Introduction to Digital Scholarship and Digital Humanities in the Liberal Arts
and at Bethel UniversityKent Gerber
Digital Library ManagerBethel University
Bethel Faculty Retreat (College of Arts and Sciences)Summer 2013
Introduction to Digital Scholarship and Digital Humanities in the Liberal Arts by Kent Gerber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Outline
What is Digital Humanities?Brief HistoryCurrent ProjectsWhy Digital Humanities in Liberal Arts?Digital Humanities at BethelToolsCommunities (How to get involved)
What is Digital Humanities?
Definition from a Practitioner
“a nexus of fields within which scholars use computing technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities, or … ask traditional kinds of humanities-oriented questions about computing technologies.”Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference, ProfHacker
Definition from Office of Digital Humanities
“projects that explore how to harness new technology for humanities research as well as those that study digital culture from a humanistic perspective.”
Emerging Methods and GenresEnhanced Critical CurationAugmented Editions and Fluid TextualityScale: The Law of Large NumbersDistant /Close, Macro /Micro, Surface/DepthCultural Analytics, Aggregation , and Data-MiningVisualization and data designLocative Investigation and Thick MappingThe Animated ArchiveDistributed Knowledge Production and Performative AccessHumanities GamingCode, Software, and Platform StudiesDatabase DocumentariesRepurposable Content and Remix CulturePervasive InfrastructureUbiquitous Scholarship
Brief History
Early History
Quantifiable elements of a textual corpus
1946-1967 Father Roberto Busa’s concordance of Thomas Aquinas’ body of work Index Thomisticus completed1957 Concordance of RSV Bible in 400 hours1963 Questions of Authorship in Federalist Papers
Recent History
Digitized primary sources and encoded texts
1987 Perseus Digital Library (Classics and 19th century American, Germanic, and Arabic literature)
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
1988 Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. Our goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader.
1993 Valley of the Shadow (Civil War Primary sources, PA and VA)http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/
From Humanities Computing to Digital Humanities
2004 Humanities Computing transitioned to use of Digital Humanities after discussion of a Blackwell Companion to Humanities publication initiated in 2001 and published in 2004
2006 Now an Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities
Current Projects
Plato’s Timaeus in Text is Beautiful
Digital Humanities Centers
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
Digital Humanities Centers
University of Virginia Scholars Lab
Digital Humanities Centers
Current ProjectsKinds of projects pursued at the University of Minnesota from University Libraries survey:
○ Digital writing and storytelling○ Machine learning○ Social media and narrative production○ Data mining of digital print○ GIS and digital humanities○ Digital music and ethnography○ 3D visualization○ Crowdsourcing○ Image tagging and discovery○ Digital publishing
Debates in the Digital HumanitiesUniversity of Minnesota Press, 2012, print
Why Digital Humanities in Liberal Arts?
Why Digital Humanities in Liberal Arts Colleges?
“faculty and students use digital resources to pose new questions, discover and create knowledge in distributed and collaborative ways, work with scholars and information globally without physically leaving campus, and simultaneously gather and share data in the field” (Chamberlain - Director of Center for Digital Learning and Research, Occidental College).
Digital Humanities Centers: Liberal Arts Institutions
Digital Humanities Centers: Liberal Arts InstitutionsHomer Multitext Project
Applied-learning opportunities of digital humanities projects like the model of labs in the sciences.
“Students should learn both the process of inquiry and the actual content answer to the problem. After such scaffolded learning experiences, students will be ready for more independent research of the Homer manuscripts...This process-over-product focus distinguishes the digital humanities as practiced at small liberal arts colleges from the production focus in much of the digital humanities community.”(Alexander & Frost Davis, 2012)
Digital Humanities Centers: Liberal Arts Institutions
Digital Humanities Centers: Liberal Arts InstitutionsDifference from Research I institutions
“The mission of this center, then, explicitly focuses on undergraduate education rather than on the production of digital humanities projects. Instead, digital methodologies are seen as a means to achieving that classroom-based end. While such centers share with centers at research institutions the functions of offering a location for interdisciplinary collaboration, thereby centralizing expertise and attracting funding, they have a distinct mission that focuses on undergraduate education, akin to the focus of teaching and learning centers and in keeping with the identity of small liberal arts colleges.”
Should Liberal Arts Campuses Do Digital Humanities? Process and Products in the Small College World. In Debates in the Digital Humanities (Alexander & Frost Davis)
DH for Liberal ArtsWilliam Pannapacker
Digital Liberal Arts
Digital Liberal Arts
“students who are interested in the Arts and Humanities—Theater, Languages, History, Dance, English, Philosophy, Art, Music, and Religion—can receive even more opportunities to work closely with professionally active faculty mentors in the context of a new, three-year program designed to foster faculty-student collaborative research in the arts and humanities, as well as engagement with new Internet-based technologies that are invigorating many fields of scholarly research.”
DH for Liberal Arts Job Placement
DH for Liberal Arts Job Placement
I keep hearing the same thing from potential employers: “We love students with liberal-arts degrees. They are curious; they know how to ask good questions. They know how to conduct research. They are effective writers and speakers. And they learn quickly.“All good news, so far, for those of us who support traditional liberal-arts education. But there’s more:“So I’d love to hire your students,” they say, “provided they can also help us fix this Web site, handle our social media, help us with fund-raising, and maybe even cultivate some new clients. Do you have anyone like that? We can only hire one person.”
Digital Liberal Arts Projects
Andrew Mellon Grant supported
Hamilton College (established a center)Occidental College (established a center)Hope College (established an honors program incorporating digital humanities)Wheaton College (MA)
Lexomics
Digital Liberal Arts/Humanities Courses - 411 so far
Local or Peer Liberal Arts Institutions
Messiah College - DH Working group Reported on occasionally John Fea's blog
(St. Olaf, Macalester, Carleton) Mellon Grant supported
Carleton, Macalester, and St. Olaf Colleges
In May 2012, received a $100,000 collaborative planning grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation to support faculty projects in the Digital Humanities. The Mellon Foundation funded “Collaborative Planning for the Digital Humanities” grant will run for two years. During this time, all three campuses will host a rich array of workshops and presentations, and new funding opportunities will be made available to faculty. (Goals of Digital Humanities grant.)
Resulting ProjectsDouglas Casson, Political Science, St. Olaf, John Locke’s use of the King James Bible in his personal papers, published books, and correspondence using textual comparison software to identify lexically similar passages in large collections of text
Chris Wells, Macalester, and George Vrtis, Carleton, to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to put together place-based virtual tours (both on the web and through downloadable Android and iOS smartphone apps) based on their environmental history research on the Twin Cities riverfronts.http://apps.carleton.edu/humanities/digital/grants_summer12/
Macalester History professor collaborating with Library
Chairman Mao's Railroad in Africa
CONTENTdm curating images of this project same system used by Bethel Digital Library
Digital Humanities Sparkfest
Digital Humanities Sparkfest
The Twin Cities Digital Humanities Symposium is an opportunity for scholars (faculty and graduate students) from humanities and computer science fields, academic technologists, programmers, research consultants, librarians, and other academic support staff from Minnesota to come together to spark new research.
Who Attended from Bethel?
Faculty Chris GehrzSam MulberryBarrett Fisher
LibrariansDavid StewartKent Gerber
Project Examples
Design & Tools for Storytelling
City as LayersPhoto, Video, Sound
Project Examples
Design & Tools for Storytelling
City as LayersPhoto, Video, Sound
Crowdsourcing and Student Engagement
Many digital humanities projects make materials available so that others can do the tasks that do not require expertise but do require time like transcribing or identifying shapes of characters.
These also give students the chance to experience exposure to primary sources or to engage more deeply.
Transcription Crowdsourcing
What’s on the Menu - NYPLhttp://menus.nypl.org/menus
Ancient Lives - Zooniversehttp://www.ancientlives.org/tutorial/transcribeOxford University
Guantanamo Bay ProjectGuantanamo Public Memory Project (part of 11 universities involved)http://gitmomemory.org/stories/Public history or Digital Humanities in the course.Exhibiton will be in Minnesota History Center Feb 2014HIST 3001: Public HistoryProfessor in History and American Studies
Rachel Hines, one of undergraduate students did a panel on Closing Guantanamo, Who Decides GTMO’s Future?http://gtmoproject.umn.edu/
Place to Find Many of These Projects
Newspaper/Magazine
Place to Find Many of These Projects
Newspaper/Magazine
Journals
Digital Humanities at Bethel
Digital Humanities / Liberal Arts at Bethel
Stephen Self’s and Grant McEachern Edgren Scholars
Mike Holmes’ Greek New Testament
Enabling New Scholarship and Public Services
Bethel has 150 photos in National Collection
Permanent Art Collection
George Poundstone
Text Mining and Visualization
Wordle
Tools
See Chris Gehrz
How to use Omeka in the classroomhttp://omeka.org/blog/2013/08/20/back-to-school-edition-use-omeka-in-your-class/
Choosing Tools
What is Needed for these efforts?Key needs / skills
Building interfacesWhere to go for help/ tech supportManage large scale grantsProject planning - multi institutionalChoosing tools - GIS, text mining, network analysis, data visualizationData management - macro analysis of 100,000 novels.Metadata and encodingLarge scale content selection and development (digitization)Data analysisNew research outputsNew preservation responsibilities.
Digital Liberal ArtsWilliam Pannapacker 1. "Stop calling it 'digital humanities.'"
2. "Show how digital humanities supports the liberal arts."
3. "Build a support network with like-minded colleagues."
4. "Integrate digital humanities into the curriculum."
5. "Show how digital techniques support faculty research."
6. "Celebrate the accomplishments of students and colleagues."
7. "Seek support of the higher-ups."
8. "Invest in faculty and staff development."
9. "Seek external partnerships."
10. "Strive to be a "servant leader."
Communities (How to Get Involved)
CommunitiesAlliance of Digital Humanities Organizationshttp://adho.org/
Praxis Network (includes Hope College)
THATCamp
Curated Conversations on Twitterhttps://twitter.com/dancohen/digitalhumanities
How Can You Get Started
Attend a THATCamp
Consult some example Syllabi
DHCommons - http://dhcommons.org/List projects and people and skills needed
Experiment with some project websites or tools
Collaboration with the Library
Create a new digital collection
Engage and extend an existing collection
Submit your work to the Digital Library Archive
Platform for you or your student’s scholarship
Some Digital Library Collections
Faculty Journal
Faculty Work (coming soon)
Undergraduate Research and Scholarship
Community Video Collection
Colloquy
New Website: Library Home Page
New Website: Digital Collections Tab
Contact and References
Email [email protected]
Twitter http://twitter.com/ktkgerber
Personal Learning Environments/Blogs
Digital Humanities Bookmarks and Bibliographyhttps://www.diigo.com/user/kgerber/%22digital%20humanities%22?type=all&sort=updated
Atlibber: Academic Technology Librarian Bloggerhttp://atlibber.wordpress.com