Why I’m Excited (and a Little Worried) About the Prospects for Digital Humanities

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Lisa SpiroDigital Media Center, Rice UniversityOctober 2010

How Has Society Changed Since the Emergence of the Web?

How Have the Humanities Changed Since the Emergence of the Web?

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The (Digital) Humanities are Beginning to Transform…

Communicating

Representing knowledge

Producing knowledge

Teaching “Digital Humanities 2008 Book of Abstracts”

What Are the Digital Humanities?

http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/How_do_you_define_Humanities_Computing_/_Digital_Humanities%3F

Digital Humanities Defined

“Digital humanities is a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods.”

(Digital Humanities Quarterly)

Communicating

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nichollsphotos/2906834393/

How Humanists Have Traditionally Communicated

Researcher

Chats w/ colleagues

Conferences

Meeting with

students

Publications

How Networked Humanists Communicate

Researcher

Chats w/ colleagues

Conferences

Meeting with

students

Publications

Multimedia publication

sBlogs

Twitter

Email

Tweeting Digital Humanists Share information Conduct

conversations Keep track of

conferences Reveal interests of

community

http://twitter.com/#!/dancohen/digitalhumanities

Digital Humanities Now

http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/

“Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon”

http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/2010/07/dh2010-plenary-present-not-voting.html

“Going Viral at the Virtual MLA”

http://www.briancroxall.net/2010/03/08/on-going-viral-at-the-virtual-mla/

Representing Knowledge

http://www.scottbot.net/blog/?page_id=2

Traditional Forms of Humanities Publication

Valley of the Shadow

http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/

The Hypertextual Article: “The Differences Slavery Made”

http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/

Participatory Scholarship: HyperCities

http://hypercities.com/

Open Access Publishing

Expand access to knowledge

Make scholarly work more visible

Enable information to be re-used and built upon

Hacking the Academy

http://hackingtheacademy.org/

Tools and Methods

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bw/2516698553/

Deluge of Digital Information 12 million+ volumes in Google Books Average American consumes 34

gigabytes per day (UCSD study) At least 14.54 billion pages on the

indexed web

Literary Arguments and the Problem of Scale

Primary texts cited in my dissertation: 150ish

Results for search of “bachelor” in Google Books: 181,000

“Distant Reading”

How do we study world literature and understand the literary system?

Close reading= small canon “Distant reading: where distance… is a

condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems.”

Microscope vs. telescope Elaborated in Franco Morretti’s Graphs,

Maps, Trees (2005)

http://www.newleftreview.org/A2094

Tag Clouds

http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/

“a visualization of word frequencies.” (Many Eyes)

Topic Modeling: Mining the Dispatch

http://americanpast.richmond.edu/dispatch/pages/home

Cultural Analytics

http://www.youtube.com/user/Calit2ube#p/search/1/xtbzVuDqSas

Tracking 18th C Culture of Letters

http://shc.stanford.edu/intellectual-life/video-podcasts/detail/tracking-18th-century-social-network-through-letters

Valley & Historical Visualization: The Emancipation Project

http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/emancipation/BlkPop/migration.html

Cinematic Maps: Voting America

Visualize evolution of American presidential politics by transforming data into dynamic images “to reveal patterns across time”

http://americanpast.richmond.edu/voting/

Tip: Manage (and Share) Research Info with Zotero

http://www.zotero.org/

New Educational Models:Looking for Whitman

http://lookingforwhitman.org/

An “experiment in multi-campus digital pedagogy”

Challenges facing digital scholarship

Getting data Technology development Copyright Funding Academic culture Training Publishing Preservation & sustainability

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What is the significance of digital humanities?

Collaborative Open, visible, public Experimental Bridges theory and

practice Cultural objects as

“data”; interpret patterns

Engaged with the “now”

PS: It’s fun

THATCamp Parishttp://www.flickr.com/photos/revuesorg/4626510454/

How do you become a digital humanist

Work at a place like the DMC Develop your own digital humanities project Take a wide variety of courses, e.g.

Caleb McDaniel’s HIST 246: The American Civil War Era

Programming Design Media studies, etc.

Experiment with multimedia tools such as video editing

Read widely Be conscious of digital culture

Questions?

Contact me at the DMC (Herring 129) or at lspiro@rice.edu

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