The term “digital humanities” can refer to research and instruction that is about information technology or that uses IT. By applying technologies in new ways, the tools and methodologies of digital humanities open new avenues of inquiry and scholarly production. Digital humanities applies computational capabilities to humanistic questions, offering new pathways for scholars to conduct research and to create and publish scholarship. Digital humanities provides promising new channels for learners and will continue to influence the ways in which we think about and evolve technology toward better and more humanistic ends.
As defined by Johanna Drucker and colleagues at UCLA, the digital humanities is “work at the intersection of digital technology and humanities disciplines.” An EDUCAUSE/CNI working group framed the digital humanities as “the application and/or development of digital tools and resources to enable researchers to address questions and perform new types of analyses in the humanities disciplines,” and the NEH Office of Digital Humanities says digital humanities “explore how to harness new technology for thumanities research as well as those that study digital culture from a humanistic perspective.” Beyond blending the digital with the humanities, there is an intentionality about combining the two that defines it.
digital humanities can include
creating digital texts or data sets;
cleaning, organizing, and tagging those data sets;
applying computer-based methodologies to analyze them;
and making claims and creating visualizations that explain new findings from those analyses.
Scholars might reflect on
how the digital form of the data is organized,
how analysis is conducted/reproduced, and
how claims visualized in digital form may embody assumptions or biases.
Digital humanities can enrich pedagogy as well, such as when a student uses visualized data to study voter patterns or conducts data-driven analyses of works of literature.
Digital humanities usually involves work by teams in collaborative spaces or centers. Team members might include
researchers and faculty from multiple disciplines,
graduate students,
librarians,
instructional technologists,
data scientists and preservation experts,
technologists with expertise in critical computing and computing methods, and undergraduates
some disciplinary associations, including the Modern Language Association and the American HistoricalAssociation, have developed guidelines for evaluating digital proj- ects, many institutions have yet to define how work in digital humanities fits into considerations for tenure and promotion
Because large projects are often developed with external funding that is not readily replaced by institutional funds when the grant ends sustainability is a concern. Doing digital humanities well requires access to expertise in methodologies and tools such as GIS, mod- eling, programming, and data visualization that can be expensive for a single institution to obtain
Resistance to learning new tech- nologies can be another roadblock, as can the propensity of many humanists to resist working in teams. While some institutions have recognized the need for institutional infrastructure (computation and storage, equipment, software, and expertise), many have not yet incorporated such support into ongoing budgets.
Opportunities for undergraduate involvement in research, provid ing students with workplace skills such as data management, visualization, coding, and modeling. Digital humanities provides new insights into policy-making in areas such as social media, demo- graphics, and new means of engaging with popular culture and understanding past cultures. Evolution in this area will continue to build connections between the humanities and other disci- plines, cross-pollinating research and education in areas like med- icine and environmental studies. Insights about digital humanities itself will drive innovation in pedagogy and expand our conceptualization of classrooms and labs
Digital humanities (DH) has been heralded as the next big thing in humanities scholarship and universities have been creating initiatives and new positions in this field. Libraries, too, have moved to create a presence in the digital humanities community, setting up centers and hiring librarians to staff them. This course is designed as an introduction for librarians or library school students who have little or no exposure to DH and wish to be better positioned to offer DH support or services in a library setting. Participants will read and discuss DH scholarship, learn about frequently-used software, and think about why and how libraries and librarians engage DH. While I will encourage participants to explore more complex computing approaches (and I will support those who do as best I can), this course does not presuppose computing skills such as programming or use of the command line and will not ask participants to do much more than upload files to websites or install and use simple programs. Participants should have an interest and background in humanities scholarship and humanities librarianship and while the readings will focus on activities in the United States, our discussions can be more geographically wide-ranging.
Objectives:
– A basic knowledge of what digital humanities is and how it effects scholarship in the humanities disciplines.
– Exposure to core tools and approaches used by digital humanists.
– An understanding of how libraries and librarians have been involved with digital humanities.
– Critical engagement with the role of librarians and libraries in digital humanities.
This class has a follow-up, Introduction to Text Encoding
John Russell is the Associate Director of the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania State University. He has been actively involved in digital humanities projects, primarily related to text encoding, and has taught courses and workshops on digital humanities methods, including “Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians.”
Read an interview with John Russell about this class:
The American Philosophical Society (APS) Library in Philadelphia seeks applicants for its new Digital Humanities Fellowship.
This fellowship, for up to two (2) months, is open to scholars who are comfortable creating tools and visualizations, as well as those interested in working collaboratively with the APS technology team.
Librarians, scholars, and graduate students (MLIS or other) at any stage of their career may apply. Special consideration will be given to proposals that present APS Library holdings in new and engaging ways. Examples include (but are not limited to) projects that incorporate timelines, text analytics, network graphs, and maps.
Stipend: $3,000 per month will be awarded to the successful applicant after their arrival at the Library.
All Applicants must submit:
Cover letter
Curriculum vitae
Prospectus for a digital project
Examples of previous digital humanities projects (if available)
Contact information for two people who will submit confidential letters of reference
Full details are available on the application webpage:
Call for Papers The Journal of Emerging Learning Design special issue: The Digital Humanities
Submissions due date
On/before November 14, 2016.
Editors Jerry Alan Fails (Boise State University) and AJ Kelton (Montclair State University)
Introduction The Journal of Emerging Learning Design is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for its first Special Issue: The Digital Humanities.
With roots reaching back as far as 1940, the term Digital Humanities came into wide usage in late 2012 and has slowly risen in popularity since then. A Google Scholar search for “digital humanities” yields just under 30 results during the year 2000 and over 4,700 during 2015. The increase in the number of published articles in 15 years is second only to the diversity of the research that is included.
About the ELDj
The Journal of Emerging Learning Design (ELDj) is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal that provides a platform for academics and practitioners to explore emerging learning design theories, concepts, and issues and their implications at national and international levels.
An outgrowth of the annual Emerging Learning Design Conference, which makes its home at Montclair State University (MSU), the ELDj invites scholarly communication in the emerging learning design field and will present best practices in design and implementation by offering articles that present, propose, or review engaging and dynamic approaches to pedagogy and how technology can better enhance it.
The ELDj has purposefully kept the focus of the theme for this special issue broad. The intent is to continue to break down traditional academic silos and allow for an open dialogue and sharing with respect to what is considered the Digital Humanities. ELDj is intentionally taking a broad consideration for what is included in the digital humanities with the clear understanding that this issue, and the articles within, will contribute to this growing field and provide a groundwork for further reflection and research.
Timeline
Deadline for Submission: November 14, 2016
Notification of Acceptance: March 1st, 2017
Final Revised Submission: April 21, 2017
Publication: June 2, 2017
Publication and Presentation
The issue will be published prior to, and featured at, the 7th Annual Emerging Learning Design Conference (ELDc17) on June 2nd, 2017.
Based on when a submission is accepted, authors may be offered the opportunity to present their research at the 7th Annual Emerging Learning Design Conference in June, 2017. Presentations must be given in an appropriate presentation format for the conference: panel (full conference audience), workshop (120 minutes), concurrent (45 minutes), or Sparks! (5 minutes to full conference audience).
Submission Details
Manuscripts should be the appropriate length for the material being presented.
Full paper manuscripts can vary from 2500-4500 words in addition to an abstract of 250 words and a works cited section of appropriate length.
Briefs or Trends papers have a limit of 1000 words.
A description of each type of submission and guidelines can be found at http://eldj.montclair.edu/submission-guidelines/ELDj uses a double-blind, peer-review process. Submissions should not have been published previously or be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Authors should review the above linked guidelines for important and relevant information.
Submissions should be sent to eldj@mail.montclair.edu: questions and information requests may be sent to the Editors at the same address.
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more on digital humanities and publications for digital humanities in this IMS blog
The deadline for proposals has been extended to September 9th, 2016. Thank you.
THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES: IMPLICATIONS FOR LIBRARIANS, LIBRARIES, AND LIBRARIANSHIP
The redefinition of humanities scholarship has received major attention in higher education over the past few years. The advent of digital humanities has challenged many aspects of academic librarianship. With the acknowledgement that librarians must be a necessary part of this scholarly conversation, the challenges facing subject/liaison librarians, technical service librarians, and library administrators are many. Developing the knowledge base of digital tools, establishing best procedures and practices, understanding humanities scholarship, managing data through the research lifecycle, teaching literacies (information, data, visual) beyond the one-shot class, renegotiating the traditional librarian/faculty relationship as ‘service orientated,’ and the willingness of library and institutional administrators to allocate scarce resources to digital humanities projects while balancing the mission and priorities of their institutions are just some of the issues facing librarians as they reinvent themselves in the digital humanities sphere.
College & Undergraduate Libraries, a peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor & Francis, invites proposals for articles to be published in the fall of 2017. The issue will be co-edited by Kevin Gunn (gunn@cua.edu) of the Catholic University of America and Jason Paul (pauljn@stolaf.edu) of St. Olaf College.
The issue will deal with the digital humanities in a very broad sense, with a major focus on their implications for the roles of academic librarians and libraries as well as on librarianship in general. Possible article topics include, but are not limited to, the following themes, issues, challenges, and criticism:
Developing the project development mindset in librarians
Creating new positions and/or cross-training issues for librarians
Librarian as: point-of-service agent, an ongoing consultant, or as an embedded project librarian
Developing managerial and technological competencies in librarians
Administration support (or not) for DH endeavors in libraries
Teaching DH with faculty to students (undergraduate and graduate) and faculty
Helping students working with data
Managing the DH products of the data life cycle
Issues surrounding humanities data collection development and management
Relationships of data curation and digital libraries in DH
Issues in curation, preservation, sustainability, and access of DH data, projects, and products
Linked data, open access, and libraries
Librarian and staff development for non-traditional roles
Teaching DH in academic libraries
Project collaboration efforts with undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty
Data literacy for librarians
The lack of diversity of librarians and how it impacts DH development
Advocating and supporting DH across the institution
Developing institutional repositories for DH
Creating DH scholarship from the birth of digital objects
Consortial collaborations on DH projects
Establishing best practices for DH labs, networks, and services
Assessing, evaluating, and peer reviewing DH projects and librarians.
Articles may be theoretical or ideological discussions, case studies, best practices, research studies, and opinion pieces or position papers.
Proposals should consist of an abstract of up to 500 words and up to six keywords describing the article, together with complete author contact information. Articles should be in the range of 20 double-spaced pages in length. Please consult the following link that contains instructions for authors: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=wcul20&page=instructions#.V0DJWE0UUdU.
Please submit proposals to Kevin Gunn (gunn@cua.edu) by September 9th, 2016; please do not use Scholar One for submitting proposals. First drafts of accepted proposals will be due by February 1, 2017 with the issue being published in the fall of 2017. Feel free to contact the editors with any questions that you may have.
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more on digital humanities in this IMS blog:
***”Culture & Technology” – European Summer University in Digital
Humanities (ESU DH C & T) 19th to 29th of July, University of Leipzig* http://www.culingtec.uni-leipzig.de/ESU_C_T/
The Summer University takes place across 11 whole days. The intensive
programme consists of workshops, public lectures, regular project
presentations, a poster session, and a panel discussion.
The *workshop programme* is composed of the following thematic strands:
– XML-TEI encoding, structuring and rendering
– Compilation, Annotation und Analysis of Written Text Corpora. Introduction to Methods and Tools
– Comparing Corpora
– Digital Editions and Editorial Theory: Historical Texts and Documents
– Searching Linguistic Patterns in Large Text Corpora for Digital Humanities Research
– Lexicometric text analysis using CLARIN-D Webservices and R
– Stylometry
– Spoken Language and Multimodal Corpora
– Digital Lexica, Terminological Databases and Encyclopaedias: Contents, Structures and Formats
– Exploring art and technology within contemporary network culture. A close look at net art, digital art curation and its impact on the culture heritage sector
– From Text to Map. Modeling Historical Humanities Data in Mapping
Environments
– Project Management
– Data management for the humanities: from data warehousing to legal and ethical implication
– Digital Research Infrastructures in the Humanities: How to Use, Build and Maintain Them
Workshops are normally structured in such a way that participants can either take the two blocks of one workshop or two blocks from different workshops. The number of participants in each workshop is limited to 10. For more information see: http://www.culingtec.uni-leipzig.de/ESU_C_T/node/621
The Summer University is directed at 60 participants from all over Europe and beyond. It wants to bring together (doctoral) students, young scholars and academics from the Arts and Humanities, Library Sciences, Social Sciences, Engineering and Computer Sciences as equal partners to an interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge and experience in a multilingual and multicultural context and thus create the conditions for future project-based cooperations and network-building across the borders of disciplines, countries, languages and cultures.
The Summer University seeks to offer a space for the discussion and acquisition of new knowledge, skills and competences in those computer technologies which play a central role in Humanities Computing and which determine every day more and more the work done in the Humanities and Cultural Sciences, as well as in publishing, libraries, and archives, to name only some of the most important areas. The Summer University aims at integrating these activities into the broader context of the Digital Humanities, which pose questions about the consequences and implications of the application of computational methods and tools to cultural artefacts of all kinds.
In all this the Summer University aims at confronting the so-called Gender Divide , i.e. the under-representation of women in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Germany and Europe. But, instead of strengthening the hard sciences as such by following the way taken by so many measures which focus on the so-called STEM disciplines and try to convince women of the attractiveness and importance of Computer Science or Engineering, the Summer University relies on the challenges that the Humanities with their complex data and their wealth of women represent for Computer Science and Engineering and
the further development of the latter, on the overcoming of the boarders between the so-called hard and soft sciences and on the integration of Humanities, Computer Science and Engineering.
As the Summer University is dedicated not only to the acquisition of knowledge and skills, but wants also to foster community building and networking across disciplines, languages and cultures, countries and continents, the programme of the Summer School features also communal coffee breaks, communal lunches in the refectory of the university, and a rich cultural programme (thematic guided tours, visits of archives, museums and exhibitions, and communal dinners in different parts of Leipzig).
For all relevant information please consult the Web-Portal of the European Summer School in Digital Humanities “Culture & Technology”: http://www.culingtec.uni-leipzig.de/ESU_C_T/ which will be continually updated and integrated with more information as soon as it becomes available.
For questions about the European Summer University please use esu_ct@uni-leipzig.de
With best regards, Elisabeth Burr
Humanities need convincing data to demonstrate their value, says expert
Humanities scholars have always been good at conveying the importance of their work through stories, writes Paula Krebs for Inside Higher Ed, but they have been less successful at using data to do so. This need not be the case, adds Krebs, who recounts a meeting with faculty members, local employers, and public humanities representatives to discuss how to better measure the impact of a humanities education on graduates. Krebs offers a list of recommendations and concrete program changes, such as interviewing employers about their experiences with hiring graduates, that might help humanities programs better prepare students for postgraduate life.
a list of the skills that we think graduates have cultivated in their humanities education:
Critical thinking
Communications skills
Writing skills, with style
Organizational skills
Listening skills
Flexibility
Creativity
Cultural competencies, intercultural sensitivity and an understanding of cultural and historical context, including on global topics
Empathy/emotional intelligence
Qualitative analysis
People skills
Ethical reasoning
Intellectual curiosity
As part of our list, we also agreed that graduates should have the ability to:
Meet deadlines
Construct complex arguments
Provide attention to detail and nuance (close reading)
Ask the big questions about meaning, purpose, the human condition
Communicate in more than one language
Understand differences in genre (mode of communication)
Identify and communicate appropriate to each audience
Be comfortable dealing with gray areas
Think abstractly beyond an immediate case
Appreciate differences and conflicting perspectives
Identify problems as well as solving them
Read between the lines
Receive and respond to feedback
Then we asked what we think our graduates should be able to do but perhaps can’t — or not as a result of anything we’ve taught them, anyway. The employers were especially valuable here, highlighting the ability to:
Use new media, technologies and social media
Work with the aesthetics of communication, such as design
Perform a visual presentation and analysis
Identify, translate and apply skills from course work
Perform data analysis and quantitative research
Be comfortable with numbers
Work well in groups, as leader and as collaborator
Take risks
Identify processes and structures
Write and speak from a variety of rhetorical positions or voices
Support an argument
Identify an audience, research it and know how to address it
Know how to locate one’s own values in relation to a task one has been asked to perform
Digital humanities (DH) has been heralded as the next big thing in humanities scholarship and universities have been creating initiatives and new positions in this field. Libraries, too, have moved to create a presence in the digital humanities community, setting up centers and hiring librarians to staff them. This course is designed as an introduction for librarians or library school students who have little or no exposure to DH and wish to be better positioned to offer DH support or services in a library setting. Participants will read and discuss DH scholarship, learn about frequently-used software, and think about why and how libraries and librarians engage DH. While I will encourage participants to explore more complex computing approaches (and I will support those who do as best I can), this course does not presuppose computing skills such as programming or use of the command line and will not ask participants to do much more than upload files to websites or install and use simple programs. Participants should have an interest and background in humanities scholarship and humanities librarianship and while the readings will focus on activities in the United States, our discussions can be more geographically wide-ranging.
Objectives:
– A basic knowledge of what digital humanities is and how it effects scholarship in the humanities disciplines.
– Exposure to core tools and approaches used by digital humanists.
– An understanding of how libraries and librarians have been involved with digital humanities.
– Critical engagement with the role of librarians and libraries in digital humanities.
This class has a follow-up, Introduction to Text Encoding
John Russell is the Associate Director of the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania State University. He has been actively involved in digital humanities projects, primarily related to text encoding, and has taught courses and workshops on digital humanities methods, including “Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians.”
Read an interview with John Russell about this class:
You can register in this course through the first week of instruction (as long as it is not full). The “Register” button on the website goes to our credit card payment gateway, which may be used with personal or institutional credit cards. (Be sure to use the appropriate billing address). If your institution wants us to send a billing statement or wants to pay using a purchase order, please contact us by email to make arrangements: inquiries@libraryjuiceacademy.com
This course will introduce students to text encoding according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. Why should you care about text encoding or the TEI Guidelines? The creation of digital scholarly texts is a core part of the digital humanities and many digital humanities grants and publications require encoding texts in accordance with the TEI Guidelines. Students in this course will learn about the use-cases for text encoding and get a basic introduction to the principles of scholarly editing before moving on to learning some XML basics and creating a small-scale TEI project using the XML editor oXygen. We will not cover (beyond the very basics) processing TEI, and students interested in learning about XSLT and/or XQuery should turn to the LJA courses offered on those subjects. Participants should have some experience with digital humanities, as this course is intended as a follow up to the Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians course.
Objectives:
A basic understanding of digital scholarly editing as an academic activity.
Knowledge of standard TEI elements for encoding poetry and prose.
Some engagement with more complex encoding practices, such as working with manuscripts.
An understanding of how librarians have participated in text encoding.
Deeper engagement with digital humanities practices.
John Russell is the Associate Director of the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania State University. He has been actively involved in digital humanities projects, primarily related to text encoding, and has taught courses and workshops on digital humanities methods, including “Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians.” Interview with John Russell
Course Structure
This is an online class that is taught asynchronously, meaning that participants do the work on their own time as their schedules allow. The class does not meet together at any particular times, although the instructor may set up optional synchronous chat sessions. Instruction includes readings and assignments in one-week segments. Class participation is in an online forum environment.
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Spatial Data Analyst & Curator
University Libraries / U-Spatial
University of Minnesota
Overview
The University of Minnesota Libraries and U-Spatial (https://uspatial.umn.edu/) seek a knowledgeable and proactive Spatial Data Analyst & Curator to advance the Libraries’ efforts in the areas of geospatial projects, geospatial data curation and management, and digital spatial humanities. Residing in the John R. Borchert Map Library, the Spatial Data Analyst & Curator works under the management and direction of the University Libraries, which holds institutional responsibility for supporting the products and processes of scholarship through the collection, provisioning, and preservation of information resources in all formats and media. As such, the work of the Spatial Data Analyst & Curator uses a life-cycle data management approach to serve the specific needs of the spatial data creator/user community while ensuring that processes and methods employed are strongly aligned with enterprise strategies and systems.
Required Qualifications include a Master’s degree in library/information science from an American Library Association accredited library school, GIS-related field, or equivalent combination of advanced degree and relevant experience, as well as experience with geographical information systems, including/especially Esri’s ArcGIS software, experience with scripting languages, such as Python or JavaScript, and experience with metadata creation, schema, and management.
the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. five concepts: web design; digital exhibits; GIS geographical information systems; text mining; text encoding