This document summarizes a presentation on digital humanities given by Dr. Jennifer Dellner in October 2016. It defines digital humanities as the intersection of computing and humanities disciplines, involving the investigation and presentation of information in electronic form. It provides examples of digital humanities in practice, including open access textbooks, digital archives and exhibitions, e-literature, student projects, video games, and text analysis tools. The presentation demonstrates how digital tools can be used to study and engage with the humanities.
Share Copy: Arts and Humanities DH Presentation October 2016
1. {
Digital Humanities
Dr. Jennifer J Dellner
Professor of English and Literature
Ocean County College
Presentation to School of Arts and Humanities October 2016
2. The digital humanities, also known as humanities
computing, is a field of study, research, teaching, and
invention concerned with the intersection of computing
and the disciplines of the humanities. It is methodological
by nature and interdisciplinary in scope. It involves
investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of
information in electronic form. It studies how these media
affect the disciplines in which they are used, and what
these disciplines have to contribute to our knowledge of
computing .
Wikipedia Definition (7.31.2011) quoted by Kirschenbaum (2012) and Klein
(2015):
What is it?
4. Using digital resources, e.g. digital/(-ized) archives or
exhibitions, tools, maps
Studying or using digital objects, e.g. games, digitized
texts, e-lit
Project based learning: creating a digital object, e.g. a
map or creative piece;
E-portfolio or web page/site
Hypertext document/multi-modal composition
Digital storytelling and art
Mapping geo-spatial or other relationships
Digital Humanities in Practice
5. Open access and changing the way text books
are formed, social annotation
The Open Anthology of Earlier American
Literature (DeRosa)
CC Consortium Open Educational Resources
https://hypothes.is/
Demand for open dissemination of projects,
scholarly work:
Handbook of Digital Politics
Open Access
6. Each Second is the last
Perhaps, recalls the Man
Just measuring unconsciousness
The Sea and Spar between.
—Emily Dickinson, 879
What it is and how to read it
The poem
E-lit Example: Nick Montfort and
Stephanie Strickland’s Sea and Spar
Between “Re-media-ting” art; putting in
a new digital medium
7. Roopika Risam and Adeline Koh “Rewrite
Wikipedia” project
http://roopikarisam.com/
http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/category/rewr
iting-wikipedia-project/
Student contribution to knowledge
work
8. Never Alone
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM_80zVz
wpI
Redshift and Portmetal
New careers, e.g. a narrative designer is
someone who can use digital skills to design
games and who is highly competent in
narrative theory, history, music, culture, … the
humanities
New Media, new narrative
: active creation of learning and
narrative
9. This is how you will die
(A story generator that thinks about narrative)
Speaking of narrative…
10. https://books.google.com/ngrams/info
How to use Ngram Viewer
Caveat: "Characterizing the Google Books
Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-
Cultural and Linguistic Evolution”
Voyant (text analysis): http://voyant-tools.org
Text Analysis
11. Mapping a poem onto a painting: Michael
Field’s Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ poem
Mapping
Notas do Editor
A definition now missing from Wikipedia, but often still cited by those working in the field.
The Uvic graduate certificate program description – what do people with grad training in DH do? What fields and activities/practices are elaborated by and in digital humanities?
Examples of what may constitute DH learning and teaching. Important to think about the fact that we all use digital tools. To borrow from Interdisciplinary theory, there is “unconscious” vs. “conscious” digital humanities as well: what happens when we think consciously, i.e. as scholars and pedagogically, about the digital aspects of what and how we teach? Concept of “digitally inflected” class/course.
Canada: grants must include a knowledge dissemination plan; US: NEH wants detailed plan of how white paper and project will be shared; publishers offer free and open access to some books online; charge for printed copy. Social annotation of the web another way to have a conversation- integrates with Canvas.
E-literature as an example of a genre that can be conceived of as artistic as well as analytic. Computer/code generated poems have been around since early computing: Montfort and Strickland make the code available i(open developer window of browser). Takes two well known texts and tries to pull them apart (analyze) and reassemble them in a new way: raises questions about reinterpretation, status of the author, plagiarism vs. fair use in the case of art (Warhol’s soup cans, e.g.). Long tradition, particularly in Modernism, of cutting up texts and reasembling them; more recently, Foer’s Code of Trees.
Design of “Never Alone” essentially teaches the player some of the rules of Inuit culture through experience, so experiential learning by design. Example also relates to the newer jobs that are available to students who study the humanities but who also have an interest in computation, coding, design, Second game, “Redshift and Portmetal,” also works through the creation of a post-apocalyptic world where the character must make moral choices in order to survive (not as developed; well know for being developed in Scalar, a very flexible, open source platform). Creation of narrative in digital media can be a powerful learning/pedagogical tool.
Besides being just funny, Jason Nelson’s piece opens up questions about narrative structures, offers an aleatory view of existence and death, and asks players/readers to contemplate what they expect from stories. Is it a game ? Is it literature? (It is included in a large repository of electronic literature). E-literature is an established genre? Should we include pieces in ENGL 152 for example, integrate e-poems with the poems we teach, e-stories with short stories, etc.? = digital inflection of a class.
Tools for analyzing texts by use of word over time in a large corpus (Ngram) or by frequency and relative placement (Voyant).
Other examples were passworded, so just this one for Slideshare, but it is lovely. Instead of mapping geography, Bassam Chiblak mapped” Michael Field” (aka Catherin Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper, 1892)’s poem about Botticelli’s Venus onto the painting itself.
He wrote up the experience of working with Neatline to do this. A really neat idea of what can be done with mapping software when it is not GIS you are interested in. So, it’s not about the tools or the digital, but a particular set of practices and technologies, the questions, teaching, research they enable. Often calls for a pedagogy that is open-ended and exploratory, focused on creating learning experience vs backward design from goals. What think we?