Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
DIGITAL HUMANITIES 101ENGL 206 , JANUARY 26 , 2015
Elizabeth Skene
Digital Initiatives Librarian
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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
WHAT DO YOU THINK IT MEANS?
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
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
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
TOOLS & VALUES(& DETAILS)
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?
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
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
VALUES
The Public Digital Humanities starts with humans, not technologies or tools, and its
terrain must be continuously co-constructed.- Jess Stommel
VALUES
James Cuno
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
VALUES
VALUES
Open Access
Creative Commons
OCCUPY THE DIGITAL
Elijah Meeks
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
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
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
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
@elizabethskene #DHatWCU bit.ly/DHatWCU
