What are the Digital Humanities

What are the Digital Humanities

“…the work of the humanities is to create the vessels to store our culture. In this sense, the digitization of archives and collections holds the promise of a grand conclusion: nothing less than the unification of the human culture record online, representing, in theory, an unprecedented democratization of access to human knowledge.”

Jonathan Shaw “The Humanities Digitized” Harvard Magazine May-June 2012


“There is no such thing as the ‘Digital Humanities’; there are multiple emerging domains of experimental practice that fall under this capacious umbrella.”

Jeffrey Schnapp “The Humanities Digitized” Harvard Magazine May-June 2012

http://metalab.harvard.edu/




In other words, there is no monolithic model of knowledge production.

This can be true even when you are using the same standard to describe content in the humanities.


TEIThe Text Encoding Initiative is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Since 1994, the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation.

What are the Digital HumanitiesMagna Carta Digital Editions Project

•Digital surrogates have been created for each page of the manuscript, and some of these will be worked on within a Text Encoding Initiative XML file

•Uses the EpiDoc guidelines for TEI

•Concerned with creating editions (Diplomatic, Normative and Translation)

•Work has just begun—there are issues still being addressed



What are the Digital HumanitiesBoth projects make use of a extensive data dictionary

Modernized Record both the original text and a modernization made to the original text. <choice><orig>original text</orig><reg type="modernized">modernized text</reg></choice> <choice><orig>shewed</orig> <reg type="modernized">showed</reg></choice> http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-choice.html

http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-choice.html


MONKS AnalyticsInstance of the MONK Project includes approximately 525 works of American literature from the 18th and 19th centuries, and 37 plays and 5 works of poetry by William Shakespeare.Uses TEI to perform linguistic analysis.Has a robust data dictionary

http://monkpublic.library.illinois.edu/monkmiddleware/public/index.html

http://www.monkproject.org/

http://segonku.unl.edu/teianalytics/TEIAnalytics.html



Conclusions:•Digital Humanities scholarship is not monolithic, even when using the same standard •Frequently project based•Likely require a team approach going forward


Documents

What are the Digital Humanities