With the help of some colleagues from Loyola and IIT, I’ve started Chicago DH, an informal group of/for scholars, technologists, librarians, and others dedicated to sharing digital humanities events, announcements, questions, and discussions in and around Chicago. Our goal is to use Google Groups along with a forthcoming website (http://chicago.digitalhumaniti.es/) and Twitter account (@ChicagoDH) to share DH events and announcements across the many campuses in the Chicago area in the hopes of building a stronger community and sharing learning resources and opportunities. If you’re interested in joining the mailing list (to which you can also post) please visit https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/chicago-dh and request to join. Hopefully as we get more users across all of our institutions it can become a vital and vibrant resource. Michael and Jillana, if you’re interested in participants from other campuses, please add NUDHL meeting session announcements to this list!

On the topic of humanists writing code, I wanted to share this pretty awesome and definitely hilarious coding language called Vigil, “the eternal morally vigilant programming language,” written by and for moral philosophers. You can find the code on GitHub at https://github.com/munificent/vigil, but the best part (unless you hate philosophy and code jokes, I guess) is the documentation, especially the FAQ.

An excellent new monograph is now out by Joanna Drucker & co. titled Digital_Humanities (and, as I hoped when I picked up the title, that underscore IS important). I can’t recommend it enough for those new to DH and those long-affiliated with it (and for the so many of us in between). The best part is that the authors have put their theory to practice and released a beautifully designed, semi-experimental book that also has an open access edition for download here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities-0

I’m about finished with it, and if others are reading it too, maybe a NUDHL spin-off book club may be in order.

 

As many of you are probably aware, the annual MLA conference is currently underway. For the past few years, digital humanities panels and presentations have been on the rise at MLA, and this year the trend continues. Mark Sample has a post called Digital Humanities at MLA 2013 which collects all of the information on the DH-related sessions at MLA this year, and notes that there are a total of 66 (in 2010 there were only 27), or about 8% of all sessions. If you’re not attending, a good way to follow along is via Sample’s post and the #MLA13 hashtag on Twitter.

The entire fourth issue of JDH is dedicated to the evaluation of digital humanities projects.

From the Editors:

With this fourth issue we wrap up the first year of the Journal of Digital Humanities, and with it, our first twelve months of attempting to find and promote digital scholarship from the open web using a system of layered review. The importance of assessment and the scholarly vetting process around digital scholarship has been foremost in our minds, as it has in the minds of many others this year. As digital humanities continues to grow and as more scholars and disciplines become invested in its methods and results, institutions and scholars increasingly have been debating how to maintain academic rigor while accepting new genres and the openness that the web promotes.

The entire issue can be accessed in multiple formats here: http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/

Via Neil Fraistat on the Centernet discussion list:

I’m delighted to announce that in an effort to make membership more widely affordable, the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), will now offer low-cost membership for students and early career scholars and unwaged or low-waged independent scholars, beginning 2013.

Those who join under the program will not receive a subscription to LLC: the journal of digital scholarship in the humanities, published by ADHO. ADHO’s membership-only fees will be set at $25, £14, and €20. Please spread the word!

Those interested in membership for the coming year can join (or re-join) here:

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/litlin/access_purchase/price_list.html/.

As you know, centerNet is now a constituent organization of ADHO. We’ll soon be announcing our own quite modest membership rates in the near future, as we’ll as news about our new open source journal focused on the registry and peer review of DH projects.

 

The other night, Jade Werner  and I presented “A Gentle Introduction to Digital Text Analysis.” Attendance was strong and the post-presentation discussion lively and we’d like to share our work as broadly as possible. The link below features the presentation slides, full transcript of our remarks, and links to our live collation and analysis environments using Juxta Commons andVoyant Tools. The presentation (a) introduces our the object/subject of our study, (b) outlines a brief history of text analysis, (c) discusses and displays new digital tools, and (d) outlines popular text analysis methodologies.

This presentation came about through a collaboration between Jade and I on her wonderful scholarship on the two versions of the Lady Morgan novel The Missionary (1811) and its edited version Luxima, The Prophetess (1859). Having cleaned up the texts, we are now exploring new interpretations enabled and enhanced by online text analysis tools. Please take a look and feel free to get in touch with us with any questions/comments.

http://cscdc.northwestern.edu/blog/?p=687

I am the Digital Scholarship Library Fellow at Northwestern University Library’s Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation. I know, that’s a lot of capitalized words, especially for an introductory sentence, but, essentially, I am a librarian (MLIS) with a humanities background (MA American Studies) who consults and collaborates with Northwestern faculty and graduate students on digital humanities research and pedagogy projects, referral to and training on digital research tools, and other scholarly digital publishing initiatives. In addition to this work, I’m also a designer (web and print), I read a lot of Latin American fiction in translation and contemporary American literature, and I also have some modest scholarly side projects such as marking up a Max Beerbohm short story in TEI and using digital tools to analyze and visualize literary texts. You can find me online at my website and on Twitter.

As far as definitions of digital humanities go, I tend to be an agnostic in the semantic debates, the who’s in and who’s out (who cares!) arguments, and try to focus on doing. I know that’s radically naive, and I also know that, as a librarian, I’m a bit privileged and can afford that view, but it also helps me stay centered and focussed on creating, and while I see myself often as a collaborator with faculty and graduate students (and vice versa), I also understand a large component of what I do is support-ish. Anyway, the definition of digital humanities I usually run with is three-pronged:

1. Humanities research enabled and informed by digital means.
2. Humanities publication through new digital means.
3. Humanities scholarship on digital technology and culture.

Honestly, I don’t believe this definition is broad enough, and there’s something freeing about being a part of a field that one can’t even define, but I think this covers three very important approaches, all of which can be exclusive of the other and still count as digital humanities (e.g. research can be done digitally and published in print). Missing from this definition are a few crucial things such as coding, programming, metadata creation, etc. For instance, I most definitely do think marking up a text in TEI is a scholarly activity in and of itself. The one thing I am OK with is the use of the phrase “digital humanities” which I feel is a necessity for a field trying to define itself, make its case, and in many ways is seen as an oppositional force. That doesn’t mean DH is always radical, but it does mean its new and not yet commonly accepted.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to meeting everyone, sharing ideas, debating, collaborating, and so on. I’m very excited for NUDHL and have had the privilege of working with both Michael and Jillana on digital humanities projects and think they are to be commended for their trailblazing spirit and for convening this workshop!