A BRIEF GUIDE TO DIGITAL

HUMANITIES
 A form of scholarship and
teaching that integrates
computational methods with
traditional humanistic
methodologies
■Preservation
■Aggregation
■Collaboration
■Digitizing material artifacts
• Manuscripts
• Printed materials
"plastic" arts (paintings, statues, maps, photos, etc.)
• Audio and video materials
• Borne digital resources
■Describing digitized items: METADATA
• Physical account, but also the contextual features of
each digital object = act of scholarship!
■Curating digital collections
■Expanding the scope of our scholarly
resources = Big data
■Gaining access to previously hidden or
closed collections
■Creating opportunities for scholars to explore
and integrate diverse sources for research
and teaching
■Isn't computation about quantitative
analysis but humanistic study concerns the
qualitative?

■How then can

technology assist
the humanities?
■All of our work-n o matter how
sophisticated our methodologies are-boils
down to one
simple task: pattern matching
■When we make an argument, compose a
critique, edit a text, and even create a work of
art, we are bringing similar and disparate
elements together in our composition.
■One thing computers are helpful with is
complex and large tasks of pattern
matching:
computational methods can help us with
what we do as humanistic scholars.
■The important small print:
•We still must make the
judgments as to the
value
of those discovered
patterns
■Digital Humanities offers two
significant advances for our work:
1. Granularity
2. Larger Scope
■Intentional Collaboration: internet
technologies empower interdisciplinary
and
international collaboration
■Digital Tools allow scholars to share
their findings with others
in order to create
scholarship
■Even social media can be a tool of
collaboration: collaboration is organic and
begins when we know what others are doing
■Unintentional Collaboration: we share our
evidence-our data-s o that others may re-
use
for their own scholarship
■Digital Humanities is built upon open source
data models and upon the principle that all
scholarship ultimately belongs to the
community
■Using more than just print media can
facilitate future collaborative work
■Both forms of collaboration entail
transparency:
• We share how we work: we can model our acts of
scholarship or creative enterprises
• We acknowledge that we build our research upon
the work of others and so there is an ethical
pull to reciprocate
1. Be good at what you do: digital
humanities cannot cover a multitude of
scholarly sins
2. Be willing to think about your source
material as data: what is its scope,
its structure, etc.
3. Be willing to think about your research
as part of a larger network
of ideas and methods
4. Be collaborative: how can you work with
others
5. Be collaborative, part 2: share your sources,
your data, and even your final product
6. Remain committed to peer reviewed
scholarship, but consider that
dissemination is bigger than the print
media
7. Learn new skills: encoding, metadata
analysis, even web design and
programming
8. Be creative: using a computer or
searching a database is not the full-scale
of digital humanities.