Digital Humanities Commons^™

Digitization And The Changing Roles Of Libraries In Support Of Humanities Research: The Case Of The Harrison Forman Collection, Krystyna K. Matusiak

Library and Information Science: Faculty Scholarship

Objective – this article examines the role of libraries in expanding access to primary sources through digitization and in providing support for humanities research. Research method – the author analyzes the literature on information behavior of humanist scholars in light of the increased use of digitized primary sources. Next, using the example of the digitized photographs and diaries from the Harrison Forman Collection, the author explores the emerging role of libraries in creating a new source of scholarly materials and supporting research in humanities. Results and conclusion – digitization increasingly matters not only for practical reasons of ease of use …

Towards Sustainable Digital Humanities Software, George K. Thiruvathukal, Shilpika Shilpika, Nicholas J. Hayward, Saulo Aguiar, Konstantin Läufer

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Our work in software quality for digital humanities was borne of an effort to address sustainable practices in scientific software development, where the speaker (Thiruvathukal) co-authored a position paper on the case for software engineering in scientific software development as part of an all-encompassing strategy to create more sustainable scientific software (an example of a well-known scientific software package is LINPACK). In this position paper, we addressed how “progress in scientific research is dependent on the quality and accessibility of software at all levels". This progress depends on embracing the best traditional--and emergent--practices in software engineering, especially agile practices that …

This Week In Digital Humanities And Pedagogy, Dominique Zino

Publications and Research

Report on the NEH Summer Institute for Community College Faculty held in July 2015 at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon.

Reporting On What Jane Saw 2.0: Female Celebrity And Sensationalism In Boydell’S Shakespeare Gallery, Janine Barchas

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay reports on ongoing efforts to build an accurate digital model of John Boydell’s popular Shakespeare Gallery precisely as it looked in August 1796—when a 20-year-old Jane Austen visited London’s sites, staying within a ten-minute walk from the gallery. The essay argues for the substantial difference between studying Boydell’s pictures in a paper volume (whether as lists, illustrations in books, or engraved folio plates) and viewing them as an exhibition of paintings on walls, albeit virtual ones. For example, the digital reconstruction illuminated commissions from several female participants in Boydell’s male-dominated gallery, especially Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) and Anne Seymour …

Digital Humanities In Ten Pages Or Less! Engaging Students With Digital Texts Through Sustainable Collaboration, Julie Thompson Klein, Judith Arnold, Graham S. Hukill

Library Scholarly Publications

Digital Humanities projects are somewhat new to many librarians, particularly those who are liaisons to faculty who are venturing into this area. Because of this “newness,” many librarians are unsure of their role in engaging with faculty or other librarian colleagues who are working with digital collections and editions, text mining, or other applications of technology to humanities scholarship. A digital humanities project need not be intimidating. Opportunities are nascent in everyday projects and technologies. Through the example of a digital humanities project integrated into a senior-level writing intensive course for English majors, this session will offer attendees a working …

A "Digital Wasteland": Modernist Periodical Studies, Digital Remediation, And Copyright, Roxanne Shirazi

Graduate Student Publications and Research

The nonlinearity of magazine reading is an important consideration in the emerging field of modernist periodical studies, one that deserves greater attention in the development of digital collections. As modernist scholars begin to generate a theoretical foundation for periodical studies it becomes evident that digital technologies must go beyond reproducing the printed page. This paper reviews recent scholarship and digital projects in modernist periodical studies and introduces non-consumptive research methods as a partial solution to the post-1923 copyright conundrum.

Interim Report, Hd-51897-14, Image Analysis For Archival Discovery (Aida), Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh

CDRH Grant Reports

In the first six months of work on "Image Analysis for Archival Discovery," the project team has made significant strides toward our goal of analyzing more than 7 million newspaper pages in Chronicling America for poetic content. Although we have made some adjustments to our work plan, we remain on task to perform the major research outlined in our proposal. Activities undertaken from June–November 2014:
• Preparation of training set images (completed)
• Processing of initial data sets to extract/derive features from image data (completed)
• Development of algorithms for describing image characteristics (completed, but future iterations/revisions are likely)
• …

The Trees Within The Forest: Extracting, Coding, And Visualizing Subjective Data In Authorship Studies, Krista Kennedy, Seth Long

Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition - All Scholarship

Kennedy and Long tackle questions related to the treatment of digital texts as evidence of writing activity, where the object of inquiry is the author and authorship more generally. With sections on extracting, coding, and visualizing data, they offer a useful set of methods that can form the core of a study or be recruited to triangulate analysis of primary source materials.

Developing Civil War Washington, Katherine L. Walter, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Stacy Rickel, Karin Dalziel

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

The Civil War Washington project team at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln includes scholars, librarians, technologists, and students, both undergraduate and graduate. Individuals are affiliated with the English and History Departments, the University Libraries, the School of Geography, and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Our successes as a team can be attributed to many things, including sound project management and the fact that our participants have been committed to achieving set goals. Most important, the interdisciplinary nature of the team has been highly advantageous in the research itself and in creating the composite web site.

The project was …

Introduction To New Work On Electronic Literature And Cyberculture, Maya Zalbidea, Mark C. Marino, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Teaching Digital Humanities In Romania, Mădălina Nicolaescu, Adriana Mihai

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Teaching Digital Humanities in Romania" Mădălina Nicolaescu and Adriana Mihai describe a research project that sets out to promote digital humanities with an internet based platform in Shakespeare studies at the University of Bucharest. Texts have been collected and catalogued and the platform's technical construction is in construction. Based on the Shakespeare platform's content and presentation, Nicolaescu and Mihai propose participation strategies for involvement in the creation of a digital database that is both a research tool and a digital storytelling environment. The database is a collection of digitized translations of Shakespeare in Romanian followed by participants' …

Html & Css November 19, 2014, Karin Dalziel

Digital Humanities Workshop Series

HTML and CSS are two of the most important building blocks of the web. In this workshop, you'll learn how to create an HTML page, how to give it some style, and how to take advantage of HTML and CSS frameworks to speed up your development process. You'll also learn where to go next to continue your learning.

The James Merrill Digital Archive: Channeling The Collaborative Spirit(S), Shannon Davis, Joel Minor

WashU Libraries Presentations

The James Merrill Digital Archive, comprised of Merrill’s poetry drafts, typescripts, and Ouija board session transcripts, is the result of expertise and input of many collaborators across the Washington University campus. Shannon Davis and Joel Minor will speak on various aspects of the project, including successful cross-campus collaboration, employing student workers to perform high level encoding and exhibit curation, and how Omeka was used to develop the digital archive. - Shannon Davis, Digital Projects Librarian, and Joel Minor, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts

Digitization Fundamentals: Text September 17, 2014, Laura Weakly

Digital Humanities Workshop Series

No abstract provided.

Digital Humanities, Matthew K. Gold

Publications and Research

Published in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media and Textuality, this chapter takes stock of the field of digital humanities as it existed in 2014.

Situating Digital Archives, Michelle R. Warren

Dartmouth Scholarship

This essay is the introduction to an essay collection about the Middle English Prose Brut manuscript purchased by Dartmouth College in 2006. I consider how the competing pressures of access and preservation condition scholarship in medieval studies. I suggest several analogies between the digital humanities in general, digital philology in medieval studies, and the historical practices of medieval writers: hacking, dark archive, and prosthesis.

The Dartmouth Brut: Conservation, Authenticity, Dissemination, Deborah Howe, Michelle R. Warren

Dartmouth Scholarship

This essay describes the conservation process of the Dartmouth Brut manuscript: Dartmouth College, Rauner Special Collections Library, MS 003183. The format alternates between the observations and descriptions of the conservator, Deborah Howe, and those of medievalists Michelle Warren. The essay includes photos of Deborah's process in making a fragile fifteenth-century manuscript useable in the twenty-first century.

Review: Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, And Politics, Stephen Brier

Publications and Research

Review of Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics, edited by Brett D. Hirsch, multiple authored collection of articles on the theory as well as the practices and principles of the digital humanities and how DH can and has begun to reshape pedagogy in college teaching and learning.

Computational Analysis Of The Body In European Fairy Tales, Scott Weingart, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This article explores how digital humanities research methods can be used to analyze the representations of gendered bodies in European fairy tales, a flexible and pervasive genre that has influenced Western children's education and acquisition of gender identity for centuries. By blending the theoretical and methodological concerns of folkloristics, gender studies, and large-scale scientific research, this article demonstrates the utility of cross-disciplinary collaboration in asking traditional questions of traditional materials with new methods. To facilitate this research, a hand-coded database listing every reference to a body or body part in the 233 fairy tales was created. Analysis revealed strong indications …

The Black And The White Bride: Dualism, Gender, And Bodies In European Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Fairy tales are one of the most important folklore genres in Western culture, spanning literary and oral cultures, folk and elite cultures, and print and mass media forms. As Jack Zipes observes: ‘The cultural evolution of the fairy tale is closely bound historically to all kinds of storytelling and different civilizing processes that have undergirded the formation of nation-states.’¹⁴³ Studying fairy tales thus opens a window onto European history and cultures, ideologies, and aesthetics.

Where’S The Pedagogy? The Role Of Teaching And Learning In The Digital Humanities, Stephen Brier

Publications and Research

The Digital Humanities (DH) has focused narrowly on digital research methods and projects and digital publication efforts. Yet DH has also had a significant, if under recognized, impact on classroom pedagogy. This chapter evaluates the ways DH practices, embodied in a series of pedagogy projects at the City University of York (CUNY), have been used to reshape teaching and learning in college classrooms.

Topic Modeling And Figurative Language, Lisa M. Rhody

Publications and Research

Located at the center of Jorie Graham’s collection The End of Beauty, “Self Portrait as Hurray and Delay” crafts a portrait of the artist, poised at a precarious moment in which thought begins to take shape. Like Penelope, Graham entertains the illusion, if only momentarily, of a choice between bringing a creative impulse into form or allowing it to come undone. A weaver of language, Graham subtly, deftly, but unsuccessfully attempts to delay the inevitable moment in poetic creation in which complexity of thought adopts form through language, and so realized is also reduced. In The End of Beauty, the …

The September 11 Digital Archive, Stephen Brier, Joshua Brown

Publications and Research

This article focuses on the creation and subsequent development of the September 11 Digital Archive (www.911digitalarchive.org), currently one of the largest digital repositories of historical materials on the September 11 attacks. The article reflects on archival and methodological questions and on issues raised by the efforts of staff members at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and at the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning (ASHP) at the City University of New York Graduate Center to preserve and present via the Internet digital resources related to the epochal events of …

Digital Romanticism In The Age Of Neo-Luddism: The Romantic Circles Experiment, Steven Jones

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Romantic Circles Website, along with a number of other major projects in digital Romanticism, came online around 1995, a historical moment that also saw the emergence of neo-Luddism, in part as a reaction to the techno-hype of the Internet boom. At the time. neo-Luddites often claimed as a precedent the original historical Luddism of 1811-16, but they usually also Romanticized that collective labor subculture to fit their own late-twentieth-century ideas of “technology.” This essay looks back at the interlinked assumptions in the air around 1995–neo-Luddite and Romantic–as the context out of which Romantic Circles defined its own engaged experiment …

Electronic Textual Editing: The Poem And The Network: Editing Poetry Electronically, Steven Jones, Neil Fraistat

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Suda On Line: Byzantine Lexicography, Raphael A. Finkel, Ada Adler, William Hutton, Catharine P. Roth, Patrick Rouke, Ross Scaife, Elizabeth Vandiver, David Whitehead

Library Videos

Pope’s ‘Suidas’ is not a man but a work, The Suda (or Stronghold): a massive 10^th century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, covering the whole of Greek and Roman antiquity and also including Biblical and Christian material.

Preserved in several medieval manuscripts, it has been edited and published several times since the end of the 14th century in traditional hard-copy scholarly editions, most recently that of Ada Adler (Teubner, 5 volumes: 1928-1938, reprinted 1971). The Suda On Line (SOL) project, begun in 1998 as part of the Stoa Consortium, opens up this stronghold of …