2012 January : Digital Humanities Now

Archive

On Sharing With the Right People, or Why Online Metrics to Assess “Impact” Should Be Qualitative (Too)

January 31, 2012

By Ernesto Priego

There has been much talk recently about “maximising” and measuring academic impact through blogging and social media (as well as the academic impact of online publications and resources), but what is not often discussed thoroughly is what the meaning of “maximising” is in this context.

“Maximising” seems to refer to the quantitative, rather than the qualitative, implying that “impact” is necessarily related to how many people or visits or clicks or downloads a given online resource is getting. So-called“altmetrics” and the more-established webometrics or statistical cybermetrics seek to recognise the need of measuring the role that sharing links online has on increasing academic impact, but it seems to me that beyond an emphasis on the numbers what is also needed

Editors’ Choice: “Academic History Writing and the Headache of Big Data”

January 30, 2012

By Tim Hitchcock

[T]he seven or eight major projects I have co-directed are, from my perspective at least, fragments of a single coherent research agenda and project.

And that project is about the amalgamation of the Digital Humanities with an absolute commitment to a particular kind of history: ‘History from Below’. They form an attempt to integrate the British Marxist Historical Tradition, with all the assumptions that implies about the roles of history in popular memory, and community engagement, with digital delivery. In the language of the moment, they are a fragment of what we might discuss as a peculiar flavour of ‘public history’. And what I feel I have discovered in the last five or six years, is that there is a fundamental contradiction between the direction

Editors’ Choice: invention and digital humanities navel #dhdebates

January 27, 2012

By Alex Reid

Perhaps there are historical reasons why, at this particular moment, the humanities are so self-reflective. No perhaps about it, actually. We are somewhat lost at sea and the “digital” is part of the reason. This does not mean, however, that reflection is productive, and certainly not all reflection is productive…. I am particularly interested in the problem of rethinking rhetorical education to address shifting literacy practices. This, to me, is not narcissistic, though it does involve looking at the rhetorical practices of humanisits since it is fairly clear that what we will teach students is a function of what we do ourselves.

…Composing is a networked phenomenon because thinking is always already relational. I mean you are composing/thinking in words right? You didn’t invent that

Editors’ Choice: “‘An Electric Current of the Imagination’: What the Digital Humanities Are and What They Might Become” Lecture

January 27, 2012

By Andrew Prescott

Lecture at King’s College London, 25 January 2012

….A standard point of historical reference in thinking about the modern information revolution is the arrival of print in the fifteenth century, but perhaps a closer parallel is the way in which the growth of empire and the resulting changes in industry and agriculture transformed Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. David Simpson has pointed out how Wordsworth’s reference to ‘bright volumes of vapour’ in his poem ‘Poor Susan’ in the Lyrical Ballads may refer to the over-production of cheap and worthless literature – a data deluge whose effects preoccupied Wordsworth. The prostitute Susan in Simpson’s interpretation is one of an army of alienated and rootless people who pervade Wordsworth’s verse: beggars whose anxious movements reflect

Editors’ Choice: Men and Women in Shakespeare

January 26, 2012

By Aditi Muralidharan

In previous posts, I’ve shown how WordSeer can be used to explore small, well-defined questions:what word did Shakespeare use for ‘beautiful’? Is the occurrence of the word ‘love’ the same in the comedies and tragedies? This post is different. WordSeer has now developed enough to support a simple, but complete, exploratory analysis.

The question we’ll think about is this:

“How does the portrayal of men and women in Shakespeare’s plays change under different circumstances?”

Creative Commons image by Dominic's Pics via Flickr

Editors’ Choice: The monologue in a crowdsourced world

January 26, 2012

By Claire Warwick

The monologue in a crowdsourced world: have digital resources rendered the inaugural lecture obsolete?

The longer I work in DH, and the more I consider what the digital medium makes possible the more the idea of me standing up and telling people what I think and thus by implication what they might think seems frankly bizarre. I increasingly dislike the idea of the single voice speaking with some kind of a spurious authority. One of the great assets of the digital, and what it encourages and enables is multiple voices entering into a dialogue and creating new knowledge out of conversation and discussion. In what follows, therefore, I propose to look carefully at this apparent contradiction.

Read Full Post Here

Annotation Nation

January 25, 2012

By Michael Kramer

As I continue to plan out this spring’s Digitizing Folk Music Historycourse with the ace librarians, archivists, and technologists at Northwestern University’s library, I keep returning to the concept of annotation as a core concern for digital historians.

I suspect that literary scholars have done a lot of thinking about annotation, but have historians? Chauncey Monte-Sano has a good post about teaching annotation on the teachinghistory.org website. Her post is directed toward K-12 education (important!). But I think the art of annotation also has bigger implications for historical teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. So too, it proposes new modes of research, publication, and scholarly communication in the field of history.

DPLA Strawman Technical Proposal

January 24, 2012

By Jason Ronallo

Collection Achievements and Profiles System and DPLA Crawler Services

This is a quick strawman proposal for what the Digital Public Library of America should build as the first parts of a generative platform. This document is not in a finished state, but just as the DPLA has been good at opening up its process with the Beta Sprint, I wanted to release this document early even in this unfinished state.

Avoiding traps

January 24, 2012

By Scott Weingart

We have the advantage of arriving late to the game.

In the cut-throat world of high-tech venture capitalism, the first company with a good idea often finds itself at the mercy of latecomers. The latecomer’s product might be better-thought-out, advertised to a more appropriate market, or simply prettier, but in each case that improvement comes through hindsight. Trailblazers might get there first, but their going is slowest, and their way the most dangerous.

Digital humanities finds itself teetering on the methodological edge of many existing disciplines, boldly going where quite a few have gone before.

Creative Commons by chispita_666 via Flickr

The Political Economy of Digital Media and Education

January 23, 2012

By Benjamin J Robertson

My aim for that paper, and for this, is to think through my hesitation with regard to the new, history, form, and meaning. Briefly put, and not saying anything new as yet I think, I value new forms and processes of discourse, ones that seek to overcome limitations inherited from the past in order to make meaning in new ways. These forms and processes would have to, perhaps, ignore history and the methods of meaning making it affords us. However, I also value history, however problematic, insofar as it allows us to contextualize, understand, and make judgments about the new. In my MLA paper, and with further elaboration here, I consider received forms and processes of scholarship, especially as such scholarship….

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