In lieu of making slides, I thought a blog post outlining what I’ll be discussing informally at today’s NUDHL meeting might be a better resource for everyone. I would like to briefly discuss some of the resources available to faculty and graduate students, most of which can be filed under a very loosely defined digital humanities. Please feel free to leave a comment on this post or contact me directly at josh.honn@northwestern.edu with any questions or comments. I’m also online a lot.
- Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation
This is where I work as Digital Scholarship Fellow along with my boss Claire Stewart, who is both head of the Center and Digital Collections. Claire is the go-to person for all things copyright, fair use, and data management. Me, I mostly research digital tools and methodologies and consult/collaborate with faculty and grad students on digital humanities and publishing projects. Though, by projects, I don’t necessarily mean BIG projects, but projects of all kinds, shapes, and sizes. Some types of projects we’re working on now include online manuscript transcription and annotation, a digital history course, various types text analysis research, experiments in multimodal scholarly monograph publishing, born-digital web archiving curation and research, and others. Finally, I’ve also begun to provide presentations and resources on digital pedagogy and building an online scholarly presence.
- A Guide to Digital Humanities
One of my projects is this guide, which should provide a pretty basic and broad (but I hope high quality!) overview of many of the methods, tools, research, and projects that often fall under the umbrella term digital humanities. It’s also collocates many of the best repositories online, such as Bamboo DiRT for finding many, many kinds of digital research tools. A good amount of the tools and methodologies listed here I and other folks in the library have some experience with, so please feel free to consult with me/us. And if there’s something I don’t know, it’s part of my job to, at the very least, look into it! I’m also always looking for feedback on how to make the guide better, so please feel free to contribute ideas.
- Digital Collections & the Digital Media Lab
The Center and the Digital Collections department work very closely together and we also share a space in 2 East in the Library. Digital Collections works on digitization and other digital projects, checks out equipment, and also has a digital media lab which is open to faculty and graduate students. Digital Collections is an excellent source for learning about metadata, best practices for self-digitization in archives, learning and using new software, running OCR on PDFs, and a lot more. My colleague Brendan Quinn is a particularly great person to be in touch with when it comes to multimedia production and web design.
- Northwestern University Library
I don’t know everything that’s going on in the library, but there are a lot of other resources pertinent to digital humanities research, especially through many of our humanities librarians. For instance, if you want to find out more about what databases the library subscribes to and how to search and use them, Charlotte Cubbage is invaluable, especially for English. She’ll help you find everything from primary to secondary research resources online. If you’re looking to learn reference/citation management software like Zotero, I recommend making an appointment with Geoff Morse. And for GIS data and visualization, Ann Aler. For a full list of subject specialists, go here.