Hi!

My name is Kevin and I am a second-year PhD student in History, a Mellon Science Studies Research Fellow, and a new HASTAC scholar. My work explores the political and economic uses of computer simulation modeling in the 1960s and 1970s, paying close attention to the interrelationship between human-computer interaction, emotion, experience, and scientific credibility. In my past work, I’ve looked at the early philosophical reception of cybernetics in East Germany, its reconciliation with dialectical materialism, and the discipline’s uneven organizational implementation by the ruling Socialist Unity Party. I can be found in a variety of places: on Twitter, academia.edu, my website, and on the historiography wiki Videri.

I come to the digital humanities from, perhaps, an uncommon direction; I’ve been digital for quite a while longer than I’ve been a humanist. Before I became a history major in my late undergraduate days, I had worked for a several years on the grunt end of the IT sector, repairing computers, managing servers, and mostly doing the unglamorous work of removing spyware and viruses from factory-floor computers. Since the very beginning stages of my training as a historian, digital methods and tools have been the often invisible background assumptions in the way I approach research, writing, and organizing information. Maybe for these reasons, my definition (insofar as you can call it one) of the digital humanities is, like Josh’s, a pragmatic, process-oriented one: DH is the kind of work humanists do with when they have access to an expanding digital toolkit (while never abandoning the critical reflexiveness of our disciplines). For me, it also involves a political commitment to open access, copyleft, and transparency.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to meeting all of your tomorrow and working with everyone this academic year!

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!

Hello! I am Amanda, a first-year grad student in the history department and new HASTAC scholar. I am interested in the U.S. South in the Civil War and post-emancipation. I have been involved in some way with the digital humanities since my freshman year of undergrad at the University of Richmond, where I interned with the Digital Scholarship Lab there, which largely focuses on digital history research. In my own undergraduate honors thesis, I used Network Workbench, social network analysis software, to model the social relationships between African American Virginians after the American Civil War. This digital method allowed me to better organize my sources and to understand black loyalties in Virginia during the Civil War and the concept of Unionism. As I begin studying history at Northwestern, I am excited to stay involved with digital scholarship research while also exploring the impact and implications of this research outside of history and in an interdisciplinary setting.

In my own research, I, like Emily, turned to the digital humanities as a way to organize and eventually visualize my historical sources. I am also particularly interested in the digital humanities as a teaching tool and for its potential to share and reuse information, much as Spiro articulates in Debates in the Digital Humanities, both in general and particularly as a way to connect academic and public history. With that said, here is my attempt to define digital humanities: The digital humanities is an interdisciplinary field in which scholars have integrated new media with humanities research in order to reach wider audiences and synthesize information more effectively.

I look forward to continuing these discussions in our meeting tomorrow.

Hello, fellow HASTAC Scholars! I’m looking forward to getting to meet each of you and to embark on this year-long journey together. My name is Emily VanBuren, and I am a first year doctoral student in Modern European History here at Northwestern, specializing in Modern Britain. My fields of interest include Cultural History, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. My current research focuses on interwar British theatre as a space of reflection on the First World War, and I’m beginning to move my project toward the context of internationalism and the stage. This is probably enough information to demonstrate that I am training as an interdisciplinary historian, and my arrival in the HASTAC seminar is the direct result of my desire to work across fields.

In the book Debates in the Digital Humanities (edited by Gold), I especially enjoyed the interview with Brett Bobley, published in Part I. He predicts that the digital humanities will have its greatest impact in terms of scale – “Big, massive, scale” (63). I see it the same way, and I hope the increase in size will generate greater interdisciplinarity and collaboration as research projects and exponentially increasing sources demand the expertise of more than one or two researchers. I’m interested in how long it will take for interdisciplinary humanities research to move from something novel to the norm (or if it already has!). Like several of those who sought to define the digital humanities in the book, I see it as the application of digital tools to “traditional” humanities research, making the work not only more efficient but also opening up new questions to be asked of our materials and sources.

From a practical standpoint, I’m also drawn to this field because of the “big, massive, scale” that Bobley mentions, and the challenges it has already caused me. I’m lucky be working with a very exciting archive in my research. But it’s also proved daunting tackling a mountain of primary sources during my first large-scale project. I’ve turned to digital tools in an effort to better organize and analyze these materials, but I’m excited to discover more effective methods than those I’m currently employing. I’m hoping my year as a HASTAC Scholar will help me in that pursuit.

There are about a dozen other issues related to the digital humanities that I’m looking forward to discussing with the other participants (like access to tools in the face of massive cuts to educational funding, or how this field will change the career paths of myself and my cohort), but I’ll save those for now. I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you. Feel free to contact me on Twitter (@emilydvb). See you soon.

Hi, I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Performance Studies. I am currently working on a project about performance practices and politics in the Americas. This project has a hemispheric focus and I am developing it on a platform called “Scalar.” I am interested on how the digital humanities and new technologies of networked scholarship and culture allow us to go back to issues about live, embodied culture and archives, how to interrelate different epistemic systems such as written, oral and now the digital. In what ways can the semantic web help us to demonstrate a conceptualization of the Americas as a terrain of interrelated performance practices. So, my take on the digital humanities is around questions of performativity, memory, and event, as well as explorations on new forms of scholarship alongside archives. Looking forward to our conversation tomorrow!

I am a postdoctoral fellow with The Graduate School here at Northwestern.  My work and teaching is focused on intersections between American literary and cinematic traditions and paradigmatic changes in American jurisprudence.  I am completing my first book on American Western films and US self-defense laws, Gunslinging Justice, and am also lecturing a survey course in African American literature for the winter term.

An Openly Contrarian Definition of Digital Humanities

At a rather specific level, the digital humanities could be marked as a set of computing practices—read coding, programming  index and website building—that use cultural products as the content or data set of analysis.   Though the content is often humanistic, the methodology of what used to be called humanities computing is more science-y than humanist, more computer science and algorithmic experiments than performance and interpretation.

At a more general level, the digital humanities have started to cohere as a set of practices and methodologies for doing the work of interpreting and disseminating the humanities in the age of the internet.  Quite simply, the term ought to be seen as denoting a historical epoch as much as a specialty practice within the ambiguous and amorphous umbrella term, “humanities.” Digital humanists, then, are those scholars whose disciplinary training was completed after the integration of networked computing within higher education, or those whose technological savvy has kept pace with digital innovation writ large over the past 3 decades.  These scholars work within, as much as with, the indexing, searching, and publishing revolution made possible by the spread of the internet.  In other words, their work as researchers and proselytizers of cultural texts is marked by the internet’s ethos of sharing and building, by its inspirational message of open access to information for all.

A great deal of tension within the debates about digital humanities’ impact has can be attributed to a friction between the basic faith in individual authority and authorship cultivated by the academy on the one hand, and on the other hand the open, putatively more democratic ethos of open-access cultivated by the internet. The internet’s impact on research has been met with optimism, to say the least.  Without question the integration of networked computing within higher education has exponentially increased the effectiveness of scholars working with networked tools and expanded the reach of scholarly materials around the globe.  This particular technological revolution, and the fervor with which its capabilities are touted as emancipatory tools, however, is part of a larger historical change in the preservation and dissemination of cultural products.  New technologies have often been met with such hopeful aspirations.  Let us not forget that Mr. Gatling did earnestly believe his machine gun would end all wars.

I wonder if the push for open-access publication and open-source coding is not actually causally related to the dismantling of public support for the humanities.  If university level research and teaching can be spread remotely why do we need a brick and mortar campus at all?  If everyone’s voice/text/limited number of howsoever witty characters is to be collaboratively weighed and aggregated, where does that leave the professoriate?  Furthermore, how is the DH ethos of building for everyone and sharing with all compatible within a “marketplace of ideas”? To put it bluntly, if the milk is free, who buys the cow?  Could the ethos of open—read “free of charge”—dissemination of scholarship be fueling the retreat of publicly-funded education and actually be stifling academic freedom?