Digital Humanities Commons^™

Using A Content Management System For Student Digital Humanities Projects: A Pilot Run, Amy E. Gay

Library Scholarship

Content management systems (CMS), a phrase that is defined pretty much how it reads--they are systems that manage digital content. If you have worked within a library’s archives, special collections, history and genealogy department, or within museums, you have probably used one either on the front end or managed digital collections on the backend. For this use case, I will share a pilot project using a newly developed content management system, Omeka S, for an undergraduate History class’ digital humanities projects.

Ev-Ent-Anglement: A Script To Reflexivey Extend Engagement By Way If Technologies, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

We discuss an art project that links entaglements and events and thinks about cutting pasting and bleeding.

The Digital Labor Of Blended Learning: The Reading Cities Project, Melissa Dinsman

Publications and Research

In this chapter, we consider the methods, goals, and practicalities of integrating digital labor into literary/historical pedagogy through a discussion of our work on the development and initial implementation of the augmented text platform, Reading Cities. As readers who are also digital humanities (DH) practitioners are no doubt aware, there are multiple forms of labor involved in a digital project blending tool development and research. Some of these forms of labor are readily apparent in the end product’s interface and content, but others would remain largely invisible if it were not for careful documentation of and critical reflection upon them. …

The Digital Public Humanities: Giving New Arguments And New Ways To Argue, Jordana Cox, Lauren Tilton

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In response to the latest "crisis" in the humanities, advocates have marched, rallied, fundraised, and-especially-argued. This essay contends that communication scholars can support the growing "case for the humanities" by analyzing argumentative strategies, and more specifically, by offering ethical argumentative strategies that avoid replicating structures of domination. In particular, we look to Mari Lee Mifsud's theorization of rhetoric as gift, which follows Henry W. Johnstone in conceptualizing argument as something other than winning over an adversary. We place Mifsud's theorization of the gift in conversation with the methods of the digital public humanities (DPH), which acknowledge and offer abundant resources …

Running Wires: Digital History In The Classroom And The Field, Ian A. Isherwood, Amy E. Lucadamo, R.C. Miessler

All Musselman Library Staff Works

The First World War Letters of H.J.C. Peirs is a digital history project that publishes the letters of a British World War I officer 100 years to the day they were written. By telling the story of one person, we have aimed to humanize a dehumanizing war and supported the effort to commemorate the centennial of the conflict. While the project was conceived with pedagogy in mind, it has grown beyond the letters and crossed boundaries: from the analog to the digital, from the classroom to the public, and from the archives to the field.

Remix The Medieval Manuscript: Experiments With Digital Infrastructure, Laura Braunstein, Michelle R. Warren, Baylauris Byrnesim

Dartmouth Library Staff Publications

Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of Digital Experiments is a collaborative research project that takes up this challenge. It brings together academics, librarians, technologists, conservators, and students to study the many permutations of a single manuscript—a fifteenth-century Middle English prose chronicle of Great Britain, commonly referred to as the “Prose Brut.” Our project raises fundamental questions about the digital research environment. How is today’s code configuring tomorrow’s historical knowledge? How do digital technologies affect our access to and understanding of material culture? By investigating these broad questions through the example of one manuscript, we define a limited yet infinitely …

The Consequences Of Framing Digital Humanities Tools As Easy To Use, Paige C. Morgan

Library Articles, Papers, and Presentations

This article examines the recurring ways in which some of the most popular DH tools are presented as easy to use. It argues that attempts to couch powerful tools in what is often false familiarity, directly undermines the goal of encouraging scholarly innovation and risk taking. The consequences of framing digital tools as either easy or more difficult shapes the relationship between librarians and the students and faculty whose research they support, and, more broadly, the role and viability of libraries as spaces devoted to skill acquisition.

Adoption Of Open Educational Resources In California Colleges And Universities, Ruth Guthrie, Katherine Harris, Peter Krapp

Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature

The California Open Educational Resources Council (CAOERC) was formed in 2014 to find solutions to reduce the cost of college textbooks without impacting quality. Comprised of faculty from California's three public higher education systems, the CAOERC conducted a field study of 16 faculty using OER materials to discover practical knowledge about the challenges of adopting OER textbooks. The quality of the OER textbooks received positive reviews. The faculty also reported being more engaged with their teaching. The faculty felt that availability of OER support materials was a challenge to implementing OER. The following article presents the results of the CAOERC's …

Digital Literary Studies In The High School Environment, Eric Rettberg

Faculty Publications & Research

In my time today, I’ll discuss some of the challenges and opportunities of adapting a college-level digital-centric course for the high-school classroom. The two courses in question are a class called Literature in the Digital Era, which I taught as a postdoc at the University of Virginia in 2014, and a class called Digital Literary Studies, which I’ll teach at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a state-run boarding school for high schoolers talented in math and science, in Spring 2019. While there’s been a lot of continuity in the design of the two classes, teaching high school does present …

Transformed, I'M Sure: A (Polite) Introduction To Fair Use In Dh, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This presentation looks at how the words "including" and "such as" in the fair use section of United States copyright law (i.e., Section 107 of Title 17 of the United States Code) allow for unforeseen fair uses, including transformative works made by digital humanists.

Review Of The Shelley-Godwin Archive, Stacey L. Kikendall

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

Review of The Shelley-Godwin Archive

Ted-Style Talk: It Takes A Village: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Supporting And Facilitating Digital Scholarship Initiatives, Jeffrey P. Emanuel

Digital Initiatives Symposium

The continued increase of digital tools and methods in both teaching and research has created a need for initial and ongoing support within institutions. While each institution has its own specific needs, we can learn a great deal from each other’s approaches and experiences. This presentation offers as a case study Harvard University’s recent (and ongoing) experience working across groups and divisional boundaries to support digital scholarship, digital methods-related courses, and the integration of digital components into courses and assignments through training, consultation, and the development and implementation of digital tools and methods.

From The Trenches: Cross-Campus Digital History Collaboration, Amy E. Lucadamo, Ian A. Isherwood, R.C. Miessler, Jenna Fleming, Meghan E. O'Donnell

All Musselman Library Staff Works

In September 2015, our team launched The First World War Letters of H.J.C. Peirs (www.jackpeirs.org), a digital history initiative built on collaboration between faculty, students, and library staff. The project is founded on amazing primary source material, but with limited financial support and little dedicated staff time. We leveraged the creativity and hard work of our team members to build a website that is maintained by students and enhanced whenever possible with features and commentary from faculty and staff. Members of #TeamPeirs discussed the evolution of the project, the nature of our collaboration, and the intersection of audiences …

3 Secrets Of The Digital Humanities That You Never Knew, Jennifer Hootman

Library Presentations

No abstract provided.

Honoring The Dead: Digitizing Abuse & Neglect At The Asylum For Insane Indians, Kennedi Ford

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Perhaps because of the nature of the asylum and the relatively short length of time in which it was open, documents and records pertaining to the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians are hard to come by.

Approximately 1,000 files have been gathered and are in the process of being edited and published online. My participation is part of a Capstone project for Dakota State University’s General Beadle Honors Program. During my work with the Honoring the Dead digital archive project, I have edited, uploaded, transcribed, and gathered metadata for 6 documents. In addition to digitizing, I analyzed the documents for …

You Built It, But Can You Talk About It?, R.C. Miessler, Carrie Pirmann, Courtney Paddick

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Gettysburg College and Bucknell University have adopted library-led summer research fellowships for undergraduates that focus on teaching research skills with digital methods. In the summer of 2017, Gettysburg and Bucknell's student cohorts met to learn how to create elevator speeches for their research topics; R.C. Miessler (Gettysburg), and Carrie Pirmann and Courtney Paddick (Bucknell), talk about the structure and goals of their summer programs, with a focus on their combined session and the importance of helping students learn how to talk about their research.

Our Marathon: The Role Of Graduate Student And Library Labor In Making The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, Alicia Peaker, Jim Mcgrath

Library Staff Research and Scholarship

Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships brings forward ideas and reflections that stay fresh beyond the changing technological landscape. The book encapsulates a cultural shift for libraries and librarians and presents a collection of authors who reflect on the collaborations they have formed around digital humanities work. Authors examine a range of issues, including labor equity, digital infrastructure, digital pedagogy, and community partnerships. Readers will find kinship in the complexities of the partnerships described in this book, and become more equipped to conceptualize their own paths and partnerships.

Contemporary Proposals About Reading In The Digital Age, Matthew K. Gold, Rachel Sagner Buurma

Publications and Research

Recent ideas about reading in literary criticism have centered around a fundamental question: what are the limits and affordances of human reading? Not all of these re-visitings of reading name technology as a central figure, yet they are all to varying degrees shaped by recent cultural attention to the emerging possibilities of machine reading and the reading of digitized and born-digital texts.

History In 140 Characters: Twitter To Support Reading Comprehension And Argumentation In Digital-Humanities Pedagogy, Kalani Craig

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Click-bait headlines that tackle the modern phenomenon of social media often rail against the stultifying effects of too much Twitter. At the same time, productive educational use of Twitter in the classroom is a particularly germane area of study for digital humanists, who consider Twitter a central piece of their community-building practices. This case-study analysis addresses the use of microblogging by using activity theory to understand how social media can be harnessed to help students quickly appropriate the norms of professional historians in a discipline they often encounter as passive listeners in a large lecture course. Students reimagined Prokopios’ biography …

Entering The Digital Commons: Using Affinity Spaces To Foster Authentic Digital Writing In Online And Traditional Writing Courses, Jeffrey Bergin

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Despite the fact that the field of rhetoric and composition has been closely allied to the digital humanities for many years, instructors in these disciplines often remain on their own in terms of adopting, implementing, and evaluating digital technologies. While theoretical scholarship in digital rhetoric is advancing, instructional practices lag behind. Surveying 72 doctoral-granting rhetoric and composition programs, researchers found innovation in the implementation of new media comes primarily from solitary instructors (Anderson and McKee, 74). This article presents several ways in which writing instructors can leverage digital spaces to improve their pedagogies. In particular, the article focuses on digital …

American Studies + Computational Humanities, Lauren Tilton

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

While often commonly positioned at the intersection of computer science and digital humanities, computational humanities engages with other fields including data science, (computational) linguistics, and statistics.Such a transdisciplinary approach creates "a digital ecology of data, algorithms, metadata, analytical and visualization tools, and new forms of scholarly expression that result from this research," as Christa Williford and Charles Henry, of the Council on Library and Information Resources, write. Text analysis, particularly the method of topic modeling, has enjoyed broad exposure within computational humanities. Given the scale of the corpus, computational methods were used to identify reprinted texts in 41,829 issues.The goal …

Re-Embodying Information. [Review Of The Book Bodies Of Information: Intersectional Feminism And The Digital Humanities Edited By E. Losh And J. Wernimont], Dawn Betts-Green

STEMPS Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Digital tools are often integral to the survival of marginalized groups (p. xii), yet the structure of digital humanities is typically presented as an overwhelmingly White, heterosexual, cisgender, male endeavor. The voices and frameworks of marginalized peoples are either absent all together or not integrated into the larger work of digital humanities. When they are integrated, there is little to no attempt in most cases to make the types of connections that intersectional feminism is grounded in, thus eliminating or obscuring perspectives that could improve lives and scholarship.

Review Of Locating London's Past And London Lives 1690 To 1800: Crime, Poverty And Social Policy In The Metropolis, Shawn W. Moore

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

Review of Locating London's Past and London Lives 1690 to 1800: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis

Wwabd? Intersectional Futures In Digital History, Tonya L. Howe

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

WWABD: What would Aphra Behn—world traveler and spy, playwright and poet of scandal, innovator of novelistic forms—do, were she to imagine a future for digital humanities in period-specific scholarship? This essay outlines a vision for the DH section of Aphra Behn Online: An Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830. In particular, I see three important and interrelated places for development: theorizing the feminized labor of digital recovery, editing, and textual preparation; offering thoughtful and feminist approaches to digital pedagogy that are specific to the work we do in the period; and critically assessing the absences in existing …

Digital Scholarship, With Undergraduates, In The Library, R.C. Miessler

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Three different Pennsylvania liberal arts colleges, Lafayette, Gettysburg, and Bucknell, have adopted library-led summer internship models as part of the effort to teach students about research using digital methods. Panelists from these colleges discuss perspectives on designing, leading, and adapting such programs, and on collaborating within and between institutions.

Successes And Challenges In Growing And Sustaining An Undergraduate Digital Scholarship Program, R.C. Miessler

All Musselman Library Staff Works

In July of 2017, Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library completed the second iteration of the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship, a library-led, student-focused program that introduces students to digital scholarship tools and methodology. Librarian R.C. Miessler discusses the successes and challenges of supporting a growing digital scholarship program, with a focus on its future sustainability and a vision of its expansion into a campus-wide initiative.

Conversation As A Model To Build The Relationship Among Libraries, Digital Humanities, And Campus Leadership, Kent Gerber

Librarian Publications and Presentations

By committing to two conversation-based concepts, David Lankes's Mission for New Librarians and the “Scholarship as Conversation” Information Literacy Frame, Bethel University's Library has established a leadership role in advocating and implementing digital humanities at a midsized liberal arts institution. Aligning the services and strategy of the Bethel University Digital Library (BUDL), Bethel's institutional repository, with the lessons learned and relationships built through these conversations with administration, faculty, and staff has resulted in successful outcomes for the communication and implementation of innovative digital library and digital humanities initiatives.

Thinking Digitally, Together: Models For Digital Scholarship At Gettysburg College, Amy E. Lucadamo, R.C. Miessler, Lauren E. White

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Systems Librarian R.C. Miessler, College Archivist Amy Lucadamo, and senior Lauren White, discuss how Musselman Library has been involved in digital scholarship conversations and activities at Gettysburg, and invite discussion on how a campus-wide model for digital scholarship could emerge.

Creating Digital Knowledge: Library As Open Access Digital Publisher, D. Russell Bailey

Library Faculty and Staff papers

Since the mid-1990s, many higher education libraries have evolved from the traditional roles of primarily (1) research resource purchasers and providers and (2) research service providers into new, enhanced, and complementary digital age roles related to digital open access knowledge creation and digital publishing, creating digital resources for open education. This article presents a brief description of open access digital knowledge creation, the library publishing landscape (particularly in Digital Humanities/DH), as well as several model higher education library approaches and example initiatives in these areas. These models and initiatives are presented as broadly adaptable and scalable to many higher education …

Prototyping Mina Loy's Alphabet, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

An important branch of digital humanities involves prototyping the past. This entails approaching material forms of knowledge as sites within which epistemological and ontological problems may be evaluated as physical embodied practices. This essay discusses the interpretive and methodological implications of using 3D printing technologies to prototype the archival diagrams of a proposed but never constructed plastic segmental alphabet letter kit – a game designed by Mina Loy for F.A.O. Schwarz. Although it is intended as a toy for young children, “The Alphabet that Builds Itself,” is also a work of object typography which articulates a theory of language as …