A quick intro to digital humanities presentation for a 200 level English course

1. DIGITAL HUMANITIES 101
ENGL 206, JANUARY 26, 2015
Elizabeth Skene
Digital Initiatives Librarian
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

2. WHAT IS DH?
We will never know what digital
humanities ‘is’ because we don’t want
to know nor is it useful for us to know.
- Matt Kirschenbaum

3. WHAT DO YOU THINK IT MEANS?

4. WHAT IS DH?
whatisdigitalhumanities.com

5. WHAT IS DH?
Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities
computing, of computationally enabled "formal representations of
the human record," whose origins reach back to the late 1940s...”
And in 2004…
DH uses… “uses digital technology in studying traditional
humanities objects.”
-Wikipedia

6. WHAT IS DH?
Digital Humanities is not a unified field but an array of
convergent practices that explore a universe in which:
a) print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which
knowledge is produced and/or disseminated; instead, print
finds itself absorbed into new, multimedia configurations; and
b) digital tools, techniques, and media have altered the
production and dissemination of knowledge in the arts, human
and social sciences.
- Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0

7. WHAT IS DH?
…digital humanities is work, somebody’s work,
somewhere, some thing, always. We know how to
talk about work. So let’s talk about this work, in
action, this actually existing work.
- Matt Kirschenbaum

8. TOOLS & VALUES
(& DETAILS)

9. DETAILS
Metadata: who/why/when/where/how/so what/who says
Preservation: or else fail whale
Access: Can I get there? Can Google get there?

10. DETAILS
Metadata: who/why/when/where/how/so what/who says
Preservation: or else fail whale
Access: Can I get there? Can Google get there?
Roger Conner
New York Gothams, 1st base
September 10, 1881- first ever grand slam
138 homeruns – record holder until Babe Ruth

11. TOOLS
Twitter visualization
Twitter viz/mapping
timelines
digital publishing
multimedia essays
mapping
mixing
data analysis
text analysis
transcription
interactive reading
collaborative writing
social media storytelling
online exhibits
transcription
mapping text

12. VALUES
The Public Digital Humanities starts with
humans, not technologies or tools, and its
terrain must be continuously co-constructed.
- Jess Stommel

13. VALUES
James Cuno

14. VALUES
We, professionals of the digital humanities,
are building a community of practice that is
solidary, open, welcoming and freely
accessible.
- Manifesto for the Digital Humanities

15. VALUES

16. VALUES
Open Access
Creative Commons

17. OCCUPY THE DIGITAL
Elijah Meeks

18. OCCUPY THE DIGITAL
Critical pedagogy… is primarily concerned with an equitable distribution of
power.
If students live in a culture that digitizes and educates them through a
screen, they require an education that empowers them in that sphere, teaches
them that language, and offers new opportunities of human connectivity.
Digital tools offer the opportunity to refocus how power works in the
classroom.
- Pete Rorabaugh

19. OCCUPY THE DIGITAL
As much as digital archives promise to make cultural
materials accessible to broad audiences, they also
present a danger of repeating the power structures
that are implicit in the way many Western archives
have traditionally been structured.
…the archive tends to privilege the voices of the
colonizers over those of the colonized.
-Jeffrey Binder

20. OCCUPY THE DIGITAL
At the center of the digital humanities should be an
emphasis on individual and collective agency, which means
advocating for marginalized teachers, scholars, and
students.
This is how DH can and should innovate, not through
competition, clearcutting, and hype cycles, but by listening
intently to more (and more diverse) voices.
-Jesse Stommel

21. BUT WAIT!
In terms of argument-driven scholarship, digital history has
over-promised and under-delivered. It’s not that historians
aren’t using digital tools to make new arguments about the
past.
It’s that there is a fundamental imbalance between the
proliferation of digital history workshops, courses, grants,
institutes, centers, and labs over the past decade, and the
impact this has had in terms of generating scholarly claims
and interpretations.
- Cameron Blevins

22. WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Let’s vote

23. @elizabethskene #DHatWCU bit.ly/DHatWCU