1. Professor Andrew Prescott, King’s College London,
AHRC Digital Transformations Theme Leader Fellow
The Arts and Humanities in a Digital Age

10. Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage, 1798
- Rural poverty and hunger
- Effect of French Wars
- Leading characters in poem engage in repetitive, alienated
and meaningless tasks – in an almost machine-like fashion
- The poem is haunted by almost spectral figures – elegy for
a lost countryside

11. The Old Cumberland Beggar
But deem not this Man useless.--Statesmen! ye
Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye
Who have a broom still ready in your hands
To rid the world of nuisances; ye proud,
Heart-swoln, while in your pride ye contemplate
Your talents, power, or wisdom, deem him not
A burthen of the earth! 'Tis Nature's law
That none, the meanest of created things,
Or forms created the most vile and brute,
The dullest or most noxious, should exist
Divorced from good

12. The Excursion, 1814
Meanwhile, at social Industry's command
How quick, how vast an increase. From the germ
Of some poor hamlet, rapidly produced
Here a huge town, continuous and compact
Hiding the face of earth for leagues - and there,
Where not a habitation stood before,
Abodes of men irregularly massed
Like trees in forests, - spread through spacious tracts.
O'er which the smoke of unremitting fires
Hangs permanent, and plentiful as wreaths
Of vapour glittering in the morning sun.

14. Coleridge:
‘We are daily advancing to the state in which
there are but two classes of men, masters
and abject dependents’.
Calls for ‘a general revolution in the modes of
developing and disciplining the human mind
by the substitution of life and intelligence for
the philosophy of mechanism which, in
everything that is most worth of the human
intellect, strikes Death’.
Seeks studies promoting ‘’the harmonious
development of those qualities and faculties
which characterise our humanity’

15. Matthew Arnold, Literature
and Science, 1882
‘The great majority of
mankind... would do well, I
cannot but think, to choose
to be educated in humane
letters rather than in the
natural sciences. Letters
will call out their being at
more points, will make
them live more’.

17. 776 pieces of Shakespeare’s Plays from the First Folio, each of
1000 words, rated on two scaled principal components (1 and
4). The color key for the dots: Histories (green), Comedies (red),
Tragedies (orange) and Late Plays (blue). Late plays are: The
Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, Henry VIII. Note
Romeo and Juliet in the lower-left, History quadrant.

18. Biblical concordance in a 14th-century manuscript
from Rochester: British Library, Royal MS 4 E.V

20. Long-standing tradition of
quantitative analysis using
computing by scholars such as the
economic historian Roderick Floud
working in the 1960s and 1970s

23. www.janeausten.ac.uk

24. Online Chopin Variorum Edition: www.ocve.org.uk

25. Electronic Beowulf

26. Text of Mark 1:1 in the British Library portion of the Codex
Sinaiticus under standard light, showing corrections
including insertion of the phrase ‘Son of God’.

27. ‘The digital humanities are what happens as soon
as you start to use computers to study the
humanities’ Willard McCarty
As soon as we started creating Electronic
Beowulf, we immediately became engaged with:
• New research questions
• New forms of access
• New methods
• New skills
• New forms of presentation
• New forms of collaboration and of working
together

28. Debates in the Digital Humanities
Formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism – grand
intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature,
politics and culture spread. The next big idea in language, history and
the arts? Data. Instead of looking for new ‘isms’, digitally savvy
humanists now argue, we should start looking at how technology is
currently changing our understanding of what it means to do liberal arts.
New York Times, November 2010
Does the digital humanities offer new and better ways to realize
traditional humanities goals? Or does the digital humanities
completely change our understanding of what a humanities goal (and
work in the humanities) might be?
Stanley Fish, January 2012

29. Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0

30. Digital humanities (along with other ‘new’
humanities such as spatial humanities,
environmental humanities, medical
humanities) as a space for debating
what the humanities is and should be
Mark Sample: The digital humanities
should not be about the digital at all. It’s
all about innovation and disruption. The
digital humanities is really an insurgent
humanities.

32. What is Changing?
• No longer an easily defined set of methods
• Wide variety of formats: not just text but sound, image, moving
image, animation, visualisation, making
• Recycling: visualising, linking, mash-up
• Cannot be confined within single disciplinary practice or structures
• More experimental and ad hoc
• Stronger cross-connections with practice-led research of different
types, particularly in arts
• Requires fresh appoaches to initiating and conceiving research
• Reflects increasing availability of born-digital data; digitisation no
longer at centre of agenda

33. 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

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

38. Visualisation of languages used in tweets in London in
Summer 2012: Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL:
http://mappinglondon.co.uk/2012/londons-twitter-tongues/

40. Visualising milllions of books: The Industrial
Revolution in the Ngram Viewer

42. Mapping Metaphor Project: University of Glasgow
http://blogs.arts.gla.ac.uk/metaphor/

44. www.connectedhistories.org

45. www.oldbaileyonline.org

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

49. Michael Takeo Magruder, Data Sea: www.takeo.org

51. Jekyll 2.0: A React Hub project. Collaboration between
Slingshot (Pervasive Game Developers) and Dr Anthony
Mandal, Cardiff University: http://www.react-
hub.org.uk/books-and-print-sandbox/projects/2013/jekyll-
20/

52. Available at: http://mith.umd.edu/sharedhorizons/resources/

53. Component
and Behavior
for Protein 1
Component
and Behavior
for Protein 2
Component
and Behavior
for Protein 3
ParametricModeling Quantitatively MapsSingle Cell Protein
Levelsto Individual Qualitative Components

54. Data objects developed by Ian Gwilt, Sheffield Hallam University:
http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/c3ri/projects/data-objects

55. www.bareconductive.com

56. www.productresearch.ac.uk

57. http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=cCYn7oQlLiA
Eduardo Kac, Lagoglyph Sound System