Blogs

THATCamp - The DH Unconference

Submitted by Nicholas Morris
on Sun, 02/26/2012 - 9:55am

THATCamp, or "The Humanities and Technology Camp", is an unconference, first held by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University in the summer of 2008. Since then, under the facilitation of CHNM and their THATCamp coordinator Amanda French (@amandafrench), there have been 50 THATCamps held across North America, Europe, and Australia, with over 30 in various stages of planning for 2012-2013.

Working from a similar model to BarCamp, THATCamps differ from, and riff upon, traditional academic conferences in several ways.

Digital Millenarianism

Submitted by Neil Coffee
on Thu, 02/09/2012 - 12:15pm

What can digital humanities do? Not much, according to Stanley Fish. Fish recently penned a blog post that takes issue with both the methods and results of the digital enterprise.

His methodological objection is that digital humanists start by churning out data:

“. . . first you run the numbers, and then you see if they prompt an interpretive hypothesis. The method, if it can be called that, is dictated by the capability of the tool.”

Fish prefers to happen on an idea, then look for evidence to support it:

“The direction of my inferences is critical: first the interpretive hypothesis and

Digital humanities on the other side of the digital divide

Submitted by jcgood
on Tue, 01/31/2012 - 10:10pm
In December, I spent a little over a week in Cameroon participating in a pilot project to digitize materials in one of the country's two national archives. This project was funded by the Endangered Archives Programme based at the British Library. This program is itself supported by Arcadia. While this was my sixth visit to Cameroon, it was the first time I went to do something other than linguistic work.
 
I personally spent most of time in Yaounde, Cameroon's capital, and Buea, where the archives that the project was focusing on are located.

The Wikipedia, Possibilities and Opportunities

Submitted by Charles D'Aniello
on Wed, 01/25/2012 - 11:44am

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the Wikipedia, has been interviewed by Charlie Rose (a Wikipedia fan) several times. You’ll learn a lot about the Wikipedia quickly if you watch videos of these interviews and you’ll appreciate the idealism behind the effort.  A Stephen Colbert-Jimmy Wales encounter (there’s a lot of Colbert-Wikipedia history) will alert you to the most persistent complaint against the resource: its accuracy.

Pixelated Memories: Performance and Digital Historiography

Submitted by Sarah Bay-Cheng
on Tue, 01/10/2012 - 12:15pm


By coincidence, luck, or--more likely--bad planning, I find myself writing this post in the midst of three simultaneous theatre festivals in New York. All devoted to new work, these festivals--COIL by PS122, Under the Radar by The Public Theatre, and the American Realness Festival--offer extraordinary opportunities to view contemporary performance from across New York and around the world. Seeing over a dozen shows in 6 days, I'm in performance heaven.

Many of these works include at least some engagement with digital technology.

XTF and Finding Aids in EAD (Encoded Archival Description)

Submitted by DHIB (not verified)
on Mon, 12/12/2011 - 9:26am

 

Contrary to what is claimed above, this blog was written by John Bewley, who appears to have offended Drupal in a previous life. Hostage negotiators have been deployed to restore his identity.

_____________________________

In 2009 the University Libraries launched its installation of XTF (eXtensible Text Framework) to provide online access to finding aids representing hundreds of its archival collections.

Visualizing Sound Patterns in Homer

Submitted by Chris Forstall
on Mon, 12/05/2011 - 7:28pm
In his 1974 article "Sound-Patterns in Homer," David W. Packard compared a wide range of critical opinions about the artistic use of sound in the poetics of the Iliad and Odyssey with a statistical analysis of letter frequencies.  This is a seminal paper in digital humanities not only because Packard was a pioneer in designing the hardware and software necessary to digitize ancient Greek texts, but also because it addresses the interface between empirical data and critical interpretation, a problem that persists forty years on, despite huge advances in many areas of the field.
 
In the DHIB

UBIR: Repository Update

Submitted by Mark Ludwig
on Tue, 11/29/2011 - 10:21am

For three years, CIT and the University Libraries have been hosting the "UBIR", i.e., the "University at Buffalo Institutional Repository". Our Repository is based on MIT's DSpace open source software package. We have two instances or environments. The 'development' repository is hosted entirely by the University Libraries for collection development and testing. The 'production' repository, hosted by CIT and the Libraries, is the public-facing system of completed collections.

During the past semester, we upgraded the development repository to DSpace version 1.7.2. This added a 'discovery'

Tags: 
UBIR
repository
DSpace
institutional repository
archive

Upcoming blogs

Submitted by Maureen Jameson
on Tue, 10/11/2011 - 10:51am

DHIB Blogs are on the way! So far, we have the following topics lined up:

11/29/2011     Mark Ludwig       UB's Institutional Repository
1/17/2012      Neil Coffee          UB DH projects: Tesserae
2/7/2012        Jeff Good            Copyright and the digital scholar
3/6/2012        Ronan Crowley   Google Books in humanities scholarship

Watch this space for updates on other topics, and use the feedback form on the left or the comment space below to volunteer to contribute a blog yourself.

Join the DHIB listserv

Join the listserv to get news of grant opportunities and special events. (Be sure to replace "First name Last name" with your actual name!)