Scaffolding a Collaborative Humanities Classroom Online: Pedagogical Tools and Techniques

With basic digital tools and adaptations of time-tested assignments to the digital landscape, faculty in the humanities can successfully create lively, discussion-based humanities classes online. The author, who has been teaching early college humanities classes for nearly 30 years, shares specific tools, assignments, and pedagogical approaches tested with Bard/OSUN online courses that enhance student engagement and productive collaborative learning

Supporting Research in Area Studies: a guide for academic libraries

The study of other countries or regions of the world often crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries in the humanities and social sciences. Supporting Research in Area Studies is a comprehensive guide for academic libraries supporting these communities of researchers. This book explores the specialist requirements of these researchers in information resources, resource discovery tools, and information skills, and the challenges of working with materials in multiple languages. It makes the case that by adapting their systems and procedures to meet these needs, academic libraries find themselves better placed to support their institution's�� international agenda more widely. The first four chapters cover the academic landscape and its history, area studies librarianship and acquisitions. Subsequent chapters discuss collections management, digital products, and the digital humanities, and their role in academic projects. The final chapter explores information skills and the various disciplinary skills that facilitate the needs of researchers during their careers

The Emergence of the Digital Humanities: An Epistemological Cartography of Thematic Issues in French Academic Journals

The growing importance of the computational turn deeply affected the landscape of the social sciences and humanities. One of the most profound transformations caused by the development of digital technologies is the changes of the practice conditions and the production of knowledge. In recent years, French academics working in the humanities and social sciences have been devoting attention to the practices of "Digital Humanities", a new territory that fosters collaboration, openness, and enhancement of knowledge. The scope of this work is bounded to ten special thematic issues in nine French academic journals. The aim is to map main themes and emerging practices, in terms of research, knowledge production and dissemination, and also the modalities that allow Digital Humanities to develop new social and editorial assignments. The corpus is composed of seventy-three articles in nine academic journals, dedicated to various and differentiated topics of "Digital Humanities"

Sustaining the Digital Humanities in the UK

The Sustaining Digital Humanities in the UK report is timely for the UK Digital Humanities (DH) landscape. The establishment of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has created an opportune moment for the strategic planning of research infrastructure between and across all the research areas. Led by Giles Bergel and Pip Willcox, this report is based on the findings of a workshop held at the University of Oxford’s e-Research Centre (OeRC) on 21 June 2018 and sponsored by the Software Sustainability Institute. The workshop was led by an advisory board of Digital Humanities practitioners, representing a range of career stages, roles, and disciplines. The workshop’s organisers and advisory board are the joint authors of this report, with contributions from workshop participants. The mission of the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) is to cultivate better, more sustainable, research software to enable world-class research. Currently celebrating its 10th year, the SSI has achieved broadening engagement across academic communities including humanities – for example as a longstanding supporter of the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (DHOxSS), and with SSI Fellows in the arts and humanities areas. This report was commissioned by the SSI with the aim of advancing its mission within the humanities. Digital Humanities, a broad intersection of models, methods, tools, materials, career paths and affiliations, in both established and novel disciplines was identified as the area within the humanities that most closely aligns with the SSI’s role

Voices from the South

This volume captures the status of digital humanities within the Arts in South Africa. The primary research methodology falls within the broader tradition of phenomenological hermeneutics, with a specific emphasis on visual hermeneutics. Some of the tools utilised as part of the visual hermeneutic methods are geographic information system (GIS) mapping, sensory ethnography and narrative pathways. Digital humanities is positioned here as the necessary engagement of the humanities with the pervasive digital culture of the 21st century. It is posited that the humanities and arts, in particular, have an essential role to play in unlocking meaning from scientific, technological and data-driven research. The critical engagement with digital humanities is foregrounded throughout the volume, as this crucial engagement works through images. Images (as understood within image studies) are not merely another form of text but always more than text. As such, this book is the first of its kind in the South African scholarly landscape, and notably also a first on the African continent. Its targeted audience include both scholars within the humanities, particularly in the arts and social sciences. Researchers pursuing the new field of digital humanities may also find the ideas presented in this book significant. Several of the chapters analyse the question of dealing with digital humanities through representations of the self as viewed from the Global South. However, it should be noted that self-representation is not the only area covered in this volume. The latter chapters of the book discuss innovative ways of implementing digital humanities strategies and methodologies for teaching and researching in South Africa

Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Host Institution Support Beyond the Start Up Phase

This project builds on the Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability, which helped to surface the significance of the host institution as a key element in the survival of digital humanities projects. To unwrap the layers of assumptions concerning the sort of support a host institution is expected or hoped to be providing, this research will be based on a sector-wide scan to map key points in a project’s lifecycle when the host institution is likely to play a role and "deep dives" at two institutions to develop an in-depth picture of the range of digital humanities projects on these campuses. By examining the institutional support ecosystem and the value system that undergirds it, we will provide both project leaders and university decision-makers the data, examples, and guidance they need, including a toolkit to conduct their own research, to work together to encourage the long-term sustainability of the digital humanities resources that continue to enrich the scholarly landscape

Digital 3D Technologies for Humanities Research and Education: An Overview

Digital 3D modelling and visualization technologies have been widely applied to support research in the humanities since the 1980s. Since technological backgrounds, project opportunities, and methodological considerations for application are widely discussed in the literature, one of the next tasks is to validate these techniques within a wider scientific community and establish them in the culture of academic disciplines. This article resulted from a postdoctoral thesis and is intended to provide a comprehensive overview on the use of digital 3D technologies in the humanities with regards to (1) scenarios, user communities, and epistemic challenges; (2) technologies, UX design, and workflows; and (3) framework conditions as legislation, infrastructures, and teaching programs. Although the results are of relevance for 3D modelling in all humanities disciplines, the focus of our studies is on modelling of past architectural and cultural landscape objects via interpretative 3D reconstruction methods

Digital humanities—A discipline in its own right? An analysis of the role and position of digital humanities in the academic landscape

Although digital humanities (DH) has received a lot of attention in recent years, its status as “a discipline in its own right” (Schreibman et al., A companion to digital humanities (pp. xxiii–xxvii). Blackwell; 2004) and its position in the overall academic landscape are still being negotiated. While there are countless essays and opinion pieces that debate the status of DH, little research has been dedicated to exploring the field in a systematic and empirical way (Poole, Journal of Documentation; 2017:73). This study aims to contribute to the existing research gap by comparing articles published over the past three decades in three established English-language DH journals (Computers and the Humanities, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Digital Humanities Quarterly) with research articles from journals in 15 other academic disciplines (corpus size: 34,041 articles; 299 million tokens). As a method of analysis, we use latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling, combined with recent approaches that aggregate topic models by means of hierarchical agglomerative clustering. Our findings indicate that DH is simultaneously a discipline in its own right and a highly interdisciplinary field, with many connecting factors to neighboring disciplines—first and foremost, computational linguistics, and information science. Detailed descriptive analyses shed some light on the diachronic development of DH and also highlight topics that are characteristic for DH

Challenges for the creation of digital resources in the humanities

The production and use of digital resources is an increasingly important subject within the humanities. Currently significant amounts of resources are invested into digitization projects, databases, websites and other types of digital resources. However, there are few studies that address their production, use and dissemination. The present article introduces the main issues around the production of digital tools and resources as well as the concept of “digital humanities”. We present and analyze the results of an initial diagnosis of the digital humanities landscape, taking as a case study the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México – UNAM). These results are discussed and the main challenges and opportunities for the field presented