Introduces the scholarly conversation around the emerging topic of Digital Humanities and how it relates to smaller, liberal arts institutions. The conclusion of the presentation provides examples of ways you can learn more and get involved in the discussion and practice of Digital Humanities and Digital Liberal Arts.

1. Introduction to Digital Scholarship and
Digital Humanities in the Liberal Arts
and at Bethel University
Kent Gerber
Digital Library Manager
Bethel University
Bethel Faculty Retreat (College of Arts and Sciences)
Summer 2013
Introduction to Digital Scholarship and Digital
Humanities in the Liberal Arts by Kent Gerber
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
License.

2. Outline
What is Digital Humanities?
Brief History
Current Projects
Why Digital Humanities in Liberal Arts?
Digital Humanities at Bethel
Tools
Communities (How to get involved)

3. What is Digital Humanities?

4. Definition from a Practitioner
“a nexus of fields within which scholars use
computing technologies to investigate the kinds
of questions that are traditional to the
humanities, or … ask traditional kinds of
humanities-oriented questions about computing
technologies.”
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference, ProfHacker

5. Definition from Office of Digital
Humanities
“projects that explore how to harness new
technology for humanities research as well as
those that study digital culture from a
humanistic perspective.”

6. Emerging Methods and Genres
Enhanced Critical Curation
Augmented Editions and Fluid Textuality
Scale: The Law of Large Numbers
Distant /Close, Macro /Micro, Surface/Depth
Cultural Analytics, Aggregation , and Data-Mining
Visualization and data design
Locative Investigation and Thick Mapping
The Animated Archive
Distributed Knowledge Production and Performative Access
Humanities Gaming
Code, Software, and Platform Studies
Database Documentaries
Repurposable Content and Remix Culture
Pervasive Infrastructure

7. Brief History

8. Early History
Quantifiable elements of a textual
corpus
1946-1967 Father Roberto Busa’s
concordance of Thomas Aquinas’ body of work
Index Thomisticus completed
1957 Concordance of RSV Bible in 400 hours
1963 Questions of Authorship in Federalist
Papers

9. Recent History
Digitized primary sources and encoded texts
1987 Perseus Digital Library (Classics and 19th century American,
Germanic, and Arabic literature)
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
1988 Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to
early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. Our goal is to bring
texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them
accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general
reader.
1993 Valley of the Shadow (Civil War Primary sources, PA and VA)
http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/

10. From Humanities Computing to
Digital Humanities
2004 Humanities Computing transitioned to use of Digital
Humanities after discussion of a Blackwell Companion to
Humanities publication initiated in 2001 and published in
2004
2006 Now an Office of Digital Humanities at the National
Endowment for the Humanities

11. Current Projects

12. Plato’s Timaeus in Text is Beautiful

13. Digital Humanities Centers
Digital History - Center for History and New Media

14. Digital Humanities Centers
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

15. Digital Humanities Centers
University of Virginia Scholars Lab

16. Digital Humanities Centers

17. Current Projects
Kinds of projects pursued at the University of Minnesota from University
Libraries survey:
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Digital writing and storytelling
Machine learning
Social media and narrative production
Data mining of digital print
GIS and digital humanities
Digital music and ethnography
3D visualization
Crowdsourcing
Image tagging and discovery
Digital publishing

18. Debates in the Digital
Humanities
University of
Minnesota Press,
2012, print

19. Why Digital Humanities in
Liberal Arts?

20. Why Digital Humanities in Liberal
Arts Colleges?
“faculty and students use digital resources to
pose new questions, discover and create
knowledge in distributed and collaborative
ways, work with scholars and information
globally without physically leaving campus, and
simultaneously gather and share data in the
field”
(Chamberlain - Director of Center for Digital
Learning and Research, Occidental College).

21. Digital Humanities Centers:
Liberal Arts Institutions

22. Digital Humanities Centers:
Liberal Arts Institutions
Homer Multitext Project
Applied-learning opportunities of digital humanities projects
like the model of labs in the sciences.
“Students should learn both the process of inquiry and the
actual content answer to the problem. After such scaffolded
learning experiences, students will be ready for more
independent research of the Homer manuscripts...This
process-over-product focus distinguishes the digital
humanities as practiced at small liberal arts colleges
from the production focus in much of the digital
humanities community.”
(Alexander & Frost Davis, 2012)

23. Digital Humanities Centers:
Liberal Arts Institutions

24. Digital Humanities Centers:
Liberal Arts Institutions
Difference from Research I institutions
“The mission of this center, then, explicitly focuses on
undergraduate education rather than on the production of
digital humanities projects. Instead, digital methodologies
are seen as a means to achieving that classroom-based
end. While such centers share with centers at research
institutions the functions of offering a location for
interdisciplinary collaboration, thereby centralizing expertise
and attracting funding, they have a distinct mission that
focuses on undergraduate education, akin to the focus of
teaching and learning centers and in keeping with the
identity of small liberal arts colleges.”
Should Liberal Arts Campuses Do Digital Humanities? Process and Products in the Small College World. In
Debates in the Digital Humanities (Alexander & Frost Davis)

25. DH for Liberal Arts
William Pannapacker

26. Digital Liberal Arts

27. Digital Liberal Arts
“students who are interested in the Arts and
Humanities—Theater, Languages, History, Dance,
English, Philosophy, Art, Music, and Religion—can
receive even more opportunities to work closely with
professionally active faculty mentors in the context of a
new, three-year program designed to foster facultystudent collaborative research in the arts and
humanities, as well as engagement with new Internetbased technologies that are invigorating many fields of
scholarly research.”

28. DH for Liberal Arts Job Placement

29. DH for Liberal Arts Job Placement
I keep hearing the same thing from potential employers:
“We love students with liberal-arts degrees. They are
curious; they know how to ask good questions. They know
how to conduct research. They are effective writers and
speakers. And they learn quickly.“
All good news, so far, for those of us who support
traditional liberal-arts education. But there’s more:
“So I’d love to hire your students,” they say, “provided
they can also help us fix this Web site, handle our social
media, help us with fund-raising, and maybe even
cultivate some new clients. Do you have anyone like that?
We can only hire one person.”

30. Digital Liberal Arts Projects
Andrew Mellon Grant supported
Hamilton College (established a center)
Occidental College (established a center)
Hope College (established an honors program
incorporating digital humanities)
Wheaton College (MA)
Lexomics

31. Digital Liberal Arts/Humanities
Courses - 411 so far

32. Local or Peer Liberal Arts
Institutions
Messiah College - DH Working group
Reported on occasionally John Fea's blog
(St. Olaf, Macalester, Carleton) Mellon Grant
supported

33. Carleton, Macalester, and St. Olaf Colleges
In May 2012, received a $100,000 collaborative
planning grant from the Andrew Mellon
Foundation to support faculty projects in the
Digital Humanities. The Mellon Foundation
funded “Collaborative Planning for the Digital
Humanities” grant will run for two years. During
this time, all three campuses will host a rich
array of workshops and presentations, and new
funding opportunities will be made available to
faculty. (Goals of Digital Humanities grant.)

34. Resulting Projects
Douglas Casson, Political Science, St. Olaf,
John Locke’s use of the King James Bible in his personal
papers, published books, and correspondence using textual
comparison software to identify lexically similar passages in
large collections of text
Chris Wells, Macalester, and George Vrtis,
Carleton, to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary
to put together place-based virtual tours (both on the web
and through downloadable Android and iOS smartphone
apps) based on their environmental history research on the
Twin Cities riverfronts.
http://apps.carleton.edu/humanities/digital/grants_summer12/

35. Macalester History professor
collaborating with Library
Chairman Mao's Railroad in Africa
CONTENTdm curating images of this project
same system used by Bethel Digital Library

36. Digital Humanities Sparkfest

37. Digital Humanities Sparkfest
The Twin Cities Digital Humanities
Symposium is an opportunity for scholars
(faculty and graduate students) from humanities
and computer science fields, academic
technologists, programmers, research
consultants, librarians, and other academic
support staff from Minnesota to come together
to spark new research.

38. Who Attended from Bethel?
Faculty
Chris Gehrz
Sam Mulberry
Barrett Fisher
Librarians
David Stewart
Kent Gerber

39. Project Examples
Design & Tools for Storytelling
City as Layers
Photo, Video, Sound

40. Project Examples
Design & Tools for Storytelling
City as Layers
Photo, Video, Sound

41. Crowdsourcing and Student
Engagement
Many digital humanities projects make
materials available so that others can do the
tasks that do not require expertise but do
require time like transcribing or identifying
shapes of characters.
These also give students the chance to
experience exposure to primary sources or to
engage more deeply.

42. Transcription Crowdsourcing
What’s on the Menu - NYPL
http://menus.nypl.org/menus
Ancient Lives - Zooniverse
http://www.ancientlives.org/tutorial/transcribe
Oxford University

43. Guantanamo Bay Project
Guantanamo Public Memory Project (part of 11 universities
involved)
http://gitmomemory.org/stories/
Public history or Digital Humanities in the course.
Exhibiton will be in Minnesota History Center Feb 2014
HIST 3001: Public History
Professor in History and American Studies
Rachel Hines, one of undergraduate students did a panel
on Closing Guantanamo, Who Decides GTMO’s Future?
http://gtmoproject.umn.edu/

44. Place to Find Many of These
Projects
Newspaper/Magazine

45. Place to Find Many of These
Projects
Newspaper/Magazine
Journals

46. Digital Humanities at Bethel

47. Digital Humanities / Liberal Arts at
Bethel
Stephen Self’s and Grant McEachern Edgren
Scholars

48. Mike Holmes’ Greek New Testament

49. Enabling New Scholarship and
Public Services

50. Bethel has 150 photos in National
Collection

51. Permanent Art Collection
George Poundstone

52. Text Mining and Visualization

53. Wordle

54. Tools

55. See Chris Gehrz
How to use Omeka
in the classroom
http://omeka.org/blog/2013/08/20/back-to-school-editionuse-omeka-in-your-class/

56. Choosing Tools

57. What is Needed for these efforts?
Key needs / skills
Building interfaces
Where to go for help/ tech support
Manage large scale grants
Project planning - multi institutional
Choosing tools - GIS, text mining, network analysis, data
visualization
Data management - macro analysis of 100,000 novels.
Metadata and encoding
Large scale content selection and development (digitization)
Data analysis
New research outputs
New preservation responsibilities.

58. Digital Liberal Arts
William Pannapacker
1. "Stop calling it 'digital humanities.'"
2. "Show how digital humanities supports the liberal
arts."
3. "Build a support network with like-minded
colleagues."
4. "Integrate digital humanities into the curriculum."
5. "Show how digital techniques"Celebrate the accomplishments of students and
6. support faculty
research."
colleagues."
7. "Seek support of the higher-ups."
8. "Invest in faculty and staff development."
9. "Seek external partnerships."
10. "Strive to be a "servant leader."

59. Communities
(How to Get Involved)

60. Communities
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
http://adho.org/
Praxis Network (includes Hope College)
THATCamp
Curated Conversations on Twitter
https://twitter.com/dancohen/digitalhumanities

61. How Can You Get Started
Attend a THATCamp
Consult some example Syllabi
DHCommons - http://dhcommons.org/
List projects and people and skills needed
Experiment with some project websites or tools

62. Collaboration with the Library
Create a new digital collection
Engage and extend an existing collection
Submit your work to the Digital Library Archive
Platform for you or your student’s scholarship

63. Some Digital Library Collections
Faculty Journal
Faculty Work (coming soon)
Undergraduate Research and Scholarship
Community Video Collection
Colloquy

64. New Website: Library Home Page

65. New Website: Digital Collections Tab

66. Contact and References
Email
kent-gerber@bethel.edu
Twitter
http://twitter.com/ktkgerber
Personal Learning Environments/Blogs
Digital Humanities Bookmarks and Bibliography
https://www.diigo.com/user/kgerber/%22digital%20humanities%22?
type=all&sort=updated
Atlibber: Academic Technology Librarian Blogger
http://atlibber.wordpress.com