UL should host a THATCamp.
All posts tagged digitalhumanities
Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure and Promotion: A Workshop for Evaluators and Candidates at the 2012 MLA Convention . Good to see that the title of the session is longer than the URL.
John Anderson reminded me of the power of such alternate groupings of people and foci as One Week, One Tool. Thanks, John.
If one wants the computer to produce a new type of humanities, one shouldn’t look to computing, but mathematics, for that answer. That is, a new humanities would require a mathematical theory of the humanities which then the computer could implement. Expecting the computer to be the basis for a new humanities without the humanities having a computable theory is like waiting for construction tools to cause the creation of a new building architecture. –Bob Amsler
The Humanist mailing list is currently entertaining a discussion about what a digital humanities major for undergraduates might look like. It’s an interesting discussion, although it begs the question of what the digital humanities actually are and, so far, it seems like the computer scientists and mathematicians are weighing in to say something like “You humanists need more math and computer science.” I don’t doubt that’s true, but I don’t really hear mathematicians and computer scientists saying something like “Say, you know what, this thing that’s happening in the humanities makes us realize we need a better humanities curriculum for our majors.”
C’est la vie.
Here are some of the parameters currently being discussed for a major:
- One year of discrete mathematics (or calculus). I would argue for linear algebra, given my own experiences.
- One year of a programming language. Does this include Python, Ruby, et alum?
- Knowledge of markup languages and stylesheets: XML, HTML, CSS. (Sometimes PHP is included here.)
- Some knowledge of databases. The nature of that knowledge is somewhat undefined yet. SQL? MySQL? Etc.
Desmond Schmidt of Queensland University of Technology did some data mining in the Humanist archives and compiled the following numbers for digital humanities jobs:
2002: 11
2003: 6
2004: 15
2005: 15
2006: 18
2007: 24
2008: 27 (incomplete – 1/2 year)
2009: 36
2010: 58
2011: 65 so far
Breakdown by country:
US: 133
GB: 65
CA: 35
IE: 18
DE: 13
FR: 8
IL: 3
NO: 2
NL: 2
ES: 2
AT: 1
AU: 1
BE: 1
Normalised by population:
IE: 4.0
GB: 1.051779935
CA: 1.038575668
US: 0.433224756
NO: 0.416666667
IL: 0.405405405
DE: 0.158924205
FR: 0.127795527
NL: 0.121212121
AT: 0.119047619
BE: 0.092592593
AU: 0.04587156
ES: 0.043572985
I was lucky enough to teach our university’s first digital humanities course last year. It was a graduate-level seminar, but it was still very much an introduction. I am okay with this leveling of the playing field in the early days of our own exploration of the digital humanities domain, but I am hoping we can developing a more rigorous curriculum — well, I am hoping for a curriculum first! — in the years to come. It is with thanks, then, that I cite the following instances of digital humanities courses being offered and discussed around the web:
- Brian Croxall has made his course’s development and deployment very public. The course itself has its own WordPress site. (This is hosted on Croxall’s own server. Surely Emory could support this?)
- Paul Fyfe has not only taught a digital humanities course, but he had his students respond to the question “what is digital humanities?” and then made their responses public — after checking with them first. Here’s the link.
I think it would be fun to replicate The Setup for the digital humanities. From the About page: “The Setup is a collection of nerdy interviews, asking people from all walks of life about the software and hardware they use.”
Of course, the real coolness is that Daniel Bogan shares the code that runs The Setup. (It’s Ruby.)
I am not sure what to think of the many portals to content that are springing up everywhere. First, it’s great. So much information so lovingly curated. (Well, okay, sometimes it’s a poorly pushed together pile.) On other hand, I worry about all these terrific structures resembling so many silos on a landscape: here’s some data, and here’s some data, and here’s some data, but getting a bit of data from each at the same time (in the same search) is not possible. This is a central concern of Project Bamboo, but it’s not the one getting initial attention — and yet it would make a huge difference and have, I think, immense visibility.
The Iter Gateway seems to have gotten a lot of things right. I can’t figure out what they used to build it — Drupal? It could have been Omeka.
I just finished a long post to the digital humanities seminar about free writing, which they will be doing, and the internet. I mentioned Mark Levy’s Accidental Genius, from which I will be drawing for some of our free writing techniques, and my quick search to turn up a link both to the book and to his website, turned up this wonderful article from Wired, entitled “Accidental Genius” which recounts how the law of unintended consequences has worked out for several inventions:
- Gunpowder was meant to prolong life (as a pill).
- The mechanical clock’s intended use was to regulate monastic prayer.
- Edison developed the phonograph to record telephone calls.
- Viagra was developed to help with angina.
Uh oh. It appears that digital humanism has arrived and it wasn’t in an MLA keynote, but one at CES, where Samsung’s president B. K. Yoon asked yesterday afternoon:
How can we take digital humanism a step further? How do we envision the future of our digital devices? These are the questions I struggle with on a daily basis … Digital humanism is adding emotional value to digital technology.
Later in the presentation, Yoon noted:
We are committed to Human Digitalism. We are committed to putting human life at the center of everything we do.
And the video behind him had the same sequence. Did he mean that the first time instead of “digital humanism”? Are they the same thing?
Engadget has complete coverage but my advice is to click on “sort oldest first” so you can read their coverage in chronological order. I don’t know that it will make any more sense that way.
Royal Pingdom has the results of their monitoring of five popular blogging platforms: Blogger, WordPress.com, TypePad, Posterous, Tumblr (spoler alert: listed in order of reliability). Ordinarily I would let this pass, but I am considering using a publicly available blogging platform for my digital humanities seminar. Why a public service? I want students to have something that can continue beyond their years at university: using our Moodle installation can’t do this. I am currently leaning towards WordPress.com because
- I use it and am familiar with it
- It’s open source
- A number of digital humanities projects, e.g. CUNY’s Academic Commons, are built on it — or the other open source CMS, Drupal. (CUNY’s effort should not be confused with the other Academic Commons, which is equally interesting, but I don’t know if it’s built on WordPress CMS.)
This morning’s ProfHacker, now part of the Chronicle of Higher Education, has a write-up by Konrad Lawson on his portable copy stand that lets him quickly set up his camera to photograph book pages in archives and libraries.
