Methodological Framework

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

How Do Digital Technologies Deepen Ethnographic Practices?

Culture takes variegated forms, including lived experiences, social interactions, memories, rituals, transactions, events, conversations, stories, gestures, and expressive disciplines like music and dance. These processes and artifacts of social life make an ethnographer’s job as analyst and cultural documentarian dynamic and challenging. The increasing digital mediation in the field of ethnographic inquiry is undeniable. Through the engagement of individual users, governments, corporations, and even grassroots organizations, the ubiquity of computational technology has a far-reaching impact on social life. These technologies mediate culture by documenting, sharing, sensing, tagging, locating, trading, synchronizing, filtering, automating, remixing, and mining the everyday experiences of our research associates. Rather than walking away from the digital, we ethnographers should give serious considerations to software as infrastructure and materiality at the sites of our research. We should also be mindful of our own digital research practices as we utilize digital technology to organize, manage, and publish our field findings.

Media Systems – Envisioning the Future of Computational Media

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

This is the final report of the Media Systems project held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2012. This gathering brought together field-leading participants working in media-focused computer science, digital art, and digital humanities, located in and across universities, industry, federal agencies, publishers, and other stakeholders in the future of media. Participants focused on diverse aspects of how new media forms are impacting culture, education, the economy, and other areas of national importance, using examples ranging from the World Wide Web to computer animation, and from video games to social media. Surprisingly — despite this diversity of background and focus — rather than struggling to explain our different fields to each other, we found ourselves engaged in deep conversations focused on a coherent set of shared activities. For the purposes of this report, the authors have chosen to name these activities computational media.

Making Digital: Visual Approaches to the Digital Humanities

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

The Making History Project is an attempt by artists and archaeologists based within the University of Southampton to collaboratively develop innovative uses for 3D technologies. Techniques such as high resolution data capture and 3D printing represent a new era in digital imaging. As these technologies become increasingly affordable they are coming to play a more significant role in archaeological and artistic practise. Both art and archaeology are currently involved in attempting to realise the full implications and potential of these technologies. This paper describes a project undertaken by the Archaeological Computing Research Group and Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton which seeks to address this moment of technological disruption in order to collaboratively develop creative and methodologically innovative approaches to the use of these technologies.

Programming with Arduino for Digital Humanities

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 92KB)

Background

The department of library, archive, and information studies at Tsurumi University provides courses on computer science for humanities students. The courses include one introductory and two intermediate programming courses. There are project-based courses on Digital Humanities instead of an advanced programming course. In the introductory course, Scratch was used and in the intermediate courses, Java has been adopted.

Difficulties in teaching programming in an introductory course to humanities students have been to let students find interest or enjoyment in (1) symbol manipulation and (2) grouping tasks with functions or other similar units.

Encoding Financial Records

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

Introduction¹

“[A]ccount books,” business historian Judith McGaw noted in 1985, “are among the most common but least accessible primary sources for historians….” In the intervening twenty-seven years, historians have made use of these rich sources to produce a range of articles and monographs, but few digitization projects have tackled financial records directly.²

Some standardized electronic data has long been available to social science historians. The Minnesota Population Center’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Series provides harmonized data for U.S. and international population studies. The National Historic Geographic System provides data for United States historical geography, as does the Great Britain Historical Geographic Information System for Britain. A current initiative of the European Science Foundation, the European Historical Population Samples Network, seeks “to create a common format for databases containing information on persons, families and households.” And while a strong tradition of monographs and journals in economic history has resulted from investigation of archival financial records, no comparable project exists for their digitization.³

The Details: Training and Validating Big Models on Big Data

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

In this video, David Mimno discusses some of the different choices one can make in training models and what their implications are for efficiency, scalability, and topic quality, using the MALLET topic modeling package. This presentation was recorded on November 3, 2012 at the Maryland Institute for Technology as part of the Topic Modeling Workshop, sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities and MITH, at the University of Maryland. Slides are available here.

What Can Topic Models of PMLA Teach Us About the History of Literary Scholarship?

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

Of all our literary-historical narratives it is the history of criticism itself that seems most wedded to a stodgy history-of-ideas approach — narrating change through a succession of stars or contending schools. While scholars like John Guillory and Gerald Graff have produced subtler models of disciplinary history, we could still do more to complicate the narratives that organize our discipline’s understanding of itself.

Figure 1: A browsable network based on Underwood’s model of PMLA. Click through, then mouse over or click on individual topics.

A Call to Redefine Historical Scholarship in the Digital Turn

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

_This is a collaboratively-written call for the American Historical Association to appoint a task force to survey the profession as to the place of digital historical scholarship in promotion and tenure and graduate student training and to recommend standards and guidelines for the profession to follow.__This document is a product of many of the exciting changes discussed below. It began at a session at THATCamp AHA 2012 that included graduate students, tenured and non-tenured faculty, and librarians. These participants and others continued their conversations at the physical conference and afterwards on the web. Additional signatures and edits in the _Google Doc were solicited via Twitter, and through posts on Jason’s blog and by Alex on GradHacker.__The letter was then submitted to the American Historical Association’s Research Division on January 26, 2012. On June 2, 2012 the AHA announced the establishment of a Task Force on Digital Scholarship.

Documenting a New Media Case

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

_This material was developed by an online open-content collaborative of individuals and groups working to develop a common resource for the profession using an online wiki. _The structure of the project allowed anyone with an Internet connection to alter its content.As such, it does not represent the official positions of the Modern Language Association. The wiki is still available for editing.

Promotion and Tenure for Digital Scholarship

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

An Open Letter to the Promotion and Tenure Committee at Texas A&M University, Department of English, upon their request for information about how to evaluate digital work for promotion and tenure.

Evaluating Digital Scholarship

The first thing to do in evaluating digital scholarship is to ask the scholar who has produced it to submit it, if at all possible, for peer review. There are several avenues for doing so. First, any electronic scholarly edition can be submitted to the MLA Scholarly Editions Committee for peer review, and junior faculty should be encouraged to do so. The kinds of editions that will pass peer review by the SCE could be very print-like, so the fact that a digital edition did not receive the SCE seal is not completely indicative of its value as research, about which I’ll say more below. Another venue for peer-reviewing is Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online (NINES) for nineteenth-century electronic scholarship. That NINES model is being expanded: my own 18thConnect peer-reviews eighteenth-century digital projects, and three other peer-reviewing organizations are coming into existence: MESA for medieval, REKn for Renaissance / Early Modern, and ModNets for Modernists.

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.

Historical Simulations as Problem Spaces: Criticism and Classroom Use

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

Part I: Historical Simulations as Problem Spaces: Some Guidelines for Criticism

The concept of problem space is a highly useful tool for studying historical simulations, teaching history, and using the former to help in the latter. Simulation games are interpretations of the past designed as problem spaces. In this sense, a historical problem space borrows and extends upon two existing concepts. In the field of educational and cognitive research a problem space is a mental map of the options one has to try to reach a goal, the various states. There is no implication of physical space. In contrast work by some scholars of video games, most notably Jenkins and Squire, discuss video games as contested spaces: here there are certainly problems, but the space itself (or rather the representation of it) becomes critical. Extending from these established concepts a historical problem space has the following features:

Transitioning to a Digital World: Art History, its Research Centers, and Digital Scholarship

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

The following is excerpted from a report written for The Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. The full report can be found at the Kress Foundation Website (PDF).

Introduction

The increasing use of digital technologies in research, publication and teaching has spurred change in many disciplines. In the field of art history, the transition from teaching with slides to teaching with digital images is often cited as the “tipping point” that moved the field into the digital world. Using digital images for research and teaching requires an understanding of digitization, online searching, and use of presentation software for displaying and manipulating digital images. These activities opened up new opportunities for the field. As art historians Hilary Ballon and Mariët Westermann note:

Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II

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

Part 1 of n: An Introduction

This piece builds on a bunch of my recent blog posts that have mentioned networks. Elijah Meeks already has prepared a good introduction to network visualizations on his own blog, so I cover more of the conceptual issues here, hoping to reach people with little-to-no background in networks or math, and specifically to digital humanists interested in applying network analysis to their own work.

Review of QueryPic, produced by Tim Sherratt

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

QueryPic is a graphical search summarizer that mines content in the Trove newspaper archive from the National Library of Australia. The program is part of Tim Sherratt’s larger TroveNewspaper software project, which allows researchers to obtain parsable data from the Trove collection. QueryPic searches the Trove newspaper archive, scrapes the returns, and graphs the results of the search. QueryPic uses the Python programming language, and is available on GitHub under a GPL v3 license.

Theory First

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

It’s easy to be reasonable about the relationship we’d like to see between digital humanities and “Theory.” Each should inform the other. After all, humanists who put big-T Theory before any empirical data foolishly close their ears to the new evidence digital can create; digital humanists who ignore theory entirely jeopardize not only their careers but the soundness of their conclusions. To take two examples from the theory-friendly side of the spectrum in digital humanities; we should heed Natalia Cecire’s call to treat digital humanities as important because it transforms humanistic practice; but we should also be mindful of Ted Underwood’s concerns that claims for the primacy of theory often amount to little more than a power play, serving to reify existing class distinctions inside the academy. In practice, this probably means digital humanists can keep calm and carry on, with greater tolerance for the occasional French name tossed into the discussion; meanwhile the theory-inclined should know they have a seat at the new table, though not necessarily at the head. Even more hack, better yack. What’s not to love?

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!

Code Appendix for “Digital Ethnography”

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

require 'rubygems' require 'mechanize' require 'geokit' include Geokit::Geocoders

# intitialize agent and open page agent = Mechanize.new

create a .txt file to save the results of the program in

filename = ‘MyspaceFriendListnew.txt’
File.open filename, ‘w’ do |f|

f.puts “lat\tlon\ttitle\tdescription\ticonSize\ticonOffset\ticon”

friend_pagenumber = 1

Fill in the starting page number of friend result pages

BandName = ’thekominas’

Fill in the friendId of the band

band_url = ‘http://myspace.com/' + BandName + ‘/friends/all/page/’ + friend_pagenumber.to_s
page = agent.get(band_url)

Exploring Social Tags in a Digitized Humanities Online Collection

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 496KB)

Abstract

The recent development of Web 2.0 technologies has been implemented in many applications with an emphasis on user contribution, active user participation, and harnessing of collective intelligence. In particular, interest has grown in the use of tagging, as tagging allows users to add their own keywords or tags to online documents and images so that they can organize resources for themselves, share them with others, and find resources that others have tagged.

RDF: Resource Description Failures and Linked Data Letdowns

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

Introduction

The topic of the Semantic Web, more recently rebranded as Linked (Open) Data, has been in discussed in digital humanities and related disciplines since its inception. Now, more than a decade later, the technology has had more than enough time to run through the hype curve towards the Plateau of Productivity. But where are we really in that timeline? Some sectors have embraced it, and others are catching up quickly, but significant obstacles to adoption remain.

Text Mining Tools in the Humanities: An Analysis Framework

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 3.56MB)

Abstract¹

The most extensive compendium of text mining tools to date includes 71 tools and summarizes each based on ten criteria.² While extensive, this listing of tools and their properties is general in its review criteria and does not offer any testing-based observations to help users assess actual usability. Humanists looking to try text analysis, visualization, and mining tools for research need better information that is relevant to their needs and reviews of tools that help them make choices. This poster presents the testing framework developed for the TAPoR 2.0 portal reviews. The poster will cover:

MediaNOLA: A Digital Humanities Project to Tell Stories of Cultural Production in New Orleans

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

The primary objective of MediaNOLA in the NEH planning grant was to work towards creating a website that showed the invisible contributions of ordinary people, places, and practices in the creation of New Orleans culture and its representations. The website was to provide an alternative way to examine New Orleans’ culture solely through the lens of its exceptionalism in relation to the rest of the United States. The scholarly impetus motivating the project came from a series of stakeholders invested in three areas of overlapping interests: (1.) the preservation of materials related to local cultures and cultural production; (2.) the public dissemination of local cultural histories that illustrated broad senses of culture and its production; and (3.) the empowerment of ordinary residents as public historians.

Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities

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

As this issue shows, there is no shortage of interest among humanists in using topic modeling. An entire genre of introductory posts has emerged encouraging humanists to try LDA.¹ So many scholars in humanities departments are turning to the tool in their research that it is sometimes described as part of the digital humanities in itself. Last fall, the NEH sponsored a workshop at Maryland which expressed concern that “the most promising work in topic modeling is being done not by humanists exploring literary or historical corpora but instead by scholars working in natural language processing and information retrieval.” There is not, it seems safe to say, another machine-learning algorithm in the world anyone would expect humanists to lead the progress of. Newcomers to the field could be forgiven for thinking that digital humanists need to topic model to prove their mettle; analog humanists could be forgiven for assuming that the computational interests of literary scholars and historians are particularly focused on the sorts of questions that topic models answer.

Evaluating Scholarly Digital Outputs: The Six Layers Approach

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

Developing standards to evaluate scholarly digital output is one of the most significant problems our generation of digital humanists can work on. The improvement of tools and methods, the elaboration of theoretical perspectives, and (above all else) the development of digital outputs, will always be of primary importance. The elaboration of evaluation standards, however, has a broader reach: it is part of our responsibility as good scholarly citizens. Regardless of how digital humanities develops in the next few years humanists are going to need quality standards that help us distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ work. In our universities this is primarily connected with the administrative requirements of performance and tenure review, but it goes much further than that.

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.

Going Beyond the Textual in History

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

Photo by Andrew Mason

Because of my interest in both history and games, I’m always on the look-out for good writing or new takes on how to bring elements of the gaming world into the framework of historical inquiry. Increasingly, I’m finding my best sources of this kind of reading from my Twitter stream, as was the case when Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) pointed me towards an article in the recent edition of the Canadian Game Studies Association journal, Loading…, titled “Beyond the ‘Historical’ Simulation: Using Theories of History to Inform Scholarly Game Design.” Tackling what they call ‘gamic action’, the authors of the paper look to use elements of ‘procedural rhetoric’ combined with ‘valid and scholarly means’ of constructing the past (modeled on the monograph or print article) to produce ‘reasonably justified truths’ compatible with current methodologies in use by many historians.¹

Clustering with Compression for the Historian

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

INTRODUCTION

I mentioned in my blog that I’m playing around with a variety of clustering techniques to identify patterns in legal records from the early modern Spanish Empire. In this post, I will discuss the first of my training experiments using Normalized Compression Distance (NCD). I’ll look at what NCD is, some potential problems with the method, and then the results from using NCD to analyze the Criminales Series descriptions of the Archivo Nacional del Ecuador’s (ANE) Series Guide. For what it’s worth, this is a very easy and approachable method for measuring similarity between documents and requires almost no programming chops. So, it’s perfect for me!

What We Think We Will Build and What We Build in Digital Humanities

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

After five years “workin’ on the railroad,” I find myself confronting one of the central paradoxes of doing digital humanities–what Jerome McGann, one of the leading scholars of electronic texts, calls the problem of imagining what you don’t know. In digital humanities, what we think we will build and what we build are often quite different, and unexpectedly so. It’s this radical disjuncture that offers us both opportunities and challenges.

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.

DARIAH-EU’s Virtual Competency Center on Research and Education

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 1.01MB)

Abstract

DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts in Humanities — http://dariah.eu) is a large-scale, long-term, pan-European endeavor aiming to enhance and support digitally-enabled research across the arts and humanities. DARIAH aims to develop and maintain an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices. It will explore and apply ICT-based methods and tools to enable new research, improve research opportunities through linking distributed digital source materials and tools, and exchange expertise, methodologies, and practices across domains and disciplines.

Voyant Notebooks: Literate Programming and Programming Literacy

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 676KB)

Abstract

Some thirty years ago Donald Knuth, a computer scientist, proposed literate programming as a better way of organizing narrative and code (1984). Knuth argued that more emphasis should be placed on explaining to humans what computers are meant to do, rather than simply instructing computers what to do. Knuth was especially interested in weaving together macrostyle code snippets with prose that provided a larger narrative context, not merely functional comments of specific lines of code that are the distilled remnants of an intellectual process.

Code Appendix for “Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities”

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

Topic Modeling Ships

Begin by getting the data in order. (This data is available on request.)

# Oceans2
rm(list = ls())
require(ggplot2)
require(plyr)
require(lubridate)
source("ICOADS parsing.R")
source("../Map Functions.R")

This step pulls in the Maury data and splits it. This is not fully documented as part of this article, since the purpose is to show general geodata parsing.

data = loadInData("~/shipping/ICOADS/maury.txt")
data = splitDataByVoyage(data)

Next, save the R data.frame into a directory that MALLET will be able to interpret as a text, and run a topic model on it. The rounding gives the resolution at which the topic will be run.

Evaluating Multimodal Work, Revisited

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

Two years ago I was preparing for a semester in which all of my classes involved “multimodal” student work — that is, theoretically-informed, research-based work that resulted in something _other_than a traditional paper. For years I’d been giving students in my classes the option of submitting, for at least one of their semester assignments, a media production or creative project (accompanied by a support paper in which they addressed how their work functioned as “scholarship”) — but given that this cross-platform work would now become the norm, I thought I should take some time to think about how to fairly and helpfully evaluate these projects. How do we know what’s good?

Spatializing Photographic Archives

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

The extensive and carefully illustrated White Paper for our NEH-sponsored “Spatializing Photographic Archives” project can be downloaded as a large PDF (26.5mb).

The White Paper describes the open-source software tool we’ve developed, and our reasons for wanting to forge a new approach to making digital tools for scholars. It also examines the implications of our approach for photography. After examining the history of landscape photography in the American West, we show how by stepping outside the photographic frame and unfreezing a photograph’s frozen instant, we can reveal many hidden aspects of photography and create new kinds of works.

Who You Calling Untheoretical?

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

[A note from the author: This blog post, as a piece of prose, is very much of the moment when it was written. Likewise its reception has been based on its tone as well as its content. So, rather than take this chance to revise the piece, I have decided to annotate the original text in the style of a documentary editor, although I have only annotated my own text, leaving the text of my commentators, Chris Forster and Jeremy Boggs (see below), alone. Aside from a few minor, silent corrections for editorial consistency, all new and supporting material can be found in the footnotes or set off by square brackets.]

“Where do you need us?” — The National Library in the Digital Humanities

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

Poster

Abstract

In the past two decades or so, national libraries have been digitising millions of pages of books, newspapers, magazines and other text-based collections. In this digital age, the research landscape is changing rapidly, with scholars able to ask new types of questions and answer them in novel ways by working with a wide variety of materials and in new collaborative modes.

As a national library, the British Library (BL) holds over 150 million items dating as far back as 2000 BC and is responding to this climate by realigning its services and structure, including the creation of a new digital scholarship department, but there are still fundamental changes the Library needs to make in order to allow researchers to fully exploit digital resources. We are passionate about working with researchers and scholars so that they can use our digital collection to create new knowledge.

Architecture to Enable Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Millions of Volumes

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 1.5MB)

Abstract

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is a collaborative research center that provides Digital Humanities researchers access to not only millions of volumes from the HathiTrust (HT) digital library, but also cutting-edge software tools and cyber infrastructure to perform advanced computational analysis over the corpus at an unprecedented scale.

The corpus at the HTRC currently consists of over 3 million public domain volumes and anticipates access to an additional 6 million in-copyright volumes. In their raw form at the HathiTrust, these volumes are stored as files on special hardware using an internal Pairtree structure. The internal HathiTrust structure is optimal for its primary function of the digital page image delivery to digital library patrons for viewing; however, it does not support well the large-scale computational analysis which is the primary function of the HTRC. Navigating the Pairtree and uncompressing the text data would encounter major performance and scalability issues. While researchers from other scientific communities have been addressing aspects of the “Big Data” problem with success, the large corpus that HTRC hosts to support computational analysis presents a unique setting in that it consists of a massive number of small text-based files, whereas most solutions from the scientific communities are tailored towards large files and non-text-based content. In this poster, we will present the approach the HTRC takes to solve this problem — the HTRC keeps the Pairtree only for the purpose of synchronization with the HT, and processes and pushes the volume data from the local Pairtree to a NoSQL storage cluster using Apache Cassandra hosted on conventional hardware during the ingest process. In order to balance the data store and ingest workload, the developers at the HTRC and the HT also devised a very simple yet effective way to parallelize the rsync of the single source Pairtree at the HT on all Cassandra nodes by starting rsync at lower branches instead of at the root.

Evaluating Digital Humanities Work: Guidelines for Librarians

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

In this piece, Zach Coble explores the benefits of creating guidelines for the evaluation of librarians’ digital humanities work for the purposes of hiring, appointment, tenure, and promotion, and offers a basic framework for what those guidelines might look like.

Digital humanities, as well as related fields such digital media studies and digital libraries, have presented many opportunities for libraries. These include the establishment of digital humanities centers, the development of new data standards, new forms of scholarly communication, the creation of new resources (and novel ways of asking questions of those resources), and the development of new tools for scholarship and accessing collections.¹ However, traditional modes of evaluation do not address many of the key aspects of digital humanities work.

“Humanities in a Digital Age” Symposium Podcasts

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

On November 11th, the University of Virginia’s Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures hosted a daylong symposium on “The Humanities in a Digital Age.” The symposium included two panels—one on Access & Ownership and the other on Research & Teaching—and two keynote talks.

The first keynote was given by Stephen Ramsay, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Fellow in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Theory, Digital Humanities, and Noticing

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

When disciplines collide, as they do throughout digital humanities, the various practitioners mutually benefit from the different knowledge and skill sets that others bring to our collaborations. But there is also an inevitable gap between how different individuals working in different areas understand their various tools and techniques, and in how they understand their own thought processes. For THATCamp and digital humanities, that causes two related tensions as programmers and critics move more closely together in their joint work. The first tension is the relationship between “hack” and “yack” in the phrase often heard at THATCamp: “more hack; less yack.” The second is the broader question of the role of theory in digital humanities — its perceived absence among some and what steps can be taken to recognize what others call theory in digital humanities. Those tensions, though, will be easily resolved by addressing the disjunction between what coders know to look for as being important and what critics look for in their work to develop theory. In short, the two groups do not yet know what the other notices (in text or in code) as the first step toward understanding their work.

Encoding Historical Financial Records

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 817KB)

Abstract

A significant number of scholars in Europe and North America are now involved in projects utilizing or encoding historical financial and tabular records. Many of them hope that it will be possible to develop guidelines that account for both the idiosyncrasies of such manuscripts and the semantic information embedded in them.

Historical financial records (HFRs), a genre of primary sources that includes such materials as bills, receipts, cashbooks, journals, and account ledgers, are abundant in traditional archives. Most current digitization projects do not capture the full range of financial information, and if they do, they have yet to develop a common method for fully expressing this range.

KORA: A Digital Repository and Publishing Platform

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

Poster

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Abstract

MATRIX has developed an open source application that cultural and educational institutions can use to preserve digital materials and display them online. The application, KORA (http://kora.matrix.msu.edu), is particularly well-suited for working with digital objects of all media types and for easily creating displays of these objects in multiple ways that enhance their educational and research value. MATRIX, a humanities computing research center at Michigan State University, has built and enhanced this application in the course of seven years of research with support from the National Science Foundation.

Let the Grant Do the Talking

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

On December 3, 2012 I spent a day talking with a community arts organization, the New Urban Arts Center, that takes a different approach to their arts education and humanities-driven mission than most arts and humanities funders are accustomed to supporting. We talked about the ways that the organization constantly needs to explain its process-driven approach to art to those not intimately involved at the Center. In doing so, they are educating supporters and funders to their humanities-driven educational community praxis.

Digital Humanities as Thunderdome

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

Recently at a workshop on digital tools for the humanities, a Stanford graduate student rather poignantly noted that oftentimes collaboration with computer scientists felt more like colonization by computer scientists. This statement, even if not true, is far too sharp to ignore. Frankly, I think it is true. Not long after that workshop, I attended a THATCamp, where I spent my time teaching folks how to use Gephi, and I tried to spend some time telling them that the network they create is the result of an interpretive act. I don’t think they cared, I think they just wanted to know how to make node sizes change dynamically in tandem with partition filters. This is an issue that has concerned me for some time: the way wholesale importation of digital tools, techniques and objects into humanities scholarship tends to foster a situation where rich, sophisticated problems are contracted to fit conveniently into software.

Philosophical Leadership Needed for the Future: Digital Humanities Scholars in Museums

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

Nik Honeysett, Head of Administration for the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution.

Originally published as part of a YouTube crowdsourced panel for the Museum Computer Network Conference 2011 on the barriers to and benefits of implementing digital humanities methodologies in museums.

Digitization and Dissemination: A Reverse Image Lookup Study to Assess the Reuse of Images of Paintings from the National Gallery’s Website

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

Poster

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Abstract

Once digital images of cultural and heritage material are digitized and placed online, how can we tell if they are copied, disseminated, and reused? This poster explores Reverse Image Lookup (RIL) technologies — usually used to identify unlicensed reuse of commercial photography — to help in assessing the impact of digitized content. We report on a pilot study which tracked a sample of images from The National Gallery, London, to establish where they were reused on other webpages. In doing so, we assessed the current methods available for applying RIL, establishing how useful it can be to the cultural and heritage sectors.

Textal: A Text Analysis Smartphone App for Digital Humanities

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 1.28MB)

Abstract

This poster introduces Textal, a text analysis application for iOS, and text analysis service infrastructure, which is currently in development at UCLDH and UCLCASA and will be freely available beginning Summer 2013. This poster will present findings evaluating the development, launch, and reception of the app, indicating how smartphone technology can increase the potential for public engagement within the Digital Humanities.

Textal (soon to be launched at www.textal.org, currently on twitter at @textal) will be a freely available smartphone application which allows users to create, share, and explore word clouds of a document, website, or tweet stream. Those in visualization and Digital Humanities have tended to sneer at the popular use of word clouds, given we are used to applying robust text analysis tools (such as http://voyant-tools.org/).¹ However, Textal turns word clouds into an intuitive, visually-oriented interface: once a Textal of a chosen text is generated, users can click on words to access underlying statistics, such as frequency and collocates, and so we believe that the pinch, stretch, and click potential in smartphones, along with our judicious design, can fix the elements of word cloud visualization which are currently held to be problematic and act as a bridge between those who have never encountered text analysis techniques, and the more detailed approaches undertaken by researchers in Digital Humanities. All Textal visualizations, including word-clouds, graphs, charts, and word lists, can be shared via social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and the resulting interface word clouds will also be available online. Textal is powered by server-side processing of linguistic data (users can submit any text material they want, by URL, or copy, or paste). The resulting sever architecture will also serve as an API for those wishing to carry out on-the-fly generation of text analysis statistics, which can be used in conjunction with other web services.

Tenure as a Risk-Taking Venture

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

I want to offer some context about my particular experience with tenure and promotion, because George Mason University (GMU) has a new tenure policy that allows candidates to go up for tenure either on the basis of “genuine excellence in research” or “genuine excellence in teaching.” In either situation, the other criteria are also held to a high standard (for example, “genuine excellence in teaching” also demands “highly competent research”).

Critical Discourse in Digital Humanities

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

My interest in the role and nature of criticism in the digital humanities grows out of a question that Alan Liu recently asked: Where is the cultural criticism in the digital humanities? Although I’m not convinced that digital humanities needs its own brand of cultural criticism beyond what its constituents would normally do as humanists, the question resonated with me because it made me wonder (with only silence to follow): where is the criticism in the digital humanities?

Words and Code

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

Originally tweeted by Tom Scheinfeldt on November 10, 2011 and Ryan Shaw on November 11, 2011.

Great Parchment Book Project

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 1.65MB)

Abstract

The Great Parchment Book of the Honourable The Irish Society is a major survey, compiled in 1639 by a Commission instituted by Charles I, of all the estates in Derry, Northern Ireland, managed by the City of London through the Irish Society and the London livery companies. Damaged in a fire at London’s Guildhall in 1786, it has been unavailable to researchers for over 200 years (Moody; Curl). The damaged manuscript has however remained part of the City of London’s collections held at London Metropolitan Archives (LMA). As part of the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the building of Derry’s city walls in 1613, it was decided to attempt to make the document available as a central point of the planned exhibition. The book represents an important source for the City’s role in the colonization and administration of Ulster and, given the relative paucity of archival records for early modern Ireland, the manuscript should also reveal key data about landholding and population in 17th-century Ulster.

TEI Boilerplate

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 2.91MB)

Introduction

TEI Boilerplate is a lightweight, HTML5 compliant framework for publishing TEI documents. TEI Boilerplate (TEIBP) is designed to bridge the gap between the browser-friendly features of HTML and the semantic richness of native TEI documents.¹

Although TEI provides mechanisms for describing the design, presentational, and material features of the source document, projects and individual scholars that use TEI are responsible for developing their own methods, or implementing existing solutions, for converting the TEI to a presentation-ready state for the web or print.² Two potential paths to reach this goal are:

Explaining Digital Humanities in Promotion Documents

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

In preparing my tenure and promotion dossier I was advised that I needed to explain my fields and contextualize my work in a more accessible way. Without many models for doing this, I made up my own rules, then tore apart my dossier, then re-assembled it, then tore it apart again (this happened 3 more times), then revised my narratives (this happened 6 more times). I received some well-meaning but conflicting advice and ultimately had to make up my own mind about how best to sell Digital Humanities, scholarly editing, and Digital Pedagogy to my colleagues. I received much help from the twitter-verse, but I really wish that a storehouse or consulting arena existed for this kind of professional documentation. As a Digital Humanist, I do so much that’s ephemeral but integral to my work. This is true with Digital Pedagogy and scholarly editing, too.

Please Write it Down: Design and Research in Digital Humanities

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

Tom Scheinfeldt provocatively suggested that “DH arguments are encoded in code” and that he disagrees “with the notion that those arguments must be translated / re-encoded in text.” I don’t think this is how this works.

What I see as the key issue is not so much whether digital humanists need to “re-encode” their work in writing. Digital humanists, like reflective designers of all stripes, are already doing a lot of writing. They are creating documentation, making wireframes, etc. The question here is: what kinds of writing should humanities scholars who design software and make things in code be doing?

Juxta Commons

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 4.21MB)

Abstract

Free and open source, Juxta Commons is an online workspace for comparing multiple witnesses to a single textual work, privately storing collations, and sharing visualizations. Originally offered as a downloadable Java-based application developed by the Applied Research in ’Patacriticism group at the University of Virginia in 2005, Juxta was taken up by NINES (http://nines.org) and transformed into a web service. This open-source API modularizes the sequence of steps required for digital collation and offers more options for working with XML documents. In addition, the NINES R&D team created the interface for Juxta Commons, a destination site for collation on the web. Juxta Commons offers three visualizations of the differences between a group of texts: the heat map (an overlay of the texts with differences highlighted by color), the side-by-side view (two texts visualized with lines connecting the sites of difference), and the histogram (a global view of the text illustrating the portions with the most change across versions). It is also compatible with TEI Parallel Segmentation, so that users can upload their encoded files and make use of Juxta’s visualizations, or those with text or XML files can export their collations as a digital critical apparatus. The interface streamlines the workflow of the original desktop application, and allows the user to edit their sources, filter the XML content included in a given collation, and share their results in a number of different ways. Even though the tool provides sophisticated options for working with texts (XML and TXT), our goal in designing Juxta Commons was to allow teachers, scholars, programmers and any other users curious about variants between documents the ability to create, collate and share their findings with others without requiring any extra software downloads or logins. In taking Juxta to the web, NINES has transformed it into a rhetorical as well as analytical tool, enabling initial discoveries to be interrogated, explored, and ultimately offered as a new kind of evidence for scholarly arguments. Instead of relying upon footnotes or links in a digital edition, a scholar can embed their collations within the argument itself, targeting sites of interest, and encouraging readers to explore the full visualizations on their own. Even as it presents some exciting opportunities for students of book history and textual criticism, Juxta Commons also broadens the scope of interest in collation to the many different kinds of texts on the web. Speeches and transcriptions, Wikipedia article versions, news releases, Google Books and HATHI Trust texts: all these require the kind of authentication and analysis that Juxta Commons makes possible. Please visit the site juxtasoftware.org to learn more, and to find sample sets to spark your creativity. Juxta Commons is a project of NINES, supported by the University of Virginia and developed by Performant Software Solutions, LLC. Additional support for the development of Juxta Commons was provided by a Google Digital Humanities Research Award. This poster was originally presented at DH2013 on July 17, 2013.

Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Experiences in New Programmes at an Irish University

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

While we have used digital research in teaching at University College Cork for many years, the central role played by digital artefacts in the new Digital Humanities programmes is a relatively recent addition. This pivotal shift is new for both staff and students who, by the nature of new media technologies, cannot benefit from generations of received wisdom on assessment and evaluation. In this piece, we undertake a frank and personal investigation from both a pedagogical and scholarly perspective.

Building and Sharing (When You’re Supposed to be Teaching)

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

Much of what I do in my classroom doesn’t necessary count as “digital humanities.” I certainly don’t present my classes as digital humanities classes to my students—or to my colleagues, for that matter.

If anything, I simply say that we’ll be doing things in our classes they’ve never done before in college, let alone a literature class. And literature is mostly what I teach. Granted, I teach literature that lends itself to digital work: electronic literature, postmodern fiction, and even videogames. We do a great deal of close readings in these classes. It’s familiar, even comfortable territory for my students. But we also—and this is what surprises my students—spend much of our time building and sharing.

Debates in the Digital Humanities: Scholarly Publishing Across Print/Digital Streams

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

Poster

Download (PDF, 3.06MB)

Abstract

Debates in the Digital Humanities, an edited collection featuring contributions from over forty DH scholars and practitioners, straddles the line between print and digital publication. The first edition of the printed text, which was published by the University of Minnesota Press in January 2012, was composed predominately of essays but also incorporated a variety of web-based materials such as blog posts, tweets, and wiki pages. The printed book was, from the earliest stages of the publication process, intertwined with digital platforms: following the model of peer-to-peer review described by Kathleen Fitzpatrick in Planned Obsolescence, all essays in the book were part of a semi-public, web-based review process that mixed new forms of peer-to-peer review with more traditional models of publisher-based blind peer review.

Marked Bodies, Transformative Scholarship, and the Question of Theory in Digital Humanities

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

In October 2011, Natalia Cecire’s off-the-cuff suggestion of a THATCamp Theory set off a ferment of planning and arguing in the digital humanities community. It sounded like a great idea to me. Beginning with a session on “diversity in digital humanities” at THATCamp SoCal in January 2011––well attended both in person and remotely––I had been collaborating with an amorphous group of scholars engaged with critical cultural studies, queer studies, and ethnic studies in the context of the digital. We had been thinking about ways to connect the ethic of making that is central to digital humanities with a greater self-consciousness about the way everything is structured and its cultural politics; I was keen to continue and broaden that conversation.

Visual Historiography: Visualizing “The Literature of a Field”

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

Poster

Click here or on the image to visit the interactive poster.

Abstract

The call for visualizing “Big Data” has generated a groundswell of interest among historians and humanities scholars, as demonstrated by the international response to the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 2010 and 2011 Digging into Data challenges (Williford and Henry, 2012). Exemplary efforts from the first two rounds of projects, such as Stanford University’s “Mapping the Republic of Letters,” and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s “Railroads and the Making of Modern America,” suggest the great potential for visualizing large repositories of primary sources for historical insight.

Where Are the Philosophers? Thoughts from THATCamp Pedagogy

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

In October, I attended THATCamp Pedagogy, where I met loads of lovely humanists, each of whom is doing fascinating things with digital tools to study humanistic questions or asking humanistic questions about digital content.

There was one core humanistic discipline largely absent from this unconference: my own, philosophy. This is not new, nor surprising. It is, however, deeply regrettable.

It’s All About the Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power, and People

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

In 1901, one of the first acts of the Commonwealth of Australia was to create a system of exclusion and control designed to keep the newly-formed nation ‘white’. But White Australia was always a myth. As well as the Indigenous population, there were already many thousands of people classified as ‘non-white‘ living in Australia — most were Chinese, but there were also Japanese, Indians, Syrians and Indonesians.

Here are some of them…

All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave

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

Following a fascinating talk by Ed Finn on the changing role and source of literary criticism in a digital age, Natalia Cecire queried the implicit neutrality of a term like “nerd.” Melissa Harris-Perry’s reclamation aside, the racialized and gendered aspects of nerddom, and by extension the digital humanities, offer opportunities for a more explicit engagement with positionalities that lead “white men to feel embattled.” How do those outside the categories white and male navigate this burgeoning disciplinary terrain?

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

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“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

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“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

About

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The Journal of Digital Humanities (ISSN 2165-6673) is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features scholarship, tools, and conversations produced, identified, and tracked by members of the digital humanities community through Digital Humanities Now.

Initiated by the PressForward project, the Journal of Digital Humanities is an experiment in sourcing and distributing scholarly communication on the open web. The Journal of Digital Humanities selects content from the Editors’ Choice pieces from Digital Humanities Now, which highlights the best scholarship — in whatever form — that drives the field of digital humanities field forward. The Journal of Digital Humanities provides three additional layers of evaluation, review, and editing to the pieces initially identified by Digital Humanities Now. Every article published includes the original date and location of publication, along with the date of revision, where applicable.

Authors

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Alison Booth (1)
Adam Chapman (1)
Alex Christie (1)
Adam Crymble (1)
Anna Dowling (1)
Amy Dyrbye (1)
Amy Earhart (1)
Alex Galarza (1)
Agiatis Benardou (1)
Andrew Goldstone (1)
Anne Houston (1)
Alberto Campagnolo (1)
Alexis Lothian (1)
Aly Conteh (1)
Amanda Visconti (1)
Alex McDowell (1)
Ann Stewart (1)
Andrew Prescott (1)
Douglas Armato (1)
Anastasia Salter (1)
Aaron Todd (1)
Andrew J. Torget (2)
Amber N. Wiley (1)
Boris Capitanu (1)
Brian Croxall (1)
Boone B. Gorges (1)
Bill Ferster (1)
Bethany Nowviskie (2)
Beth Plale (1)
Brian Parks (1)
Benjamin M. Schmidt (3)
Caroline De Stefani (1)
Chad Black (1)
Catherine Foley (1)
Chelsea Lindsey (1)
Christopher Forstall (1)
Christopher Scott Gleason (1)
David McClure (1)
Craig Mod (1)
Cory Bohon (1)
Chuck Rybak (1)
Christof Schöch (2)
Dallas Costis (1)
Dana Wheeles (1)
Daniel Hargreaves (1)
Daniel Peacock (1)
David J. Staley (1)
David Johnson (1)
David M. Blei (1)
Daniel J. Cohen (1)
David Mimno (1)
Dominic Bell (1)
Dean Rehberger (1)
Diane M. Zorich (1)
The Editors (36)
Elijah Meeks (9)
Emma Stewart (1)
Erik Malcolm Champion (1)
Eric Rochester (1)
Jordan Sellers (1)
Ethan Watrall (1)
Fred Gibbs (1)
Gareth Beale (1)
George Williams (1)
Grant Leyton Simpson (1)
Geoffrey Rockwell (3)
Guangchen Ruan (1)
Heather Williams (1)
Ian Dawson (1)
Ian Milligan (1)
Isabella Kirton (1)
James Gawley (1)
James Smith (1)
Jeremy Antley (2)
Jason Corso (1)
Jean Bauer (1)
Jeremy Boggs (2)
Jon Christensen (2)
Jennifer Guiliano (1)
Jason Heppler (1)
Jeremiah McCall (1)
Joe Dempsey (1)
Joshua Sternfeld (2)
John Resig (1)
Tom Scheinfeldt (1)
J. Stephen Downie (1)
John Simpson (1)
James Smithies (1)
John N. Wall (1)
John Walsh (1)
Jiaan Zeng (1)
Katharina Hering (2)
Kazim Pal (1)
Karl Grossner (2)
Katherine D. Harris (1)
Kirk Hess (1)
Kazushi Ohya (1)
Kristin Jensen (1)
Kate Theimer (3)
Kathryn Tomasek (2)
Kirsten Uszkalo (1)
Laurence Ward (1)
Loretta Auvil (1)
Lynn Harding (1)
Liz Yamada (1)
Laura Mandell (1)
Louisa Minkin (1)
Lotte Wilms (1)
Lisa M. Rhody (4)
Lisa Spiro (1)
Luc Fontenoy (1)
Marianne Ping Huang (1)
Mark Abrams (1)
Matt Munson (1)
Matthew K. Gold (1)
Matthew Payne (1)
Matthew Slaats (1)
Moya Z. Bailey (1)
Matthew M. Booker (1)
Megan R. Brett (1)
Michael Cosgrave (1)
Mark Curran (2)
Michael Edson (1)
Melissa Terras (2)
Mitchell S. Green (1)
Mike Griffith (1)
Michael J. Kramer (2)
Modern Language Association (1)
Evaluation Wiki of the Committee on Information Technology, Modern Language Association (1)
Michael Mateas (1)
Miriam Posner (1)
Mia Ridge (1)
Mark Sample (2)
Melissa Terras (2)
Nicole Beale (1)
Natalia Cecire (2)
Neil Coffee (1)
Nik Honeysett (1)
Nicola Avery (1)
Noah Wardrip-Fruin (2)
Olivia Rohan (1)
Patricia Stewart (1)
Peter Bradley (1)
Petra Links (1)
Philippa Smith (1)
Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser (1)
Patrick Murray-John (1)
Rachael Smither (1)
Rudolf Ammann (1)
Ryan Chartier (1)
Robert Nelson (1)
Róisín O’Brien (1)
Robert Sanderson (1)
Ryan Shaw (1)
Rebecca Sutton Koeser (1)
Rebecca Tegtmeyer (1)
Sheila Brennan (1)
Susan Brown (1)
Simon Burrows (2)
Sheila Cavanagh (1)
Scot A. French (1)
Stuart Dunn (1)
Susan Garfinkel (1)
Shawn Graham (1)
Steven Gray (1)
Stacy Kowalczyk (1)
Shannon Christine Mattern (1)
Stephen Ramsay (1)
Stéfan Sinclair (2)
Sean Takats (1)
Sue Yeon Syn (1)
Susan Schreibman (1)
Scott B. Weingart (7)
Sarah Werner (1)
Syd Bauman (1)
Trey Conatser (2)
Tim Hitchcock (1)
Tim Weyrich (1)
Trevor Muñoz (1)
Toma Tasovac (1)
Trevor Owens (2)
Todd Presner (1)
Tim Sherratt (1)
Ted Underwood (2)
Vicki Mayer (1)
Walter Scheirer (1)
Douglas Seefeldt (1)
Wayne Graham (1)
Wendy F. Hsu (2)
American Historical Association, National Council on Public History, and Organization of American Historians Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship (1)
William G. Thomas (1)
Youngok Choi (1)
Yiming Sun (1)
Zach Davis (1)
Zach Coble (1)
Zong Peng (1)

Joan Fragaszy Troyano

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Joan Fragaszy Troyano is a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. She currently is working on the development of the PressForward software platform to improve the aggregation, curation, and publication of scholarship, and is the managing editor of Digital Humanities Now and the Journal of Digital Humanities. Her own research is in visual culture and public understandings of the past. She holds a PhD in American Studies from George Washington University.

Protected: Vol. 2 No. 2 Articles Featured Excerpts

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The Editors

Protected: Vol. 2. No. 2 Reviews Featured Excerpts

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The Editors

Search

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Submissions

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The content of the Journal of Digital Humanities comes directly from the work that digital humanists around the world produce and share on the open web; there is no formal submission process.

The Journal of Digital Humanities selects, reviews, edits, and publishes the most valuable work identified by the weekly publication Digital Humanities Now. Digital Humanities Now highlights important scholarship and news items for digital humanists from the aggregated RSS feeds in our Compendium of Digital Humanities, automated searches, and information shared by the community at large on Twitter. Please consider joining the community of volunteer Editors-at-Large who help to surface and nominate the pieces that advance digital humanities scholarship and practice.

Vol. 1 No. 4 Fall 2012 Evaluation Gaps Featured Excerpts

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The Editors

What is Needed to Ensure the Development of Digital Humanities Scholarship?

Collaborators’ Bill of Rights

Vol. 1 No. 4 Fall 2012 Guidelines Featured Excerpts

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The Editors

Statements from Professional Associations and their Members

Vol. 1 No. 4 Fall 2012 Resources Featured Excerpts

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Editors

Additional Materials

Vol. 1, No. 3 Summer 2012 Articles Featured Excerpts

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Editors

“Something curious happens to our ability to understand scope when we move all that goop of process and narrative into a computer.”
Craig Mod

San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, 1972-2004

Vol. 1, No. 3 Summer 2012 Projects Featured Excerpts

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Editors

“To treat such objects only as tools, and implicitly capable only of providing that which they were designed to provide, undercuts the possibilities of advancing the use of models and modeling in the humanities.”
Elijah Meeks and Karl Grossner

The FBTEE Project Visualisation Gallery

Vol. 1, No. 3 Summer 2012 Reviews Featured Excerpts

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The Editors

Mapping Newspaper Quality

Vol. 1, No. 4 Fall 2012 Approaches Featured Excerpts

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Editors

Perspectives on Assessment and Evaluation from Across the Academy

Simon Fraser/Science Photo Library via Guardian.uk

Vol. 2 No. 1 Applications Featured Excerpts

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Joan Fragaszy Troyano

Clusters of voyages in the Maury Collection generated by a simple k-means algorithm

“The strictly linguistic character of this technique is a limitation as well as a strength.”
Ted Underwood and Andrew Goldstone

Vol. 2 No. 1 Beginnings Featured Excerpts

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Joan Fragaszy Troyano

“A model of texts, built with a particular theory in mind, cannot provide evidence for the theory.”
David M. Blei

Some of the topics found by analyzing 1.8 million articles from the New York Times

Vol. 2 No. 1 Respond Featured Excerpts

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Joan Fragaszy Troyano

open for reader responses

Vol. 2 No. 1 Reviews Featured Excerpts

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Joan Fragaszy Troyano

“For historians, literary scholars, and other humanities researchers, MALLET is a valuable addition to your toolkit.”

Ian Milligan and Shawn Graham

The results of a topic model, showing 25 topics found across a database of nearly 15,000 song lyric files.

Vol. 2 No. 3 DH2013 Poster Gallery Featured Excerpts

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The Editors

Architecture to Enable Large Scale Computational Analysis of Millions of Volumes

“Humanities students seem to struggle to envision the existence of a computational world in their minds.”

Kazushi Ohya

Vol. 2 No. 3 Features Featured Excerpts

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Editors

The story of smart and big data.

“As artists it is novel to think that in observing, drawing or modelling we might be capturing, analysing and processing data.”

Gareth Beale, Nicole Beale, Ian Dawson and Louisa Minkin

Vol. 3 No. 1 Features Featured Excerpts

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Editors

Screen shot from “Pudding Lane.”

“All of these various traces of the [public performance] have been integrated into a single experiential research environment through digital modeling.”

John N. Wall

Vol. 3 No. 1 Focus Section Featured Excerpts

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The Editors

“World building is both the creation of media and a design research practice.”

Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Vol. 3 No. 1 Poster Gallery Featured Excerpts

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The Editors

DH2013 Poster from DARIAH-EU, a European initiative to support digital research in the arts and humanities.

“creating tools for individuals with disabilities improves digital environments for all users.”

Cory Bohon, Jennifer Guiliano, James Smith, George Williams and Amanda Visconti

Vol. 3 No. 2 Features Section Featured Excerpts

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The Editors

Vol. 3 No. 2 Focus Section Featured Excerpts

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The Editors

“…archival theory and practice need to be an integral element of such a critical framework, along with evolving historiographical and professional practices. The digital medium has challenged historians to expand their knowledge about archives, and understand their function in generating scholarship and knowledge.”

Joshua Sternfeld, Katharina Hering, Kate Theimer, and Michael Kramer

Vol. 3 No. 2 Review Section Featured Excerpts

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Editors

“In addition to plotting related instances of digital media scholarship and creation, the Guide unpacks digital media, itself as a territory in which coordinates are enmeshed in humanities and social sciences research.”

Alex Christie

Volumes

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Vol. 3, No. 1 Spring 2014

Vol. 3 No. 2 Summer 2014

Vol. 2, No. 3 Summer 2013

Vol. 2, No. 2 Spring 2013

Vol. 2, No. 1 Winter 2012

Vol. 1, No. 4 Fall 2012

You are viewing entries marked 'Applications and Critiques'.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Topic Modeling and Figurative Language

… to have them for an instant in her hands both at once,
the story and its undoing…
from “Self Portrait as Hurry and Delay” [Penelope at her loom]

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Vol. 2 No. 1 Applications Featured Excerpts

Clusters of voyages in the Maury Collection generated by a simple k-means algorithm

“The strictly linguistic character of this technique is a limitation as well as a strength.”
Ted Underwood and Andrew Goldstone

(Read more)

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How to Evaluate Digital Scholarship

Short Guide To Evaluation Of Digital Work

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Evaluating Digital Humanities Work: Guidelines for Librarians

Let the Grant Do the Talking

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Vol. 1, No. 4 Fall 2012 Approaches Featured Excerpts

Perspectives on Assessment and Evaluation from Across the Academy

Simon Fraser/Science Photo Library via Guardian.uk

(Read more)

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

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

An ego network from wikipedia.org

(Read more)

Academic History Writing and its Disconnects

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Spatializing Photographic Archives

The extensive and carefully illustrated White Paper for our NEH-sponsored “Spatializing Photographic Archives” project can be downloaded as a large PDF (26.5mb).

The White Paper describes the open-source software tool we’ve developed, and our reasons for wanting to forge a new approach to making digital tools for scholars.

(Read more)

“Humanities in a Digital Age” Symposium Podcasts

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

An Electric Current of the Imagination: What the Digital Humanities Are and What They Might Become

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Vol. 1, No. 3 Summer 2012 Articles Featured Excerpts

“Something curious happens to our ability to understand scope when we move all that goop of process and narrative into a computer.”
Craig Mod

San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, 1972-2004

(Read more)

Where Material Book Culture Meets Digital Humanities

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Topic Modeling and Digital Humanities

Introduction

Topic Modeling: A Basic Introduction

The purpose of this post is to help explain some of the basic concepts of topic modeling, introduce some topic modeling tools, and point out some other posts on topic modeling.

(Read more)

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

“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”

(Read more)

Introduction: Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities

I came to theory because I was hurting—
the pain within me was so intense I could not go on living.

You are viewing entries marked 'Conversations'.

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Who You Calling Untheoretical?

[A note from the author: This blog post, as a piece of prose, is very much of the moment when it was written. Likewise its reception has been based on its tone as well as its content.

(Read more)

Theory, Digital Humanities, and Noticing

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Building and Sharing (When You’re Supposed to be Teaching)

Marked Bodies, Transformative Scholarship, and the Question of Theory in Digital Humanities

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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

“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.”

(Read more)

Archives in Context and as Context

You are viewing entries marked 'DH 2013 Poster Gallery'.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Digital Humanities Keywords: A Collaborative Community Web-based Project

Poster

Abstract

Networking the Belfast Group through the Automated Semantic Enhancement of Existing Digital Content

Poster

Abstract

You are viewing entries marked 'DH 2013 Poster Gallery'.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Architecture to Enable Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Millions of Volumes

Poster

Abstract

KORA: A Digital Repository and Publishing Platform

Poster

Abstract

You are viewing entries marked 'DH2013 Poster Gallery'.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

DH@WIT: Digital Humanities for Undergraduate Design, Engineering, and Management Students

Poster

Abstract

Vol. 3 No. 1 Poster Gallery Featured Excerpts

DH2013 Poster from DARIAH-EU, a European initiative to support digital research in the arts and humanities.

You are viewing entries marked 'DH2013 Poster Gallery'.

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DARIAH-EU’s Virtual Competency Center on Research and Education

Poster

Abstract

“Where do you need us?” — The National Library in the Digital Humanities

Poster

Abstract

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Juxta Commons

Poster

Abstract

Debates in the Digital Humanities: Scholarly Publishing Across Print/Digital Streams

Poster

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Protected: Vol. 2 No. 2 Articles Featured Excerpts

 There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. 
</div>

Changing Medium, Transforming Composition

Code Appendix for “Changing Medium, Transforming Composition”

Appendix A: Selections from Major Assignment Markup Schemes

Primary Source Analysis

In at least one paragraph match evidence (details) from the primary source with the interpretations you draw from them:

<seg type="ev_interp">

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Vol. 2 No. 3 Features Featured Excerpts

The story of smart and big data.

“As artists it is novel to think that in observing, drawing or modelling we might be capturing, analysing and processing data.”

Gareth Beale, Nicole Beale, Ian Dawson and Louisa Minkin

(Read more)

Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities

This paper is about data in the humanities. Most of my colleagues in literary and cultural studies would not necessarily speak of their objects of study as “data.” If you ask them what it is they are studying, they would rather speak of books, paintings and movies; of drama and crime fiction, of still lives and action painting; of German expressionist movies and romantic comedy.

(Read more)

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Pudding Lane: Recreating Seventeenth-Century London

Introduction

Transforming the Object of our Study: The Early Modern Sermon and the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project

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On the Origin of “Hack” and “Yack”

Using Computer Vision to Increase the Research Potential of Photo Archives

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An Introduction to Alex McDowell’s “World Building”

“World Building”

Alex McDowell — World Building

Video of this presentation to the Media Systems convening at the University of California, Santa Cruz on August 27, 2012 originally published on September 11, 2013.

(Read more)

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Vol. 3 No. 2 Focus Section Featured Excerpts

Digital Historiography and the Archives

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Provenance Meets Source Criticism

(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.)

(Read more)

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Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Historian

Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media

Introduction

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A Community-Sourced Journal

Getting Started in Digital Humanities

 When I presented at the Great Lakes College Association’s <a href="http://www.glca.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=49&amp;Itemid=108" target="_blank" title="Great Lakes College Association’s New Directions Workshop on Digital Humanities">New Directions</a> workshop on digital humanities (DH) in October, I tried to answer the question “Why digital humanities?”<br/><br/>

(Read more)

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Audience, Substance, and Style

 With this second issue, the <i>Journal of Digital Humanities</i> continues to explore and challenge the composition of the academic journal and our field itself. 
</div>

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The Difference the Digital Makes

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Closing the Evaluation Gap

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Expanding Communities of Practice

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Local Programs, Global Audiences

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Exploring and Designing Virtual Worlds

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Digital Contexts

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.

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Pacing Scholarly Conversations

The Digital Humanities Contribution to Topic Modeling

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Mapping Texts: Visualizing American Historical Newspapers

Why do we think this is important?

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Building New Windows into Digitized Newspapers

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ORBIS: An Interactive Scholarly Work on the Roman World

Modeling Networks and Scholarship with ORBIS

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Vol. 1, No. 3 Summer 2012 Projects Featured Excerpts

ORBIS: An Interactive Scholarly Work on the Roman World

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Mapping Texts: Visualizing American Historical Newspapers

Why do we think this is important?

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Building New Windows into Digitized Newspapers

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Bibliography

The Problem Stated

Burgess, Helen J., and Jeanne Hamming.

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Vol. 1 No. 4 Fall 2012 Resources Featured Excerpts

Additional Materials

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Respond to JDH 2.1

Responses from Twitter

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Vol. 3 No. 2 Review Section Featured Excerpts

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

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

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

Newspaper strip visualization

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Review of WordSeer, produced by Aditi Muralidharan, Marti Hearst, and Bryan Wagner

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

Video panels of players during gaming

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QRator at the Grant Museum of Zoology

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Vol. 1, No. 3 Summer 2012 Reviews Featured Excerpts

Mapping Newspaper Quality

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Review of ORBIS

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

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Review of MALLET, produced by Andrew Kachites McCallum

MALLET Version: 2.0.7
Requirements: Java

Reviewed: 15 February 2013
Tested on: Mac OS X v. 10.8.2, and Windows 7

The MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit, or MALLET, has been one of the “hottest” tools in digital humanities research.

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Review of Paper Machines, produced by Chris Johnson-Roberson and Jo Guldi

Paper Machines Version: 0.3.6
Requirements: Zotero, Python 2.7.3, Java.

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Protected: Vol. 2. No. 2 Reviews Featured Excerpts

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Review: Commons In A Box

Integrating Architecture into Digital and Public Humanities: Sites and Sounds + MediaNOLA

“Did you know @Tipitinas building has been a gym, radio station, juice bar, restaurant, & brothel? Not all at the same time, of course…”

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

“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

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Games and Historical Narratives

You are viewing entries marked 'The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe'.

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

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

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