Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Reaching (For) Wider Audiences With Your Dh Project, Nathan Waite

The 3rd Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities

When starting a DH project, the questions are seemingly endless—What is the scope? What tools will I use? How do I organize the data? Where will the funding come from? Sometimes missing from these conversations is the question of audience. Who am I trying to reach, what do I hope they take away from my project, and how will they find it? The actual audience too often ends up being smaller and more specialized than hoped, largely made up of professional associates and other digital humanists. How can DH reach a wider public audience? Whether the goal is education, advocacy, …

What We Teach When We Teach "Intro To Dh", Brian Croxall, Julia Panko, David Roh, Lisa Swanstrom

The 3rd Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities

Over the last decade, digital humanities has become less of an upstart and more integrated into curricula. As this happens, one of the first classes that is sure to be offered is “Introduction to Digital Humanities.” Depending on circumstances, such a class can be taught at either the undergraduate or graduate level and may be taught by faculty from departments as varied as English, history, comparative literature, the library, or even a stand-alone digital humanities department. All of these local differences—to say nothing of the decisions made by individual faculty members—logically result in significant differences in what students learn as …

Startup Logic In Dh: Performativity And Sustainability, David Roh

The 3rd Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities

This paper argues that the logic of startup companies has penetrated the digital humanities, which has led the field to prioritize glossy veneer over sound construction (“skinning”), pursue grants for survival (“venture capitalists”), and conspicuously broadcast through social media to self-promote (“branding”). The result is a field centered on the performativity of a digital artifact, with little consideration of sustainability, contributing to the existing scholarly discourse, and a graveyard of abandoned projects once they have outlived their usefulness.

It is a pattern with which I am well-familiar. In 2001, I left what would become a lucrative and successful Internet startup …

Three Phases Of The Digital In Sf / Three Faces In Sf In Dh, Lisa Swanstrom

The 3rd Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities

Well before the formation of the Digital Humanities as a field, science fiction as a literary genre was interested in—and preoccupied with—the potential of digital technology. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, in particular, many works about computing emerged in the SF landscape. In 1969, for example, Philip K. Dick’s “Electric Ant” details a man who realizes he’s an “organic robot,” controlled by punch-tape reel encased above his heart. In 1971, Stanislaw Lem’s “handbag computers” take over the tedious task of making small talk. In 1984, William Gibson’s Neuromancer imagines synthetic flesh on “digital display.” As critics such as …

The Many Faces (Interfaces) Of Historical Digitized Newspapers, Harish Maringanti, Dhanushka Samarakoon

The 3rd Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities

Galleries, Museums, Libraries and Archives (GLAM) have been digitizing textual documents, images, records and serving them online for many years. In many cases, even though the digitized content is openly available to the public, the web interfaces were designed for humans to consume the information. With advances in technology overall - at the hardware level computing power and storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, while at the software level Artificial Intelligence and machine learning tools are getting easier to use - now is an opportune time to leverage technology and simplify user’s interaction with digital libraries and archives. Treating “collections …

Wordcruncher: A Digital Research And Teaching Assistant, Jason W. Dzubak, Monte F. Shelley

The 3rd Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities

For humanities research or teaching projects, we each pick tools from our digital toolboxes. If we have few tools, our projects may be limited or take longer. When we become familiar with other tools, we may get ideas for other projects and learn how to do projects faster and better.

WordCruncher is a free digital toolkit with tools to help you search, study, analyze, download, create, and share eBooks or corpora. For example, you can add searchable notes, highlight text, do advanced searches, see search keywords in context, and find collocates or n-grams in WordCruncher books that may include formatted …