Tara Thomson shares her experience attending a participant-driven ‘unconference’ for digital humanities students and scholars. The event format aims to be democratic, aligned with how the Digital Humanities has aimed to build itself on devolved authority. But disciplinary knowledge is not always equally shared. The discussions highlighted problems of access and exclusion as primary concerns for the field. Some felt excluded from the Digital Humanities as a […]
Category: Digital Humanities
Everyday webpages as scholarly source material: Interrogating the archived UK Web.
With the advances in web analysis, Adam Crymble hails the opportunity for historians to turn to the Internet as a rich source in itself. But are historians trained to take advantage of this new opportunity? Corpus linguistics, data manipulation, clustering algorithms, and distant reading will be valuable skills for dealing with this new body of historical data. The second talk […]
Book Review: The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen: Janeites at the Keyboard by Kylie Mirmohamadi
Jane Austen’s novels are constantly re-imagined on page and screen. The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen explores the fascinating realm of Austen fandom on the internet. A compelling read for anyone interested in literature in the digital world as well as Austen fans, finds Sophie Franklin. This review originally appeared on LSE Review of Books. The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen: Janeites at […]
Is Digital Humanities a collaborative discipline? Joint-authorship publication patterns clash with defining narrative
As an emerging discipline still defining itself, Digital Humanities offers an ideal opportunity to reflect on its broader disciplinary narratives. Julianne Nyhan and Oliver Duke-Williams examined its collaborative nature through the lens of publication patterns in some of its core journals. They found predominately single-authored papers were published during the time-frames, suggesting individual scholarship is still playing a large role. But this may be a case where publication […]
Technology in our daily lives: How to implement digital humanities projects in the classroom.
As students and staff return for the new academic year, the classroom will again occupy centre stage. Instructors may even be thinking about incorporating new digital technology and projects into their curricula. Adeline Koh gives a brief overview of an assortment of digital humanities projects that can be easily implemented in primarily undergraduate-focused institutions. Without knowing it, you’re probably already using […]
Notes from the Digital Humanities Summer School, University of Oxford (DHOxSS), 14-18 July 2014
Here at the DCC, we regularly engage with researchers, research support staff and other professions dealing with research data. With researchers, we discuss, advise and help them to understand the requirements, benefits and methods of digital cur…
Twitter and blogs are not add-ons to academic research, but a simple reflection of the passion that underpins it.
The role of the academic humanist has always been a public one – however mediated through teaching and publication, argues Tim Hitchcock. As central means to participate in public conversations, Twitter and blogging just make good academic sense. Hitchcock looks at how these new platforms are facilitating academic collaboration, teaching and public engagement. What starts as a blog, ends as an academic output, […]
Turing Testing and the Game of Life: Cognitive science is about designing lifelong performance capacity not short-term fooling.
The Turing Test has captured the imagination of the general public due to fundamental questions about the nature of the mind. But Stevan Harnad argues the hype over the supposed passing of the Turing Test is misplaced. Alan Turing’s idea for cognitive science was simple: Stop worrying about what the mind “is” and explain instead what the mind does. But we are […]
Digital humanities platforms set to challenge technical barriers to digital research skills development.
Digital humanists are becoming increasingly aware of the potential for much wider impact through ‘crowdscribing’ and other innovative approaches to digital research. Emma Goodwin provides further information on a new initiative DHCrowdscribe that allows early career researchers to gain from resources and expertise to support technical project development. This approach will also foster wider collaboration between the humanities and other more […]
“Re-purposing” data in the Digital Humanities: Data beg to be taken from one context and transferred to another.
While scientists may be well-versed in drawing on existing data sources for new research, humanists are not conditioned to chop up another scholar’s argument, isolate a detail and put it into an unrelated argument. Seth Long critically examines the practice of re-purposing data and finds data in the digital humanities beg to be re-purposed, taken from one context and transferred […]