Digital Humanities

This Companion offers a thorough, concise overview of the emerging field of humanities computing. Contains 37 original articles written by leaders in the field. Addresses the central concerns shared by those interested in the subject. Major sections focus on the experience of particular disciplines in applying computational methods to research problems; the basic principles of humanities computing; specific applications and methods; and production, dissemination and archiving. Accompanied by a website featuring supplementary materials, standard readings in the field and essays to be included in future editions of the Companion.

This comprehensive introduction uses expert guidance from leading academics and international case studies to explore the possibilities and challenges that occur when culture and digital technologies intersect. Key topics covered include: social media and crowd sourcing; digital images and digitization; 3D scanning and museums; user studies; electronic text and corpora; GIS: open access and online teaching of digital humanities; and books, texts and digital editing.

A hybrid print/digital book series that explores debates in the field as they emerge.
Biannual volumes highlight current issues in the field, and special volumes on topics of pressing interest, Debates in the Digital Humanities tracks the field as it continues to grow.

Digital_Humanities is a compact, game-changing report on the state of contemporary knowledge production. Answering the question, "What is digital humanities?," it provides an in-depth examination of an emerging field. This collaboratively authored and visually compelling volume explores methodologies and techniques unfamiliar to traditional modes of humanistic inquiry--including geospatial analysis, data mining, corpus linguistics, visualization, and simulation--to show their relevance for contemporary culture. Included are chapters on the basics, on emerging methods and genres, and on the social life of the digital humanities, along with "case studies," "provocations," and "advisories." These persuasively crafted interventions offer a descriptive toolkit for anyone involved in the design, production, oversight, and review of digital projects. The authors argue that the digital humanities offers a revitalization of the liberal arts tradition in the electronically inflected, design-driven, multimedia language of the twenty-first century.Written by five leading practitioner-theorists whose varied backgrounds embody the intellectual and creative diversity of the field, Digital_Humanities is a vision statement for the future, an invitation to engage, and a critical tool for understanding the shape of new scholarship.

One of the major challenges facing librarians and curators of digital repositories are the innovative 'born digital' documents created by scholars in the humanities. These documents range from the parsed corpora created by linguists to traditional reference information presented in electronic databases, to rich, multi-media hypertexts combining audio, still and moving video and text, and many other sorts of material. Too often, librarians think of electronic resources solely as providing access to subscription databases. This book encourages librarians to think holistically of the life cycle of electronic resources from new items being created at their institution, to end-user access, to long term preservation of digital resources. Focuses on role of a digital library in the complete life cycle (creation, access, long term preservation) of digital objects created by scholars in the humanities Covers recent developments in humanities computing and their implications for digital libraries Presents accessible technical information about fields such as information retrieval and computational linguistics for a non-technical audience

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web provides for the first time a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians--teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts--who wish to produce online historical work or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium. The book takes the reader step by step through planning a project, understanding the technologies involved and how to choose the appropriate ones, designing a site that is both easy to use and scholarly, digitizing materials in a way that makes them web-friendly while preserving their historical integrity, and reaching and responding to an intended audience effectively. It also explores the repercussions of copyright law and fair use for scholars in a digital age and examines more cutting-edge web techniques involving interactivity, such as sites that use the medium to solicit and collect historical artifacts. Finally, the book provides basic guidance for ensuring that the digital history the reader creates will not disappear in a few years. Throughout, Digital History maintains a realistic sense of the advantages and disadvantages of putting historical documents, interpretations, and discussions online. The authors write in a tone that makes Digital History accessible to those with little knowledge of computers, while including a host of details that more technically savvy readers will find helpful. And although the book focuses particularly on historians, those working in related fields in the humanities and social sciences will also find this to be a useful introduction. Digital History builds upon more than a decade of experience and expertise in creating pioneering and award-winning work by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

The application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts and Humanities are resulting in fresh approaches and methodologies for the study of new and traditional corpora. This 'computational turn' takes the methods and techniques from computer science to create innovative means of close and distant reading. This book discusses the implications and applications of 'Digital Humanities' and the questions raised when using algorithmic techniques. Key researchers in the field provide a comprehensive introduction to important debates surrounding issues such as the contrast between narrative versus database, pattern-matching versus hermeneutics, and the statistical paradigm versus the data mining paradigm. Also discussed are the new forms of collaboration within the Arts and Humanities that are raised through modular research teams and new organisational structures, as well as techniques for collaborating in an interdisciplinary way.