Preservation First? Re-Viewing Film Digitization

This article addresses the politics of film digitization by arguing that we should reconsider archival and preservation best practices that require film restoration. Instead, it advocates for digitizing films as is, which, in turn, captures the film\u27s current materiality (i.e., fading, scratches, and other facets that reveal age, wear, and use). Using the work of Luis Vale, one of the youth filmmakers from New York City\u27s Lower East Side\u27s Young Filmmaker Foundation\u27s Film Club, as a case study, the article points to the importance of archiving and saving these youth films as part of a growing movement to look beyond Hollywood cultural production and preserving national moving image heritage. More broadly, this article highlights how archiving practices determine which histories are remember and how

American Studies + Computational Humanities

While often commonly positioned at the intersection of computer science and digital humanities, computational humanities engages with other fields including data science, (computational) linguistics, and statistics.Such a transdisciplinary approach creates a digital ecology of data, algorithms, metadata, analytical and visualization tools, and new forms of scholarly expression that result from this research, as Christa Williford and Charles Henry, of the Council on Library and Information Resources, write. Text analysis, particularly the method of topic modeling, has enjoyed broad exposure within computational humanities. Given the scale of the corpus, computational methods were used to identify reprinted texts in 41,829 issues.The goal of the project is not to construct a definitive, empirical solution to the problem of nineteenth-century newspaper reprinting, Cordell writes, but to facilitate an iterative conversation between the large-scale, quantitative output generated by a corpus analysis algorithm and qualitative, literary-historical readings of the surprising texts that algorithm brings into focus. Suggesting a shift from distant reading, the project is part of a growing chorus of such work that argues that DH needs to expand beyond text to other forms such as photography and moving images, a shift that American studies has also called for. DV, therefore, focuses on how a critical use of computer vision can be used to analyze moving image culture. Since the majority of the algorithms are trained on twenty-first-century data held by companies like Google and platforms like Flickr, we need to question and adapt these algorithms using machine learning informed by our areas of inquiry

The Digital Public Humanities: Giving New Arguments and New Ways to Argue

In response to the latest crisis in the humanities, advocates have marched, rallied, fundraised, and-especially-argued. This essay contends that communication scholars can support the growing case for the humanities by analyzing argumentative strategies, and more specifically, by offering ethical argumentative strategies that avoid replicating structures of domination. In particular, we look to Mari Lee Mifsud\u27s theorization of rhetoric as gift, which follows Henry W. Johnstone in conceptualizing argument as something other than winning over an adversary. We place Mifsud\u27s theorization of the gift in conversation with the methods of the digital public humanities (DPH), which acknowledge and offer abundant resources for meaning-making. Through the methods of DPH, we offer a response to the humanities crisis that activates the humanities\u27 already broad constituencies by giving resources for humanistic inquiry rather than seeking to capture adversaries. Our case study is Photogrammar, a DPH project for organizing, searching, and visualizing the New Deal and World War II era photographs funded by the U.S. federal government. The project forefronts visual, nonlinear, and interactive argumentation in order to engage publics in generative humanistic inquiry. By enlisting participants and sharing expertise, Photogrammar shows how humanities advocates can deepen attachments to the humanities and build broad constituencies of collaborators and allies

The Role of ESU in Creating and Values-Driven DH Community

In this essay, we illustrate how the European Summer University in Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig (hereafter referred to as “ESU”) under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Burr has set forth a set of values that have built and continue to model a collaborative, communal, and compassionate future for higher education. We identify three values that sit at the center of the ESU’s activities – inclusiveness, experimentation, and vulnerability. We reflect on these values from our position as workshop leaders who have had the privilege to be part of the ESU community over the past years.In questo saggio, si illustra come l’ESU, sotto la guida di Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Burr, abbia creato un modello per il futuro dell’istruzione a livello universitario fondato sui valori della collaborazione, della collettività e della compassione. Identifichiamo tre valori caratteristici delle attività dell’ESU – l’inclusione, la sperimentazione, e la vulnerabilità. Riflettiamo su questi valori dalla nostra posizione di istruttori che hanno avuto il privilegio di far parte di questa communita’ negli ultimi anni

Introduction to Focus Issue: Collections in a Digital Age

In Spring 2015, a working group engaged in questions at the intersection of digital and public history at the annual National Council on Public History (NCPH) meeting held in Nashville, Tennessee. The vibrant discussion focused on the exciting and important ways by which public historians make digital, public history. Because a significant amount of work has centered on digitizing and augmenting historical archives, this special issue explores digital approaches to physical collections. Inflected by the contributors’ positioning in public history, the issue highlights how digital approaches are shaped by questions of access, audience, collaboration, interpretation, and materiality. From that discussion in Nashville arose another conversation to convey some of the practical challenges, decisions, applications, and opportunities as experienced by working group discussants. It seemed then, and with the collection of articles in this issue it is even more apparent that the lessons learned by working group discussants are widely applicable to practitioners of public history and digital history, and public, digital history. The articles in this collection develop and interrogate a range of issues beginning with methodology and then turning to case studies

Analyzing Audio/Visual Data in the Digital Humanities

The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities reconsiders key debates, methods, possibilities, and failings from across the digital humanities, offering a timely interrogation of the present and future of the arts and humanities in the digital age.Comprising 43 essays from some of the field\u27s leading scholars and practitioners, this comprehensive collection examines, among its many subjects, the emergence and ongoing development of DH, postcolonial digital humanities, feminist digital humanities, race and DH, multilingual digital humanities, media studies as DH, the failings of DH, critical digital humanities, the future of text encoding, cultural analytics, natural language processing, open access and digital publishing, digital cultural heritage, archiving and editing, sustainability, DH pedagogy, labour, artificial intelligence, the cultural economy, and the role of the digital humanities in climate change. From this chapter: We offer an observation, perhaps even provocation: DH is undergoing an A/V turn. The combination of access to data either through digitization or born-digital sources alongside advances in computing from memory to deep learning is resulting in a watershed moment for the analysis of audio and visual data in the field