197 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. Sarah is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, and Director of the Dictionary Lab at Oxford. She specializes in lexicography, endangered languages, language revitalization, the history of dictionaries, and the interface of technology with the Social Sciences and Humanities (digital humanities). Her research includes work on Australian Aboriginal and American Indian languages, especially relating to language documentation and revitalization. She is the Director of the new MSc in Digital Scholarship.

      What a fascinating set of areas she's working in... I want to do this...

  2. Jan 2024
  3. Dec 2023
  4. Nov 2023
    1. The example of maps he shows here discusses a social interaction component which allows for an interdisciplinary approach to the knowledge scaffolding (especially if students shared their work with each other).

      Are there other non-social affordances in this system? Affordances that would let an individual go further/faster by themselves?

  5. Oct 2023
    1. “Annotating Austen” is an ongoing digital humanities project that aims to create multi-media annotated electronic editions of Jane Austen’s six published novels. The project engages undergraduate students in researching and writing scholarly explanatory annotations using the web annotation tool Hypothesis (www.hypothes.is).
  6. Aug 2023
  7. Apr 2023
  8. Mar 2023
    1. Structures and Transformations of the Vocabulary of the Egyptian Language: Text and Knowledge Culture in Ancient Egypt. “Altägyptisches Wörterbuch: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften 1999,” 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20180627163317/https://aaew.bbaw.de/wbhome/Broschuere/index.html.

    2. Ausgangspunkt und Zentrum der Arbeit am Altägyptischen Wörterbuch ist die Anlage eines erschöpfenden Corpus ägyptischer Texte.

      In the early twentieth century one might have created a card index to study a large textual corpus, but in the twenty first one is more likely to rely on a relational database instead.

    1. things to do to understand text:

      • visualize single texts
      • measure features of text
      • identify distinctive words
      • find or organize works
      • model literay forms
      • model social boundaries
      • unsupervised modeling
  9. Feb 2023
    1. 1478-1518, Notebook of Leonardo da Vinci (''The Codex Arundel''). A collection of papers written in Italian by Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452, d. 1519), in his characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left), including diagrams, drawings and brief texts, covering a broad range of topics in science and art, as well as personal notes. The core of the notebook is a collection of materials that Leonardo describes as ''a collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place according to the subjects of which they treat'' (f. 1r), a collection he began in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli in Florence, in 1508. To this notebook has subsequently been added a number of other loose papers containing writing and diagrams produced by Leonardo throughout his career. Decoration: Numerous diagrams.

    1. https://pair.withgoogle.com/

      People + AI Research (PAIR) is a multidisciplinary team at Google that explores the human side of AI by doing fundamental research, building tools, creating design frameworks, and working with diverse communities.

    1. Stettler, Lucia. “Geheime Gästekartei überlebt Hotelbrand – und birgt Zündstoff.” Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF), April 8, 2021, sec. Kultur. https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/brisanter-fund-geheime-gaestekartei-ueberlebt-hotelbrand-und-birgt-zuendstoff.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>ManuelRodriguez331</span> in Advantages of Analog note taking : Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>02/07/2023 08:33:25</time>)</cite></small>

    2. https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/brisanter-fund-geheime-gaestekartei-ueberlebt-hotelbrand-und-birgt-zuendstoff

      cc: @remikalir: Interesting example here of a historical collection of business files annotated by hotel staff used in a digital humanities perspective for semantic shift and tracking antisemitism over time.

      Published book:<br /> Hechenblaikner, Lois, Andrea Kühbacher, and Rolf Zollinger. Keine Ostergrüsse mehr!: Die geheime Gästekartei des Grand Hotel Waldhaus in Vulpera. 3rd ed. Zürich: Edition Patrick Frey, 2021.

    3. Lois Hechenblaikner, Andrea Kühbacher, Rolf Zollinger (Hrsg.): «Keine Ostergrüsse mehr! Die geheime Gästekartei des Grandhotel Waldhaus in Vulpera». Edition Patrick Frey, 2021.Der reich bebilderte Band bietet eine spannende Reise in ein Stück Schweizer Tourismusgeschichte: Die Herausgeber haben die 20'000 Karteikarten aus den Jahren 1920-1960 sehr sorgfältig kuratiert, nach Themen gegliedert und in einen grösseren, gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhang gestellt.Die Leserinnen und Leser erfahren viel über die Klientel im Hotel Waldhaus, zum Teil sogar in kleinen biografischen Porträts; und sie können an konkreten Beispielen verfolgen, wie sich der Sprachgebrauch der Concierges im Laufe der Zeit verändert – gerade zum Beispiel im Zusammenhang mit jüdischen Gästen.

      Google Translate:

      Lois Hechenblaikner, Andrea Kühbacher, Rolf Zollinger (editors): «No more Easter greetings! The secret guest file of the Grandhotel Waldhaus in Vulpera". Edition Patrick Frey, 2021.

      The richly illustrated volume offers an exciting journey into a piece of Swiss tourism history: the editors have very carefully curated the 20,000 index cards from the years 1920-1960, structured them by topic and placed them in a larger, social context.

      The readers learn a lot about the clientele in the Hotel Waldhaus, sometimes even in small biographical portraits; and they can use concrete examples to follow how the concierge's use of language has changed over time - especially in connection with Jewish guests, for example.

  10. Jan 2023
    1. 3.1 Guest Lecture: Lauren Klein » Q&A on "What is Feminist Data Science?"<br /> https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15631

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7HmG5b87B8

      Theories of Power

      Patricia Hill Collins' matrix of domination - no hierarchy, thus the matrix format

      What are other broad theories of power? are there schools?

      Relationship to Mary Parker Follett's work?

      Bright, Liam Kofi, Daniel Malinsky, and Morgan Thompson. “Causally Interpreting Intersectionality Theory.” Philosophy of Science 83, no. 1 (January 2016): 60–81. https://doi.org/10.1086/684173.

      about Bayesian modeling for intersectionality


      Where is Foucault in all this? Klein may have references, as I've not got the context.


      How do words index action? —Laura Klein


      The power to shape discourse and choose words - relationship to soft power - linguistic memes

      Color Conventions Project


      20:15 Word embeddings as a method within her research


      General result (outside of the proximal research) discussed: women are more likely to change language... references for this?


      [[academic research skills]]: It's important to be aware of the current discussions within one's field. (LK)


      36:36 quantitative imperialism is not the goal of humanities analytics, lived experiences are incredibly important as well. (DK)

    1. Operationalization   Turning ideas into something we can measure off a data set.
    2. What it means to be a member of this or that class is a complex, interpretative matter; but tracking how many times a person has been to the opera is not. You can count the latter, and (the bargain goes) facts about those numbers may illuminate facts about the deeper concepts. For example, counting opera-going might be used to measure how immigrants move up the social class ladder across generations. Crucially, operationalization is not definition. A good operationalization does not redefine the concept of interest (it does not say "to be a member of the Russian intelligentsia is just to have gone to the opera at least once"). Rather, it makes an argument for why the concept, as best understood, may lead to certain measurable consequences, and why those measurements might provide a signal of the underlying concept.

      This is a good example of the fuzzy sorts of boundaries created by adding probabilities to individuals and putting them into (equivalence) classes. They can provide distributions of likelihoods.

      This expands on: https://hypothes.is/a/3FVi6JtXEe2Xwp_BIaCv5g

    3. Signal relationships are (usually) symmetric: if knowledge of X tells you about Y, then knowledge of Y tells you about X.

      Reframing signal relationships into probability spaces may mean that signal relationships are symmetric.

      How far can this be pressed? They'll also likely be reflexive and transitive (though the probability may be smaller here) and thus make an equivalence relation.

      How far can we press this idea of equivalence relations here with respect to our work? Presumably it would work to the level of providing at least good general distribution?

    1. Transcriptions taken from Goitein’s publications were corrected according to handwrittennotes on his private offprints. The nature of Goitein’s “typed texts” is as follows. Goitein tran-scribed Geniza documents by hand from the originals or from photostats. These handwrittentranscriptions were later typed by an assistant and usually corrected by Goitein. When Goiteindied in 1985, the transcriptions were photocopied in Princeton before the originals were sentto the National Library of Israel, where they can be consulted today. During the followingdecades, the contents of most of these photocopies were entered into a computer, and period-ically the files had to be converted to newer digital formats. The outcome of these repeatedprocesses of copying and conversion is that transcription errors and format glitches are to beexpected. As the Princeton Geniza Project website states: “Goitein considered his typed texts‘drafts’ and always restudied the manuscripts and made revisions to his transcriptions beforepublishing them.” See also Goitein, “Involvement in Geniza Research,” 143. It is important tokeep in mind that only the transcriptions that were typed were uploaded to the project website.Therefore, e.g., Goitein’s transcriptions of documents in Arabic scripts are usually not foundthere. The National Library of Israel and the Princeton Geniza Lab also hold many of Goitein’sdraft English translations of Geniza documents, many of which were intended for his plannedanthology of Geniza texts in translation, Mediterranean People.

      Much like earlier scribal errors, there are textual errors inserted into digitization projects which may have gone from documentary originals, into handwritten (translated) copies, which then were copied manually via typewriter, and then copied again into some digital form, and then changed again into other digital forms as digital formats changed.

      As a result it is often fruitful to be able to compare the various versions to see the sorts of errors which each level of copying can introduce. One might suppose that textual errors were only common when done by scribes using manual techniques, but it is just as likely for errors to be inserted between digital copies as well.

    2. Fried-berg Judeo-Arabic Project, accessible at http://fjms.genizah.org. This projectmaintains a digital corpus of Judeo-Arabic texts that can be searched and an-alyzed.

      The Friedberg Judeo-Arabic Project contains a large corpus of Judeo-Arabic text which can be manually searched to help improve translations of texts, but it might also be profitably mined using information theoretic and corpus linguistic methods to provide larger group textual translations and suggestions at a grander scale.

    3. More recent ad-ditions to the website include a “jigsaw puzzle” screen that lets users viewseveral items while playing with them to check whether they are “joins.” An-other useful feature permits the user to split the screen into several panelsand, thus, examine several items simultaneously (useful, e.g., when compar-ing handwriting in several documents). Finally, the “join suggestions” screenprovides the results of a technologically groundbreaking computerized anal-ysis of paleographic and codiocological features that suggests possible joinsor items written by the same scribe or belonging to the same codex. 35

      Computer means can potentially be used to check or suggest potential "joins" of fragments of historical documents.

      An example of some of this work can be seen in the Friedberg Genizah Project and their digital tools.

  11. Dec 2022
    1. The Princeton Geniza Project(link is external) is a database of more than 30,000 records and 4,600 transcriptions of documentary geniza texts. Since 1986, the PGP has been dedicated to discovering and describing unpublished documents; maintaining a full-text retrieval database of geniza documents; and creating new transcriptions and translations.
    1. Published in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the paper also shows that the mice share similarities in mitochondrial DNA with Scandinavia and northern Germany, but not with mice found in Portugal.

      Use of DNA on rodents to indicate ancient trade and travel.

  12. Nov 2022
  13. Jul 2022
    1. I bet with the advent of computers and the digitalizing of reference material there was a spike in the amount of verbatum quotes that are used instead of summarizing the thought into your own words.

      It's a reasonable assumption that with the rise of digital contexts and the ease of cut and paste that people excerpting or quoting material are more likely to excerpt and quote longer passages because it is now easier to do.


      Has anyone done research on showing that this is the case?

  14. Jun 2022
    1. Archaeology of Reading project

      https://archaeologyofreading.org/

      The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.


      Perhaps some overlap here with: - Workshop in the History of Material Texts https://pennmaterialtexts.org/about/events/ - Book Traces https://booktraces.org via Andrew Stauffer, et al. - Schoenberg Institute's Coffe with a Codex https://schoenberginstitute.org/coffee-with-a-codex/ (perhaps to a lesser degree)

    2. Francesca Benatti (Open University)

      Online

      Short Bio

      I joined The Open University in 2012 as a member of the Arts Faculty and I am now part of the School of Arts and Humanities and the English and Creative Writing Department. I hold a Laurea in Lettere Moderne from the University of Bologna, as well as an MA in Literature and Publishing and a PhD in English from the National University of Ireland, Galway.

      My main role in the Faculty is to promote research in the Digital Humanities as the co-leader of DH_OU, the Digital Humanities at The Open University Research Collaboration (web and Twitter) and of the OOC DTP Digital Humanities training programme.

      I am a member of the READ-IT project, the Reading Experience Database, the History of Books and Reading Research Group, the Gender and Otherness in the Humanities (GOTH) Research Centre, the European Romanticism in Association and RÊVE project and the Open Arts Archive.

      During 2014-2019 I led the Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age training programme for the CHASE doctoral training partnership. In 2017 I was the Principal Investigator of the A Question of Style project, which was funded by a Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Field Development Grant. In 2016-2019 I was a member of the Executive Committee of the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) and of the International Executive Council of centerNet.

      Select bibliography

      • Understanding the phenomenology of reading through modelling (2021-01-26) Antonini, Alessio; Suárez-Figueroa, Mari Carmen; Adamou, Alessandro; Benatti, Francesca; Vignale, François; Gravier, Guillaume and Lupi, Lucia Semantic Web Journal, 12(2) (pp. 191-217)
      • *ing the Written Word: Digital Humanities Methods for Book History (2020) Antonini, Alessio and Benatti, Francesca In : SHARP 2020: Power of the Written Word (11-15 Jul 2020, Amsterdam)
    3. Alessio Antonini (Open University)

      Dr Alessio Antonini is a Research Associate at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), Open University, and a member of KMi's Intelligent Systems and Data Science group. Before joining KMi, he was a post-doc researcher in Urban Computing at the University of Turin, Italy. His research is on Human-Data Interaction (HDI) in applicative context of Civic Technologies, Smart City and Digital Humanities (DH) applications, in which contributed with more than 30 peer-reviewed papers. Transdisciplinary problems emerging from real-life scenarios are the focus of his research, approached through interdisciplinary collaborations, ranging from urban planning, philosophy, law, humanities, history and geography. He has extensive experience in EU and national projects, leading activities and work-packages in 14 projects. With more than ten years of professional practice, he as broad experience in leading R&D projects.

      Select bibliography:

      • Antonini, A., Benatti, F., Watson, N., King, E. and Gibson, J. (2021) Death and Transmediations: Manuscripts in the Age of Hypertext, HT '21: Proceedings of the 32th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Virtual Event USA
      • Vignale, F., Antonini, A. and Gravier, G. (2020) The Reading Experience Ontology (REO): Reusing and Extending CIDOC CRM, Digital Humanities Conference 2020, Ottawa
      • Antonini, A. and Brooker, S. (2020) Mediation as Calibration: A Framework for Evaluating the Author/Reader Relation, Proceedings of the 31st ACM HyperText, Orlando, Florida, USA
      • Antonini, A. and Benatti, F. (2020) *ing the Written Word: Digital Humanities Methods for Book History, SHARP 2020: Power of the Written Word, Amsterdam
      • Antonini, A., (2020) Understanding the phenomenology of reading through modelling Understanding the phenomenology of reading through modelling, pp. (Early Access)
      • Vignale, F., Benatti, F. and Antonini, A. (2019) Reading in Europe - Challenge and Case Studies of READ-IT Project, DH2019, Utrecht, Netherland
      • Antonini, A., Vignale, F., Guillaume, G. and Brigitte, O. (2019) The Model of Reading: Modelling principles, Definitions, Schema, Alignments
  15. Jan 2022
    1. When I think back to the creation of that infographic, I wonder whether we had shown the care demanded of the data. Whether we had, in creating this abstraction, re-enacted — however inadvertently — some of the objectification of the slave trade.

      This sort of objectification seems very similar to the type of erasure that Poland is doing with the Holocaust as they begin honoring Poles who helped Jews while simultaneously ignoring Poland's part in collaborating with the Nazis in creating the Holocaust.

      How can we as a society and humanity add more care to these sorts of acts so as not to continue erasing the harm and better heal past wrongs?

      Cross reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/opinion/holocaust-poland-europe.html and https://hyp.is/hrsb9oIOEey8sEObTYhk0A/www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/opinion/holocaust-poland-europe.html

  16. Nov 2021
  17. May 2021
    1. This is a facsimile and diplomatic edition of Codex Vercellensis CXVII, Archivio e Biblioteca Capitolare di Vercelli.

      An interesting example of a digitized version of a book.

  18. Apr 2021
    1. There are surprisingly few digital editions of commonplace books, especially given how the genre lends itself to digitization. What we've made isn't perfect but we hope it helps others think through/with these types of books. More about that here: digitalbookhistory.com/colletscommonp…

      I've seen some people building digital commonplace books in real time, but I'm also curious to see more academics doing it and seeing what tools and platforms they're using to do it.

      Given the prevalence for these in text, I'd be particularly curious to see them being done as .txt or .md files and then imported into platforms like Obsidian, Roam Research, Org Mode, TiddlyWiki, et al for cross linking and backlinking.

      I've seen some evidence of people doing some of this with copies of the bible, but yet to see anyone digitize and cross link old notebooks or commonplace books.

  19. Feb 2021
    1. A fairly comprehensive list of problems and limitations that are often encountered with data as well as suggestions about who should be responsible for fixing them (from a journalistic perspective).

    1. Spent some time browsing through the wealth of resources here. What a great site. Greg McVerry will appreciate it and many of the curated resources which he may be able to remix and reuse.

    2. I'm curious how a model like Homebrew Website Club or regular DoOO meetups might be similar to or borrow from a teaching model like this class?

  20. Feb 2020
  21. May 2019
    1. 1RWDOOPRYLHVKDYHWREHGRFXPHQWDULHVDQGQRWDOOYLVXDOL]DWLRQKDVWREHWUDGLWLRQDOFKDUWVDQGJUDSKV

      This is an interesting fact, usually when I think of visualization and data I go to the classic default charts and data. I'll have to keep this iin mind.

    2. 7KHEDVHRIWKHJUDSKLFLVVLPSO\DOLQHFKDUW+RZHYHUGHVLJQHOHPHQWVKHOSWHOOWKHVWRU\EHWWHU/DEHOLQJDQGSRLQWHUVSURYLGHFRQWH[WDQGKHOS\RXVHHZK\WKHGDWDLVLQWHUHVWLQJDQGOLQHZLGWKDQGFRORUGLUHFW\RXUH\HVWRZKDW¶VLPSRUWDQW

      I really like this because I don't see it often and it actually does draw my eye to the data and capture my interest.

    1. Problematicrepresentationsandbiasesinclassificationsarenotnew

      Not only are these representations nothing new to our society but they probably never will be old. Opinions and representation are not only situational, those with voices and power will use that to their advantage, whether or not it will land us with other algorithms and stereotypes.

    2. nreality,informationmonopoliessuchasGooglehavetheabilitytoprioritizewebsearchresultsonthebasisofavarietyoftopics,suchaspromotingtheirownbusinessinterestsoverthoseofcompetitorsorsmallercompaniesthatarelessprofitableadvertisingclientsthanlargermultinationalcorporationsare.

      It's a good thing google was exposed to the issues at hand and took action. As several other people have already mentioned in their annotations google has seen and responded to the racist algorithms and improved the search results drastically. This will teach youth much better examples of equality and power.

    3. Figure1.7.GoogleImagesresultswhensearchingtheconcept“beautiful”(didnotincludetheword“women”),December4,2014

      You can even see that the pictures for "beautiful men" were images of young, Caucasian males with chiseled, "imperfect" bodies. When did people decide that other cultures, shapes, and ethnicities weren't beautiful? It's a tragedy that we're recovering from globally and that will have tainted the visions of beauty for many people.

    4. Whileservingasanimportantanddisturbingcritiqueofsexistattitudes,thecampaignfailstoimplicatethealgorithmsorsearchenginesthatdrivecertainresultstothetop.Thischaptermovesthelensontothesearcharchitectureitselfinordertoshedlightonthemanyfactorsthatkeepsexistandracistideasonthefirstpage.

      I think that this is incredibly important because while in the past years these campaigns and societal viewpoints have changed and come so far, for the better, there is still the ugly truth that there are and have been these algorithms and thoughts in the past that people were so unaware of. Many people, even people who may be very aware of what's happening in the world, need to be reminded and educated on these issues. Myself included, of course.

    1. humanities scholars have collaborated with computer scientists to build tools to facilitate these essential functions of the humanities in new ways.

      I believe that the collaboration between subjects is necessary to understand ideas and theories in a more holistic way. To successfully write a scientific journal on a new medical accomplishment one must understand how to use language, grammar, and vocabulary. To paint a world renowned artwork masterpiece, one must understand the mathematics of symmetry, spacing, and measurements. It seems only natural to me that the humanities partner with all disciplines to convey its topics and research, and computer science is one such discipline that makes the humanities more applicable and accessible by researchers and public alike.

    2. Image processing involves taking a two-dimensional image that has been con-verted into digital format, making enhancements such as sharpening, changing color balances, saturation and exposure, cropping or straight-ening; annotating by adding metadata for location, date, content and so forth; and setting parameters such as color mode, compression format and size.

      This has recovered so many almost unrecognizable images from the past it's amazing. All these old, damaged documents that have been digitally revitalized is so wonderful, considering all the information we have obtained from said articles and photos.

    3. To be useful, once data is gathered, it must be inspected, cleaned, transformed and modeled to discover useful information, arrive at conclusions and support decision making.

      and presented in an organized manner so we can actually follow it!

    4. More sophisticated tools can per-form high-end linguistic 'analysis, such as tagging parts of speech (POS), creating concordances, collating versions, analyzing sentiments and keyword density/prominence, visualizing patterns, exploring intertex-tual parallels and modeling topics

      I like how this method is relatable because the analysis is what we've been familiar with through high school and university. For example in Literary Studies we learnt how to dissect poetry and pieces of literature. With the text analysis we can use the tactics we're already familiar with.

    5. Searching(including VJSual Searching): Most users are familiar with search engines like Goggle and Yahoo,

      Google Scholar is a students best friend.

    6. Video and Audio Processing Tools: These control the alteration of digital acoustic and video files and can include enhancement, clean-ing, mixing and cutting, annotation and compression.

      Anyone who has bee to a live concert after listening to the same songs on a cd or itunes can appreciate audio processing tools, as some artists sound far different without some digital "tweaking". The same goes for video, editing tools can create a entirely different product than the one shot live.

    7. digital text annotation is simply adding notes or glosses to a document, for instance, putting sticky-note comments on a PDF file for personal use.

      A more environmentally friendly way to make notes and organize thoughts, rather that printing off 80 pages of print, times 50 students, to preform comparative analysis on.

    8. The tools that have been developed since that time have helped scholars to collect material, encode it, study it with text mining and data analysis, map it using anything from Google Maps to geographic information systems (GIS), visualize it-sometimes using video, 3D or virtual reality recreations -create digital archives, incor-porate and analyze sound -anything from speech to music to noise

      The sheer depth to which we are now able to study particular things with these tools is mind-boggling. Instead of being satisfied with your local library or towns collective Library resources, you can search for information across the globe, while not leaving your home. To be able to share and collaborate and display your work in an online forum is equally as amazing, considering how quickly this has come about.

    9. This process creates a three-dimensional solid object based on computer-generated models

      This allows researchers and students to manipulate objects in their hands and explore different textures on the surface that 3D modeling just does not offer. It most definitely was a great invention!

    10. Their effectiveness for reading manuscript books has evolved greatly over the past decade, but they still require much direct intervention or "instruction" on the part of a researcher or other investigator.

      I wonder what can be done to help increase the effectiveness of these apps? Handwritten letters can be hard to read depending on the persons neatness, maybe a larger database with a wider range of handwriting samples could be used to increase the independence of the app?

    11. digital text annotation is simply adding notes or glosses to a document, for instance, putting sticky-note comments on a PDF file for personal use.

      This really does help determine where your thoughts come from while writing a paper so that credit can be given where it is due to help minimize plagiarism.

    1. A searchable map of the addresses contained in the 1956 Negro Travelers’ Green Book, which the user can filter by state or establishment type.

      As someone interested in geography and history, this application of the digital humanities is particularly intriguing. While I still do not fully grasp everything that digital humanities is and aims to do, I appreciate that the platform it gives can reach a far wider audience, myself included. There are so many things I would never have had the privilege of viewing if not for people participating in this discipline.

    2. Many  students tell me that in order to get started with digital humanities, they’d like to have some idea of what they might do and what technical skills they might need in order to do it.

      This is definitely me. I had no idea what to expect from digital humanities and still don't. I'm enjoying learning as we go and these articles definitely help.

    3. An essay, accompanied by photographs, video, and sound, that can be reconfigured by the viewer to be read in multiple ways.

      I really enjoy this layout for a project because not only is it easy to understand and navigate but it incorporates all of this generation's favourite medias; photo, video, sound, and text.

    1. Humanities scholars can also use a project site to publicize what I call their intellectual bank.

      Sharing research on a digital platform creates the ability to reach many more people. A Ted talk, for example, can be viewed live by say, a couple thousand people; throw it up on the world wide web and your audience just grew exponentially.

    2. but it’s much easier than you think

      I beg to differ. I am currently taking three courses, a psych and a geography in addition to this one. I have spent the most time on this one, with the least results. However, that just means the rewards will be greater when I figure it all out, right? As well, everything I learn in this course could be applied to many other subjects, which is an exciting prospect. I found the black on grey extremely hard to read, something I will keep in mind when creating my own blog.

    3. One thing humanities scholars are really great at doing is reading, connecting ideas and writing about it. We know stuff! However, that work (and it is intellectual labor) is invisible and largely undervalued.  Yet it forms the foundation of all good scholarship. All people see is the footnote on an article or a note in a chapter in a book. Humanities faculty, unlike their STEM counterparts, do not have labs. We do not have a place for our work and no one sees our process. While there are bibliographic managers that help scholars manage their sources, actually writing about the things you read and how they speak to each other in a way that people can access makes it more likely that humanities scholars will have conversations with others who share your research interests.

      Sharing research encourages communication and the development of ideas and theories which is what research is all about so blog spaces and web spaces are a great way to achieve this successfully and across the web.

    1. using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.

      Libraries will never go out of style, and there is nothing quite like curling up in your favourite cozy spot, be it the beach or a recliner by the fireplace, and escaping into a good book. However, having access to a multitude of peer reviewed research articles at the tips of your fingers makes a world of difference, especially to students. As a working single Mom, having the ability to tuck my kid in at night and sit down to look up resources has made education much more accessible. For young students juggling jobs and school, I am sure this is an invaluable tool as well.

    2. No one person could digest the work’s enormous amount of material, and no single printing could render it accurately, so Mr. Foys created a prize-winning digital version with commentary that scholars could scroll through.

      It is absolutely INSANE that they were able to digitally map a 224 feet long, 11th century tapestry so that scholars could scroll through it and study it. I cannot wrap my brain around this, it's just something I never thought people would do or even could do. This fact has opened my eyes quite a bit.

    3. He offered the human genome project as an example of how an area of study can be transformed: “Technology hasn’t just made astronomy, biology and physics more efficient. It has let scientists do research they simply couldn’t do before.”

      These advanced have progressed medicine and sciences so far it's incredible. Think of all of the treatments and research data we never would've had without these advancements and technologies. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved or qualities of life improved due to technology and it's only going to keep going.

    1. At the ICCH conference in Columbia, South Carolina, in spring 1987 a group of people mostly working in support roles in humanities computing got together and agreed that they needed to find a way of keeping in touch on a regular basis.

      To think that we use online chats so casually, with family, friends and colleagues from all over the world, and it was only thirty short years ago that the first "electronic seminar" was introduced.

    2. Now that the Internet is such a dominant feature of everyday life, the opportunity exists for humanities computing to reach out much further than has hitherto been possible.

      I was just finishing high school when the internet became mainstream. In the following twenty-three years, we have seen an explosion of new developments as well as greater access to technology that is still relatively new. The implications for how knowledge can be shared and expanded upon is incredible.

    3. The TEI's adoption as a model in digital library projects raised some interesting issues about the whole philosophy of the TEI, which had been designed mostly by scholars who wanted to be as flexible as possible. Any TEI tag can be redefined and tags can be added where appropriate

      Question - What were some of the issues that arose with the TEI's adoption as a model in digital library projects?

      The ability to add tags where needed throughout the texts seems to be a positive aspect due to the added ease of searching key words and it being included in said search.

    4. An additional dimension was added to humanities electronic resources in the early 1990s, when it became possible to provide multimedia information in the form of images, audio, and video.

      This addition to the media made internet education and research even more advanced and helpful. And it also added a whole new level to entertainment that is very wonderful!

    5. At this time much attention was paid to the limitations of the technology. Data to be analyzed were either texts or numbers. They were input laboriously by hand either on punched cards, with each card holding up to eighty characters or one line of text (uppercase letters only), or on paper tape, where lower-case letters were perhaps possible but which could not be read in any way at all by a human being. Father Busa has stories of truckloads of punched cards being transported from one center to another in Italy. All computing was carried out as batch processing, where the user could not see the results at all until printout appeared when the job had run. Character-set representation was soon recognized as a substantial problem and one that has only just begun to be solved now with the advent of Unicode, although not for every kind of humanities material. Various methods were devised to represent upper- and lower-case letters on punched cards, most often by inserting an asterisk or similar character before a true upper-case letter. Accents and other non-standard characters had to be treated in a similar way and non-Roman alphabets were represented entirely in transliteration.

      I find it very interesting how materials made by human beings were put into a machine and rendered virtually unintelligible until man came through again by creating a code. It's fascinating to read how much work "creating the internet" was and it makes me very appreciative that I wasn't the one who had to do it.

  22. Mar 2019
    1. Living in a media ghetto means less that my views are shaped and improved, much less challenged, than that they are hardened and made more extreme;

      Some of the reasons why views are getting so extreme.

  23. Feb 2019
    1. Given that many of my fellow Chefs are likely to focus on the scientific article, I’m going to highlight some of the exciting trends in the humanities

      useful insights here re: scholarly publishing in the humanities

  24. Jun 2018
    1. arguments scholars make about The Making of Americans are based on limited knowledge of the text’s underlying structure because the underlying patterns are difficult to discern with close reading.

      Human eye/analysis is limited. Technology enhances visibility.

    2. The first part introduces what Marjorie Perloff calls “differential reading,” which positions close and distant reading practices as both subjective and objective methodologies.

      Is New Historicism close or distant reading? The latter, right? But nonetheless deeply human, perhaps more so than "close reading" criticized as privileging text over lived reality.

  25. Mar 2018
    1. accelerated growth of undergraduate classes that explicitly engage with digital humanities methods.

      This is important! I think that many classes are starting to use digital tools to asses and accelerate learning in their classrooms and it would be important to take a class in digital humanities in order to get a background into the different tools/methods presented.

  26. Oct 2017
    1. My hope is to position our work—the work of the digital humanities (DH) community that has nurtured me with kindness for some 18 years—less as it is lately figured (that is, less as a fragmenting set of methodological interventions in the contemporary, disciplinary agon of humanities scholarship) and more as one cohesive and improbably hopeful possibility.

      I think the scope of what the author wants to do in positioning the work of the DH community as 'one cohesive and improbably hopeful possibility' is idealistic. The reason I say this is that as a new student to DH, I am still trying to define what DH actually is and the many areas of scholarship it can be applied to. I do believe that it is very fragmented and to be honest cannot see at this stage how the author could possibly position DH cohesively.

    1. While one could manually “count” references across a novel or ouvre, or attempt to estimate relative occurrence, a text analysis tool like Voyant can more easily provide textual evidence necessary to support an essay’s claim, or, if the evidence proves the writer “wrong,” help the writer re-evaluate her argument accordingly.

      Just a tool of efficiency or for noticing unrecognized patterns through a different means of analysis. Both, IMO.

    1. Network graphs that connect characters are fun to explore for a similar reason.
    2. One of the main ways computers are changing the textual humanities is by mediating new connections to social science. The statistical models that help sociologists understand social stratification and social change haven’t in the past contributed much to the humanities, because it’s been difficult to connect quantitative models to the richer, looser sort of evidence provided by written documents.

      DH as moving English more toward the statistical...

    1. I recognize that much of what provoked me to turn to literature in the first place—vital, daring, and meditative expressions of human experience—is there. It is there in the naked lyric of a blog post celebrating or mourning some personal or public event. It is there in the classical drama of a brawling, controversial Wikipedia article whose behind-the-scenes “talk” page stages the chorus of the “rule of many” or “wisdom of crowds.”16 And it is there in the epic of all the social-news, shared-bookmark, or similar sites that build a portrait of collective life from constantly reshuffled excerpts, links, and tags from that life akin to Homeric formulae. Above all, as a literature professor, I recognize that—viral YouTube videos aside—the vast preponderance of Web 2.0 is an up-close and personal experience of language.

      Great explanation, for me, of the turn to DH.

    1. In the words of rhetorician Richard Lanham, we will learn to look both "at" and "through" digital tools.

      This is great: digital as means but also object of study.

    1. a tool and our central object of study.

      Love this too. Learning to use the technology, but also reflecting on its significance.

    2. continually rethink both the process and products of the graduate seminar

      I love the process and products here. New research methods and new method of publication.

  27. Jun 2017
    1. Advocates position Digital Humanities as a corrective to the “traditional” and outmoded approaches to literary study that supposedly plague English departments. Like much of the rhetoric surrounding Silicon Valley today, this discourse sees technological innovation as an end in itself and equates the development of disruptive business models with political progress.

      From this start, this article doesn't seem based in the same reality I've been observing.

      1) I don't see/or hear DH as a "corrective" so much as an "alternative."

      2) DH seems pretty self-conscious about Silicon Valley utopianism. In fact, I'd argue that it's voices from DH that have been most savvy about deconstructing that rhetoric.

    1. literature became data

      Doesn't this obfuscate the process? Literature became digital. Digital enables a wide range of futther activity to take place on top of literature, including, perhaps, it's datafication.

    1. Don’t we have to actually read the books, before saying what the patterns discovered in them mean?

      Yes, of course. But it's ironic that this three post tirade begins with a rather distant reading of the MLA program.

    2. But does the data point inescapably in that direction?

      In the above performance of close reading, is the evidence more "inescapable"? Isn't is always in the fullness of the argumentation no matter where the data comes from?

    3. The direction of my inferences is critical: first the interpretive hypothesis and then the formal pattern, which attains the status of noticeability only because an interpretation already in place is picking it out.

      Is this really how it played/plays out? I have an idea about something that I then confirm in the facts?

    1. Traditionalists argue that emphasizing professional skills would betray the humanities' responsibility to honor the great monuments of culture for their own sake.

      I continue to think this binary is false. Perhaps historically the liberal arts was established and viewed as an oasis. But in my experience there was always a connection between my academic work, from grade school to grad school, and the "real world." The connection might not always have been as direct and explicit to be vocational, but nonetheless is was there and it was felt.

    1. When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.

      LOL. I was in the middle of a dissertation when this was published: not just an English major, but a doctoral candidate.

    1. I will not be attending the Modern Language Association meeting in Seattle (Jan. 5-8), but I have read through the program to see what’s going on and what’s no longer going on in literary studies.

      Isn't this a little like a movie reviewer saying, "I haven't seen this movie, but here's the problem with it"?

  28. Mar 2017
  29. Feb 2017
  30. Nov 2016
    1. the initiative

      The College of Arts & Letters is home to the Digital Humanities program, which includes an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate. Rather than establishing Critical Diversity in a Digital Age as an independent initiative, we might perhaps better understand it as the very method through in which we practice digital humanities at MSU.

      If DH@MSU is animated by a critical diversity approach, we will develop a curriculum that refines our focus on critical diversity in a digital age.

      By focusing on diversifying the DH curriculum, we should be able to attract a more diverse group of strong undergraduates and to recruit a cohort of innovative faculty and graduate students from traditionally underrepresented groups.

    2. As we develop the Critical Diversity in a Digital Age initiative, we invite annotations and comments here on Hypothes.is.

      Please use the #MSUCDDA tag to help us curate engagement with the initiative here on Hypothes.is.

  31. Sep 2016
    1. As many universities are being queried by the federal government on how they spend their endowment money, and enrollment decreases among all institutions nationally, traditional campuses will need to look at these partnerships as a sign of where education is likely going in the future, and what the federal government may be willing to finance with its student loan programs going ahead.

      To me, the most interesting about this program is that it sounds like it’s targeting post-secondary institutions. There are multiple programs to “teach kids to code”. Compulsory education (primary and secondary) can provide a great context for these, in part because the type of learning involved is so broad and pedagogical skills are so recognized. In post-secondary contexts, however, there’s a strong tendency to limit coding to very specific contexts, including Computer Science or individual programs. We probably take for granted that people who need broad coding skills can develop them outside of their college and university programs. In a way, this isn’t that surprising if we’re to compare coding to very basic skills, like typing. Though there are probably many universities and colleges where students can get trained in typing, it’s very separate from the curriculum. It might be “college prep”, but it’s not really a college prerequisite. And there isn’t that much support in post-secondary education. Of course, there are many programs, in any discipline, giving a lot of weight to coding skills. For instance, learners in Digital Humanities probably hone in their ability to code, at some point in their career. And it’s probably hard for most digital arts programs to avoid at least some training in programming languages. It’s just that these “general” programs in coding tend to focus almost exclusively on so-called “K–12 Education”. That this program focuses on diversity is also interesting. Not surprising, as many such initiatives have to do with inequalities, real or perceived. But it might be where something so general can have an impact in Higher Education. It’s also interesting to notice that there isn’t much in terms of branding or otherwise which explicitly connects this initiative with colleges and universities. Pictures on the site show (diverse) adults, presumably registered students at universities and colleges where “education partners” are to be found. But it sounds like the idea of a “school” is purposefully left quite broad or even ambiguous. Of course, these programs might also benefit adult learners who aren’t registered at a formal institution of higher learning. Which would make it closer to “para-educational” programs. In fact, there might something of a lesson for the future of universities and colleges.

    2. As many universities are being queried by the federal government on how they spend their endowment money, and enrollment decreases among all institutions nationally, traditional campuses will need to look at these partnerships as a sign of where education is likely going in the future, and what the federal government may be willing to finance with its student loan programs going ahead.

      To me, the most interesting about this program is that it sounds like it’s targeting post-secondary institutions. There are multiple programs to “teach kids to code”. Compulsory education (primary and secondary) can provide a great context for these, in part because the type of learning involved is so broad and pedagogical skills are so recognized. In post-secondary contexts, however, there’s a strong tendency to limit coding to very specific contexts, including Computer Science or individual programs. We probably take for granted that people who need broad coding skills can develop them outside of their college and university programs. In a way, this isn’t that surprising if we’re to compare coding to very basic skills, like typing. Though there are probably many universities and colleges where students can get trained in typing, it’s very separate from the curriculum. It might be “college prep”, but it’s not really a college prerequisite. And there isn’t that much support in post-secondary education. Of course, there are many programs, in any discipline, giving a lot of weight to coding skills. For instance, learners in Digital Humanities probably hone in their ability to code, at some point in their career. And it’s probably hard for most digital arts programs to avoid at least some training in programming languages. It’s just that these “general” programs in coding tend to focus almost exclusively on so-called “K–12 Education”. That this program focuses on diversity is also interesting. Not surprising, as many such initiatives have to do with inequalities, real or perceived. But it might be where something so general can have an impact in Higher Education. It’s also interesting to notice that there isn’t much in terms of branding or otherwise which explicitly connects this initiative with colleges and universities. Pictures on the site show (diverse) adults, presumably registered students at universities and colleges where “education partners” are to be found. But it sounds like the idea of a “school” is purposefully left quite broad or even ambiguous. Of course, these programs might also benefit adult learners who aren’t registered at a formal institution of higher learning. Which would make it closer to “para-educational” programs. In fact, there might something of a lesson for the future of universities and colleges.

    1. Some people define DH as divided into “hack” -- those who code and make digital things -- and “yack” -- those who critique and analyze “the digital.” I’m also interested in “stack” -- how do the structures of organizations and institutions enable or inhibit what we want to do? The people who “hack” and “yack” can’t work without the people in the “stack” (or without the people in the library stacks).
  32. Aug 2016
    1. Page 8

      Jockers talking about the old approach in the 1990s to anecdotal evidence:

      … in the 1990s, gathering literary evidence meant reading books, noting "things" (a phallic symbol here, a bibliographical reference there, a stylistic flourish, an allusion, and so on) and then interpreting: making sense and arguments out of those observations. Today, in the age of digital libraries and large-scale book-digitization projects, the nature of the "evidence" available to us has changed, radically. Which is not to say that we should no longer read books looking for, or noting, random "things," but rather to emphasize that massive digital corpora offer is unprecedented access to literally record an invite, even demand, a new type of evidence gathering and meaning making. The literary scholar of the 21st-century can no longer be content with anecdotal evidence, with random "things" gathered from a few, even "representative," text. We must strive to understand the things we find interesting in the context of everything else, including a massive possibly "uninteresting" text.

    2. Pages 7 and 8

      Jockers is talking here about Ian Watt’s method in Rise of the Novel

      What are we to do with the other three to five thousand works of fiction published in the eighteenth century? What of the works that Watt did not observe and account for with his methodology, and how are we to now account for works not penned by Defoe, by Richardson, or by Fielding? Might other novelists tell a different story? Can we, in good conscience, even believe that Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding are representative writers? Watt’s sampling was not random; it was quite the opposite. But perhaps we only need to believe that these three (male) authors are representative of the trend towards "realism" that flourished in the nineteenth century. Accepting this premise makes Watts magnificent synthesis into no more than a self-fulfilling project, a project in which the books are stacked in advance. No matter what we think of the sample, we must question whether in fact realism really did flourish. Even before that, we really ought to define what it means "to flourish" in the first place. Flourishing certainly seems to be the sort of thing that could, and ought, to be measured. Watt had no yardstick against which to make such a measurement. He had only a few hundred texts that he had read. Today things are different. The larger literary record can no longer be ignored: it is here, and much of it is now accessible.

    3. Jockers, Matthew L. 2013. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Topics in the Digital Humanities. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

  33. Jul 2016
    1. Page 16

      One benefit of traditional hermeneutical practices such as close reading is that the trained reader need not install anything, run any software, wrestle with settings, or wait for results. The experienced reader can just enjoy iteratively reading, thinking, and rereading. Similarly the reader of another person's interpretation, if the book being interpreted is at hand, can just pick it up, follow the references, and recapitulate the reading. To be as effective as close reading, analytical methods have to be significantly easier to apply and understand. They have to be like reading, or, better yet, a part of reading. Those invested in the use of digital analytics need to think differently about what is shown and what is hidden: the rhetorical presentation of analytics matters. Further, literary readers of interpretive works want to learn about the interpretation. Much of the literature in journals devoted to humanities computing suffers from being mostly about the computing; it is hard to find scholarship that is addressed to literary scholars and is based in computing practices.

    2. Page 15

      Rockwell and Sinclair call for

      a new kind of literacy that allows us to continue our pursuits as humanities scholars in the changing world we find ourselves in.

    3. Pages 1-2

      … Practices are changing. Older forms of communal inquiry are being remixed into modern research. We have come to recognize how intellectual work is participatory even when it includes moments of solitary meditation. Internet conferencing tools allow us to remediate dialogical practices, collaborative communities such as Wikipedia and Twitter depend on contributions by a large group of users, and the communal research cultures of the arts collective or engineering lab are influencing the humanities. Accessible computing, data availability, and new media opportunities have provoked textual disciplines to think again about our practices and methods as we build digital libraries, process millions of books, and imagine research cyber-infrastructure that can support the next generation of scholars. We have recently begun imagining large-scale humanities-based projects that require a variety of skills for implementation – skills rarely found in a solitary scholar/programmer, let alone in a Cartesian humanist. We find ourselves working in teams, reflecting on how to best organize them and then reflecting on what it means to think through with others. This inevitably turns to methodological reflection that takes new media into account as we try to balance our traditional Cartesian values with the opportunities of open and communal work.

    1. Pages 220-221

      Digital Humanities projects result in two general types of products. Digital libraries arise from scholarly collaborations and the initiatives of cultural heritage institutions to digitize their sources. These collections are popular for research and education. … The other general category of digital humanities products consist of assemblages of digitized cultural objects with associated analyses and interpretations. These are the equivalent of digital books in that they present an integrated research story, but they are much more, as they often include interactive components and direct links to the original sources on which the scholarship is based. … Projects that integrate digital records for widely scattered objects are a mix of a digital library and an assemblage.

    2. Borgman, Christine L. 2007. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

      My notes

    3. p. 6

      Retrieval methods designed for small databases decline rapidly in effectiveness as collections grow...

      This is an interesting point that is missed in the Distant reading controversies: its all very well to say that you prefer close reading, but close reading doesn't scale--or rather the methodologies used to decide what to close read were developed when big data didn't exist. How to you combine that when you can read everything. I.e. You close read Dickins because he's what survived the 19th C as being worth reading. But now, if we could recover everything from the 19th C how do you justify methodologically not looking more widely?

    1. p. 141

      Initially, the digital humanities consisted of the curation and analysis of data that were born digital, and the digitisation and archiving projects that sought to render analogue texts and material objects into digital forms that could be organised and searched and be subjects to basic forms of overarching, automated or guided analysis, such as summary visualisations of content or connections between documents, people or places. Subsequently, its advocates have argued that the field has evolved to provide more sophisticated tools for handling, searching, linking, sharing and analysing data that seek to complement and augment existing humanities methods, and facilitate traditional forms of interpretation and theory building, rather than replacing traditional methods or providing an empiricist or positivistic approach to humanities scholarship.

      summary of history of digital humanities

  34. current.ischool.utoronto.ca current.ischool.utoronto.ca
    1. A gentle introduction to studying digital humanities, and into the digital humanities community in general, was the beginner workshop group entitled “Digitization Fundamentals and Their Application.” The focus of this workshop was to develop a functional knowledge of different methods of acquiring, refining, processing, and utilizing information pertaining to artefacts, aural or visual, static or animated. The course outlined how to plan successful digitization projects, develop an organizational structure to manage large caches of data, select appropriate devices and formats for input, and create platforms for display and dissemination of output. Each day was dedicated to a specific element of digitization - usually a medium, such as audio or video, but occasionally on a form of output, such as how to host digitization projects on the web. The mornings were generally spent acquiring the foundational knowledge needed to plan and implement a digitization project in that day’s medium, and in the afternoons participants were given free access to a wide range of equipment to help put the morning’s fundamentals into practice. This workshop allowed participants to practice digitization both in the lab and in the wild, as they were able to choose to work within one of the University of Victoria’s well-appointed computer labs or take equipment to a nearby site of their choice, such as the University of Victoria’s McPherson Library and its rare book room.

      Structure of the fundamentals class

    2. ese courses are the core of the DHSI curriculum, offering students the opportunity to learn in small, collegial groups at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels - and indeed offering faculty the opportunity to be students again for a week. That levelling spirit is reinforced by other aspects of the Institute which bring the various courses together. At the beginning and end of each day, all DHSI participants attend plenary lectures by leading practitioners in the field, which brings all participants together in the same room to consider questions that all digital humanists face (such as the nature of the academic job market, or lessons to be learned from particular projects). In recent years the morning lectures have showcased short presentations by graduate students in the field, a symptom of how student-driven the field has become even during the seven years since the DHSI began.

      The structure of the camp

    3. eek-long event that has run every spring since 2004, the DHSI combines the best aspects of a skills workshop, international conference, and summer camp. Participants spend five days attending plenary lectures and pursuing their own projects in courses on topics such

      description of DHSI

    4. The Digital Humanities Summer Institute and Extra- Institutional Modes of Engagement

      Bialkowski, Voytek, Rebecca Niles, and Alan Galey. 2011. “The Digital Humanities Summer Institute and Extra-Institutional Modes of Engagement.” Faculty of Information Quarterly 3 (3): 19–29. http://current.ischool.utoronto.ca/system/files/pages/publications/fiq_3-3.pdf#page=19.

  35. Jun 2016
  36. content.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.alu.talonline.ca content.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.alu.talonline.ca
    1. AN APPROACH TO ANALYSING WORKING PRACTICES OFRESEARCH COMMUNITIES IN THE HUMANITIE

      Benardou, Agiatis, Panos Constantopoulos, and Costis Dallas. 2013. “An Approach to Analyzing Working Practices of Research Communities in the Humanities.” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 7 (1–2): 105–27. doi:10.3366/ijhac.2013.0084.

    1. p. 53

      Discussion of collaboration in DH:

      Collaboration is not, however, without its own problems and challenges, as scientific research practices have demonstrated. Aside from questions about how collaborative work will be reviewed for tenure and promotion, internal procedures for distributing authority, making editorial decisions, and apportioning credit (an especially crucial issue for graduate students and junior faculty) are typically worked out on a case-by-case basis with digital humanities projects.... Precedents worked out for scientific laboratories may not be appropriate for the digital humanities. While the lead scientist customarily receives authorship credit for all publications emerging from his laboratory, the digital humanities, with a stronger tradition of single authorship, may choose to craft very different kinds of protocols for deciding authorship credit, including giving <pb n="54"/>authorship credit (as opposed to acknowledgement) for the creative work of paid technical staff.

    1. But “digital humanities” in the guise of “humanities computing,” “big data,” “topic modelling,” “object oriented ontology” is not going to save the humanities from the chopping block.

      Can the humanistic bent in DH counteract the `self-hating human” part of technocracy?

    1. I have Serious Rant-y Thoughts on requiring that students inhabit public spaces in professional contexts, and I do wonder how much a class hashtag is useful beyond self-promotion of the course and its amazing instructor.

      You may consult input from amazing people like @GoogleGuacamole and @actualham who have very intentionally integrated (not just mentioning or requiring) Twitter use in their courses and implicated its value in students' connections with their professional network.

  37. May 2016
    1. relying on painstaking individual scholarship

      This strikes me as one of the more politically regressive parts of their argument and it is foundational. One of the key interventions of DH, broadly defined, is to turn a bright light on the conditions of academic labor and production. Anyone who has written a monograph—even an essay—knows that it was not done by individual scholarship. It is almost always the product of the labor and institutional support of a large number of people. There is a fantasy, a destructive fantasy, of the sole scholar working silently at a desk needing nothing more than a stack of books or papers and time to produce a work of scholarship. In fact, every author depends on a greater or lesser support network that includes librarians and archivists, peers and grad students, editors and (yes) tech support, to give an incomplete list (often the very most important support is given by life partners who labor to free time for the writer). The individually-credited monograph hides all of that labor or pretends that labor was merely incidental and unconnected to the intellectual work that appears in print. The "project-based learning" in DH (as described by the authors below) tend to make that labor visible and, in the best of cases, credited. This phrase encourages me to think that the authors' "progressive politics" is abstract, divorced from material conditions of production and reproduction. People without the ability to mobilize the requisite networks of support labor—parenting scholars, adjuncts, non-professionals—are demonstrably damaged by the fetish for "painstaking individual scholarship." The burden is especially borne heavily by women. It is not what I recognize as progressive, but is rather deeply conservative.

    2. Advocates position

      If this was in a peer-reviewed journal, the reviewers would hit this very first sentence with a demand for extensive citation. In the spirit of generosity, I assume the authors have references. But the problem with starting this piece, in this venue, this way is that now everyone who thinks of themselves as having a stake in this DH thing is invited to see themselves as this "advocate" they invoke. In the vast majority of cases, they will not recognize the second half of the sentence as something that they have ever, or would ever, advocate. This may be intended as a polemic that will spark serious conversation, but with the very first words a lot of the audience that would be interested in engaging this piece sees a straw man and a misrepresentation. With that, the essay only reaches those who are inclined to agree with it in the first place. That now makes me wonder, in a less generous spirit, is this an effort to engage in a debate, or is this clickbait?

    3. the unparalleled level of material support that Digital Humanities has received

      I'm sure it feels unparalleled to the authors. But this is precisely the kind of claim that even a humanist shouldn't make without providing data. It may be true, but they aren't giving me any reason to not read the phrase in this edited form: "the unparalleled level of material support that it feels like Digital Humanities has received." Without doubt, when a student makes a statement like this in a paper written for my history classes, I lower their grade if they fail to provide evidence. Why should I make an exception for these experienced professionals?

    4. pushing the discipline toward post-interpretative, non-suspicious, technocratic, conservative, managerial, lab-based practice.

      I just view the DH movement as fundamentally different:

      ...pushing the tech industry toward a more interpretative, suspicious, less technocratic, conservative, managerial, <del>lab-based</del> practice.

    5. unavoidable

      Is it?

    6. a space free from all the messiness of questions of identity and politics.

      I'd be more interested in an article that began with observing this possible lacuna in DH and explored ways that DH has or might address questions of "identity and politics."

    7. Thus,

      ?

    8. reconfigured on the model of the tech startup, with public, private, and charitable funding in place of Silicon Valley venture capital.

      Seems like a pretty big difference.

    9. Why these funders chose to do this remains something of a mystery. To find precise explanations, we would need to have access to private conversations and communications, though it is remarkable that such an epoch-making shift can be so lacking in explicit justification.

      Really? There's not research to be done here? I find that hard to believe. Why not simply ask Don Waters or Brett Bobley?

    10. fetishizing

      Et tu?

    11. The implication is that in Digital Humanities, computer use is an end in itself.

      Lots of dependence on "implications" in this argument. I've never heard a DH scholar even vaguely make a statement like this. In fact, it's converse is probably most often used to signal that such work is necessary beyond whatever project or tool is being showcased.

    12. a declaration would entail that the workers in IT departments of corporations such as Elsevier and Google are engaged in humanities scholarship.

      And why not? The authors present such a narrow and traditional notion of the humanities that work against their claim to be returning politics to literary study.

    13. It is telling that Digital Humanities, like Hirsch, and like Bowers, has found an institutional home at the University of Virginia.

      That was a lot of background/build-up on UVA literary critical history for such a vague association.

    14. Hirsch’s argument was foundational for the Common Core educational program favored by the political right.

      Interesting, but I'd like to see a citation here.

      Also, not sure it's fair to say that the Common Core was/is favored by the Right.

    15. producing forms of knowledge with less immediate economic application.

      Okay, maybe I'm just a neoliberal by this definition.

    16. It unavoidably also suggests that other approaches in the humanities fit less well into the contemporary university, because the implied measure of success is economic.

      This framework is repeated throughout: because of the success of B, A no longer has value. I don't see how that's true in terms of the structure of English departments/university priorities or digital humanities rhetoric.

    17. SSHRC’s model of funding therefore complements the development of new models of intellectual work within the neoliberal university — accelerating the devaluation of older models of literary study.

      So the problem is that someone besides a traditional independent academic researchers is getting paid to do "humanities" work? Expanding the definition of scholarly labor to include such positions seems far more radical, both politically and economically, than anything outlined here.

    18. rebranding of insecure campus employment as an empowering “alt-ac” career choice,

      Got a better idea?

    1. “In fact, our undergraduate and graduate students are our only rationale for doing digital humanities,” Risam wrote. “We couldn’t be farther from the cartoonish fantasy of digital humanities that circulates in the clickbait du jour.”
  38. Apr 2016
  39. Mar 2016
    1. Often you will need to work closely with technical experts on your campus, not simply as resources, but as co-creators. Take advantage of opportunities to collaborate with staff and faculty across the disciplines in different ways, experimenting and brainstorming in the new vocabulary of DH that accommodates insights and approaches from all fields.

      co-creators

  40. Feb 2016
  41. Jan 2016
    1. Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.

      Originally intended as upholding the virtues of the humanities in opposition to science and technology, I'd like to co-opt the argument for the humanities within, mainly, technology. We need more humanists in tech!

    1. Meanwhile, in almost exactly the same decades that the Internet arose and eventually evolved social computing, literary scholarship followed similar principles of decentralization to evolve cultural criticism.7

      Wow. This is the most interesting statement that I've read in a while. Wish I could pin an annotation...

      Really helps me justify my career arc, turning from literary criticism as a career to software "development."

  42. Dec 2015
    1. Commentary as a practice of annotation that not only helps readers comprehend a text but also facilitates its critical evaluation elucidates the relevance of the text for a particular readership and establishes or promotes specific interpretations.

      I think like we're working with a very limited (even if acknowledged) definition of commentary/annotation. We're really just talking about expert analysis laid over a text, which is nothing new, though as pointed out below this tradition can achieve a new dynamism in the online environment.

      What I think is more interesting about annotation and the digital humanities is the potential for readers themselves to become truly active contributors to the knowledge surrounding the texts--not simply served explanation for their relatively passive comprehension.

    1. recover within them, with fresh force, a broader repertoire of historical literary functions than modern literary studies usually needs to attend to.

      anew vs recover

    1. same messiness and doubt that make the complexities of concepts like race, gender, class, and culture most immediately relevant also remind us that the products of our technologies, our devices, always fall short of our perceived notions of the real or the authentic.

      Good line.

    2. “there was never clear separation between past and present, traditional and digital, or other bounded concepts” and that “[m]any of the researchers interviewed for this study assiduously avoided making such distinctions” (10).

      Good quote re false binary of new and old technologies of interpretation, etc.

    3. binary between “old” (i.e., human) versus “new” (i.e., computational) practices

      A binary worthy of breaking down...

    4. understanding why a pattern occurs and determining whether it is one that offers insight into a text requires technologies of self-reflective inquiry.

      Computer assisted practices never completely divorced from the human.

    5. self-consciousness, access, and collaboration in humanist inquiry as technologies.

      Demystifying (and conflating) "technology" by applying it to the most humanist of practices.

    1. “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.

      Nothing against this, but it's not the game I'm in.

      Question is, though, can the same tool be used to do both distant reading and close reading?

  43. Sep 2015
  44. Aug 2015
  45. Jul 2015
  46. May 2015
  47. Mar 2015
    1. reading might be described as the continual redisposition of levels of address in this manner

      Another useful (and cool) definition

    2. Physical texts were already massively addressable before they were ever digitized, and this variation in address was and is registered at the level of the page, chapter, the binding of quires, and the like.

      Always like seeing acknowledgement that scholarly primitives haven't changed, just our means for doing them. Stephen Ramsay's Reading Machines is a good, quick read about this in terms of digital humanities algorithmic criticism.

    3. massive flexibility in levels of address

      The ability to fluently read/react with a text at a given level of address be treated as a literacy.

    4. The book or physical instance, then, is one of many levels of address.

      Definition for manifestations of the text. Maybe useful in discussing interface as the encountered work?

    5. Now, we are discussing ideal objects here: addressability implies different levels of abstraction (character, word, phrase, line, etc) which are stipulative or nominal: such levels are not material properties of texts or Pythagorean ideals; they are, rather, conventions.

      Might be useful in thinking about what an “edition” is—must it include all items most editions currently include, or are those conventions or manifestations of values, and not necessary values themselves?

    6. Because a text can be queried at the level of single words and then related to other texts at the same level of abstraction: the table of all possible words could be defined as the aggregate of points of address at a given level of abstraction (the word, as in Google’s new n-gram corpus).

      I like this idea of defining a level of text and than comparing across texts—would like to see more of this at the level of code and interface design and tool design decisions (e.g. how do different digital archives deal with making sure visitors see more than the alphabetically or chronologically first few items in the collection? how do different DH sites allow people to comment? what is the difference among moderation or voting systems?).

    7. a text is a text because it is massively addressable at different levels of scale

      I think this is my favorite definition of “text” (as humanities scholars use the term) that I’ve encountered.

    8. What does it mean to be an “item” or “computational object” within this collection? What is such a collection?

      This is a great example of the type of critical thinking involved in scholarly digital building—often such projects include hard thinking about the exact nature of scholarly objects. Patrick Murray-John has a fantastic article that further discusses “where the theory is” when scholars design and build (Theory, Digital Humanities, and Noticing). The penultimate paragraph in particular lists some of the critical questions that arise out of designing for an “item” in a digital archives platform.

    9. New experiments provide opportunities for thought that precede the results.

      And even if we don’t yet have a way to run and experiment and/or gather results, we can use “speculative experiments” to learn about digital objects (such as a digital edition) by imagining and designing for a hypothetical and/or future circumstance.

  48. Dec 2014
  49. Nov 2014
    1. Scholars, intellectuals, and bricoleurs

      Eine Zusammenfassung zu diesem Aufsatz unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Verhältnisses der Wissenspraxis Bricolage zu den Digital Humanities gibt es auch im Redaktions-Tumblr von LIBREAS.

  50. May 2014
    1. Personally, I think Digital Humanities is about building things,” said Ramsay in a polarizing talk at the MLA convention in 2011, printed in Defining Digital Humanities. Unlike many theorists, however, he was willing to make this demand concrete: “Do you have to know how to code? I’m a tenured professor of digital humanities and I say ‘yes.’ ”
  51. Jan 2014
    1. Digital Humanities can look at authors and publishers and the relationships they have with one another.

    1. Born-digital, open source, media-rich scholarly publishing that’s as easy as blogging

      Scalar's mission statement