Name – Janvi Nakum
Paper- 204 Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies
Roll no- 11
Enrollment no –4069206420210020
Email id – janvinakum360@gmail.com
Batch- 2021-2023(M.A. Sem – 3)
Topic : Digital Humanity
Submitted to – S.B. Gardi Department of English Maharaja Krishnkumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
What is DH?
"the unit will advance scholarship in both classical studies and the digital humanities"
Ever since someone came up with the idea of calling it Digital Humanities (which I dislike), various attempts have been made to tell people what this/these “Digital Humanities” actually mean/s. My own explanation goes along these lines:
1.DH is a research paradigm that encompasses all kind of research in the Humanities that gains (normally partly) its findings from applying computer-based procedures, practices, and tools. I am usually refering to Manfred Thaller who expressed this more elaborately. What is important to me, however, is the fact that DH in this understanding is pure Humanities scholarship as its objects and questions are those from the Humanities. I have always been thinking that any researcher should naturally look out for the very best methods and tools to conduct their research, i.e. those that serves best to find the answers he or she is looking for.
2.DH also encompasses the design, development, and generalization of these computer-based procedures, practices, and tools as well as the study of their underlying theories and models. In this understanding, Digital Humanities is rather an auxiliary science (Hilfswissenschaft) located at the intersection between Humanities and Computer Science. Since its epistemological interest is particularly grounded in the functional question of this intersection, DH possesses, hence, its own objects and questions to study
What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?
MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM
People who say that the last battles of the computer revolution in English departments have been fought and won don’t know what they’re talking about. If our current use of computers in English studies is marked by any common theme at all, it is experimentation at the most basic level. As a profession, we are just learning how to live with computers, just beginning to integrate these machines effectively into writing- and reading-intensive courses, just starting to consider the implications of the multilayered literacy associated with computers.
—Cynthia Selfe, “Computers in English Departments: The Rhetoric of Technopower”
What is (or are) the “digital humanities” (DH), also known as “humanities computing”? It’s tempting to say that whoever asks the question has not gone looking very hard for an answer. “What is digital humanities?” essays like this one are already genre pieces. Willard McCarty has been contributing papers on the subject for years (a monograph, too). Under the earlier appellation, John Unsworth has advised us on “What Is Humanities Computing and What Is Not.” Most recently Patrik Svensson has been publishing a series of well-documented articles on multiple aspects of the topic, including the lexical shift from humanities computing to digital humanities. Moreover, as Cynthia Selfe in an ADE Bulletin from 1988 reminds us, computers have been part of our disciplinary lives for well over two decades now. During this time digital humanities has accumulated a robust professional apparatus that is probably more rooted in English than any other departmental home.
The contours of this professional apparatus are easily discoverable. An organization called the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations hosts a well-attended annual international conference called Digital Humanities. (It grew out of an earlier annual series of conferences, hosted jointly by the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing since 1989.) There is Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities. There is a book series (yes, a book series), Topics in the Digital Humanities, from the University of Illinois Press. There is a refereed journal called Digital Humanities Quarterly, one of several that serve the field, including a newer publication, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, sponsored by the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities (Société pour l’Étude des Médias Interactifs). The University of Victoria hosts the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute to train new scholars. Crucially, there are digital humanities centers and institutes (probably at least one hundred worldwide, some of them established for a decade or more with staffs numbering in the dozens); these are served by an organization known as center Net. There have been digital humanities manifestos (I know of at least two) and FAQs, colloquia and symposia, and workshops and special sessions. Not to mention, of course, that a gloss or explanation of digital humanities is implicit in every mission statement, every call for papers and proposals, every strategic plan and curriculum development document, every hiring request, and so forth that invokes the term. Or the countless times the question has been visited on electronic discussion lists, blogs, Facebook walls, and Twitter feeds, contributing all the flames and exhortations, celebrations, and screeds one could wish to read.
We could also, of course, simply Google the question. Google takes us to Wikipedia, and what we find there is not bad:
The digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, is a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. It is methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope. It involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of information in electronic form. It studies how these media affect the disciplines in which they are used, and what these disciplines have to contribute to our knowledge of computing.
As a working definition this serves as well as any I’ve seen, which is not surprising since a glance at the page’s view history tab reveals individuals closely associated with the digital humanities as contributors. At its core, then, digital humanities is more akin to a common methodological outlook than an investment in any one specific set of texts or even technologies. We could attempt to refine this outlook quantitatively, using some of the very tools and techniques digital humanities has pioneered. For example, we might use a text analysis tool named Voyeur developed by Stéfan Sinclair to mine the proceedings from the annual Digital Humanities conference and develop lists of topic frequencies or collocate key terms or visualize the papers’ citation networks. We could also choose to explore the question qualitatively by examining sets of projects from self-identified digital humanities centers. At the University of Maryland, where I serve as an associate director at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, we support work from “Shakespeare to Second Life,” as we’re fond of saying: the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, funded by a joint grant program administered by the United Kingdom’s Joint Information Systems Committee and the National Endowment for the Humanities, makes a searchable digital facsimile of each of the thirty-two extant quarto copies of Hamlet available online, while Preserving Virtual Worlds, a project supported by the Library of Congress, has developed and tested standards and best practices for archiving and ensuring future access to computer games, interactive fiction, and virtual communities.
Yet digital humanities is also a social undertaking. It harbors networks of people who have been working together, sharing research, arguing, competing, and collaborating for many years. Key achievements from this community, like the Text Encoding Initiative or the Orlando Project, were mostly finished before the current wave of interest in digital humanities began. Nonetheless, the rapid and remarkable rise of digital humanities as a term can be traced to a set of surprisingly specific circumstances. Unsworth, who was the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia for a decade and is currently dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, has this to relate:
The real origin of that term [digital humanities] was in conversation with Andrew McNeillie, the original acquiring editor for the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities. We started talking with him about that book project in 2001, in April, and by the end of November we’d lined up contributors and were discussing the title, for the contract. Ray [Siemens] wanted “A Companion to Humanities Computing” as that was the term commonly used at that point; the editorial and marketing folks at Blackwell wanted “Companion to Digitized Humanities.” I suggested “Companion to Digital Humanities” to shift the emphasis away from simple digitization.
Seven reasons why we need an independent Digital Humanities
(1) the assumption that new research will look like research that we would like to do ourselves
(2) the assumption that we should be able to exploit the results of new methods without having to learn much and without rethinking the skills that at least some senior members of our field must have
(3) we focus on the perceived quality of Digital Humanities work rather than the larger forces and processes now in play (which would only demand more and better Digital Humanities work if we do not like what we see)
(4) we assume that we have already adapted new digital methods to existing departmental and disciplinary structures and assume that the rate of change over the next thirty years will be similar to, or even slower than, that we experienced in the past thirty years, rather than recognizing that the next step will be for us to adapt ourselves to exploit the digital space of which we are a part
(5) we may support interdisciplinarity but the Digital Humanities provides a dynamic and critically needed space of encounter between not only established humanistic fields but between the humanities and a new range of fields including, but not limited to, the computer and information sciences (and thus I use the Digital Humanities as a plural noun, rather than a collective singular)
(6) we lack the cultures of collaboration and of openness that are increasingly essential for the work of the humanities and that the Digital Humanities have proven much better at fostering
(7) we assert all too often that a handful of specialists alone define what is and is not important rather than understanding that our fields depends upon support from society as a whole and that academic communities operate in a Darwinian space.
Example:
●Auto generated e-certificate
● E-portfolio
● Clic activity
● Clic Dickens project
● Cloud image of words
● Kahoot (quiz and it's answers and getting scores)
● performance charts (Classroom, presentation)
● Data analysis
● Searching tools
Works Cited
““Chapter 1: What Is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments? | Matthew Kirschenbaum” in “Debates in the Digital Humanities” on Debates in the DH Manifold.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/f5640d43-b8eb-4d49-bc4b-eb31a16f3d06. Accessed 6 November 2022.
Crane, Gregory. “Seven reasons why we need an independent Digital Humanities.” Tufts Self-Serve Blogs and Websites., 28 April 2015, https://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/2015/04/28/seven-reasons-why-we-need-an-independent-digital-humanities/. Accessed 6 November 2022.
Rehbein, Malte. “What is DH?” Denkstätte, 29 November 2017, https://denkstaette.hypotheses.org/61. Accessed 6 November 2022.
Words: 1796
No comments:
Post a Comment