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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Renegotiating The Archive: Scholarly Practice In A Digital Age, William G. Thomas Iii
Renegotiating The Archive: Scholarly Practice In A Digital Age, William G. Thomas Iii
Department of History: Faculty Publications
In the last two decades scholarly practice in archival research has changed substantially. The availability of digital finding aids and digital facsimiles of original sources combined with powerful search engines and digital library technologies have altered how historians and other researchers encounter, access, and use archives and sources. Scholars who were trained to work solely in physical archives are now dealing with a fundamentally new environment. These changes have come with considerable anxieties about whether digitization and digital archives are replacing, as well as displacing, traditional archival work in the archives. Judging from the experience of the Mellon Fellows, however, …
The Promise Of The Digital Humanities And The Contested Nature Of Digital Scholarship, William G. Thomas Iii
The Promise Of The Digital Humanities And The Contested Nature Of Digital Scholarship, William G. Thomas Iii
Department of History: Faculty Publications
This essay examines the contested qualities of digital scholarship and why, paradoxically, the twenty-year surge in the digital humanities--from 1993 to 2013--has produced relatively little interpretive or argumentative scholarship. In this first phase of the digital humanities, scholars produced innovative and sophisticated hybrid works of scholarship, blending archives, tools, commentaries, data collections, and visualizations. For the most part in the disciplines, however, few of these works have been reviewed or critiqued. Because the disciplines expect interpretation, argument, and criticism, it could be argued that digital humanists have not produced enough digital interpretive scholarship and what we have produced has not …