Me: I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Screen Cultures and an Instructor for the Gender Studies Department at Northwestern University. I specialize in early 20th century cinema and intersections between race, gender and ethnicity in the media. [My user name is “Instructor Beth” because I have a Weinberg wordpress site for my course and I needed a way to distinguish my posts from my student’s posts.]
My Research: Much of my research has benefitted from digital archives, and I’m interested in how we can make these better for future scholars (though I have to say, I would hate to give up doing actual research trips to actual archives).
My Teaching: This quarter (which begins tomorrow) I’m ditching Blackboard for a WordPress course blog in the hopes that it will help foster more active and productive online dialog among students. In the past, I’ve tried to use the message board function on Blackboard, but it never really works. I think the clunky design has a lot to do with it and I’m hoping that the clean look and user-friendly interface of WordPress will make things better.
My Thoughts on Digital Humanities: The best description of DH that I’ve encountered (this week’s readings included) was here, on a HASTAC message board. Krista White breaks explains DH as a constellation of activities which she breaks down into 3 categories: Research/Analysis, Teaching/Learning, and Preservation/Access. As I wrote in my response to her post, it was the first time I actually read something that helped my get a grasp on the nebulous term. I think its more productive to think of DH as a set of activities, rather than an ethos. This is especially important for describing it to people who are not already “in the know” because to an outsider, insiders’ refusal to define the term has the opposite of its intended effect: it feels less inclusive.
Beth —
Great link. I think the notion of breaking down digital humanities into various activities is very useful.
In my digital history thinking, I increasingly distinguish between “application” and “presentation.”
I conceptualize “application” as the use of digital technologies of any sort to a body of evidence (one document, a large data set, an image, a sound file, whatever). Application would be a kind of research activity, a way for a scholar to try to discern something new in evidence in order to then develop an interpretation. So visualization, sonification, annotation, statistical analysis, deep tagging, and the like are just a few potential applications of digital tools to materials.
Then I think of “presentation” as the way in which we might use the digital to communicate findings. How does this new medium–like any new medium–offer new modes of conveying what we have discovered? This is the part of DH concerned with the “future of the book,” platforms for presentation, questions of online narrative and writing, and other topics of how to share discoveries through the digital.
As Krista White points out, there may turn out to be intriguing intersections and overlaps between these subcategories of digital humanities scholarship. But to my mind, she is absolutely right to try to sharpen and subdivide the kinds of things one *does* in the field of digital humanities rather than offer a static definition.
Finally, your post raises the question of activities vs. ethos.
“I think its more productive to think of DH as a set of activities, rather than an ethos.”
Alex Reid has written about DH as an “ethos.” So too, in her way, have others: Lisa Spiro, Bethany Nowviskie, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and many more. They also tend to speak of DH as activities that substantiate a certain ethos. I need to leave to the philosophers a better sense of how activities and ethos relate to each other, but I think you are on to something by using those two words as a way to puzzle through the practices and the ideology of DH, particularly when it comes to the dilemmas of inclusivity and exclusivity that DH has raised for many.
Thanks for your post!
Michael