Presentation to British Library doctoral training day, 23 January 2015

1. What are the digital
humanities,
and what use are they to me?
Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow
AHRC Theme Leader Fellow for Digital Transformations
British Library Doctoral Training Day
23 January 2015

2. What Are The Digital
Humanities?
• This question causes great vexation, but the answer is simple,
and a good working definition has existed for twenty years
• Willard McCarty 1996 (updated 2013):
• DIGITAL HUMANITIES is an academic field concerned with the
application of computing tools to humanities and arts data or
their use in the creation of these data. It is methodological in
nature and interdisciplinary in scope. It works at the intersection
of computing with the other disciplines and focuses both on the
pragmatic issues of how computing assists scholarship and
teaching in these disciplines, and on the theoretical problems of
shift in perspective brought about by computing.

3. • McCarty 1996 rev. 2013 continued:
• [Digital Humanities] seeks to define the common ground of
techniques and approaches to data, and how scholarly processes
may be understood and mechanised. It studies the sociology of
knowledge as this is affected by computing as well as the
fundamental cognitive problem of how we know what we know.
• Within the institution, digital humanities is manifested in teaching,
research, and service. The subject itself is taught, as well as its
particular application to another discipline at the invitation of the
home department. Practitioners of humanities computing conduct
their own research as well as participate by invitation in the
projects of others. They take as a basic responsibility collegial
service, assisting colleagues in their work and collaborating with
them in the training of students.

4. Here is surely a truth now universally acknowledged: that the whole
of our cultural inheritance has to be recurated and reedited in
digital forms and institutional structures. But as the technology of
cultural memory shifts from bibliographical to digital machines, a
difficult question arises: what do we do with the books? This is a
problem for society at large and many people are working at it,
none more assiduously than certain expert persons, often
technicians. Highly skilled and motivated as they are, book history
and the complex machinery of books fall outside their professional
expertise. Humanist scholars, the long-recognised monitors of
cultural memory, register a problem in this situation. For humanist
thinking has been shaped by the institutions and technology of
books.
Jerome McGann, The New Republic of Letters (2014),
p. 1

5. Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0: humanitiesblast.com

6. What Use Are the Digital
Humanities to Me?
• A critical understanding of the resources that we now all use
• Means of scholars contributing to the renegotiation of the cultural record
described by McGann
• The computer is a universal machine, so its potential to support the
study of the humanities is potentially boundless (text, numbers, images,
reconstructions, sound, film, etc., etc), although humanities poses
questions about the limits of computation
• There are a number of standard methods in digital humanities (eg Text
Encoding Initiative) which should be used as matter of efficiency and
good manners, but digital humanities is much much more than this
• DH is pluralistic, multi-faceted, experimental, and constantly on the
lookout for new insights from STEM and elsewhere

7. 11th-century Old English Life of Saint Sebastian:
London, British Library, Cotton MS. Otho B x, f. 54v

8. Imaging of the Beowulf manuscript using fibre optic backlighting to reveal letters and words concealed by
nineteenth-century conservation work

9. Two sets of transcripts made for
the Danish antiquary Thorkelin,
now in the Royal Library
Copenhagen, compared with the
original manuscript

12. Kathryn Rudy, ' Dirty books : Quantifying
patterns of use in medieval manuscripts
using a densitometer ' Journal of Historians
of Netherlandish Art , vol 2 (2010) , no. 1-2 ,
pp. 1-26

13. Using Micro-CT to Explore the Structure of Papyri Scrolls from Herculaneum

14. oldbaileyonline.org

19. www.connectedhistories.org

20. A Thousand Words: Advanced Visualisation in the Humanities
Texas Advanced Computing Center
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvOuJ2RwBTA

21. Virtual Paul’s Cross Project: digital re-creation of John Donne’s
Gunpowder Day Sermon, 1622:
Flyround:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=rdt0yCbvyHg&feature=youtu.be
Acoustics:
http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/listen-from-the-cross-yard/

22. Chris Watson, ‘In St Cuthbert’s Time’: a seventh-century
soundscape of Lindisfarne
https://soundcloud.com/experimedia/chris-watson-in-st-
cuthberts

23. http://www.meagreresource.com/other-projects/tape/
nctrc.html
Nottingham Tape Club

24. Letter of Gladstone to Disraeli,
1878: British Library, Add. MS.
44457, f. 166
The political and literary
papers of Gladstone
preserved in the British
Library comprise 762
volumes containing
approx. 160,000
documents.

25. George W. Bush Presidential Library:
200 million e-mails
4 million photographs

27. Thomson and Craighead, Flat Earth (2007)
http://animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2007/flat_earth

28. Thomson and Craighead, Belief (2012)
http://animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2012/belief