DH101 2013/2014 course 2

Digital Humanities 101 - 2013/2014 - Course 2
Digital Humanities Laboratory
Frederic Kaplan
frederic.kaplan@epﬂ.ch

Structure of today's course
•Skill: Distinguishing for concepts
• Digital Humanities
• Digital Studies
• Humanities computing
• Studies about Digital Culture
•Skill: Writing an academic blog post with Wordpress
•First Assignment (Deadline Oct 16th)
•Exercize on Massive Digitization
Digital Humanities 101 - 2013/2014 - Course 2 | 2013 2
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Skill : Distinguishing four concepts : Digital Humanities,
Humanities Computing, Digital Studies, Studies about
Digital Culture
o

Distinguishing four concepts
•Only one answer is correct
• (1) A=Digital Humanities, B=Humanities
Computing, C=Studies about Digital Culture,
D=Digital Studies
• (2) A=Studies about Digital Culture, B=Digital
Studies, C=Humanities Computing, D=Digital
Humanities
• (3) A’=Humanities Computing, B’=Studies about
Digital Culture, C’=Digital Humanities,
D’=Digital Studies
• (4) A’=Digital Humanities, B’=Humanities
Computing, C’=Studies about Digital Culture,
o

Distinguishing four concepts: Your answers
D=Digital Studies
Humanities
o

Digital Humanities
o

Digital + Humanities
o

Digital Systems
•Digital systems represent information
using discrete values.
•Ex: Binary encoding (but the digital
systems can also be use other bases)
o

Analog Systems
•Analog systems represent information
using a continuous function.
o

Digitus
•The word digital comes from digit and
digitus (ﬁnger in Latin) because ﬁngers
are used for discrete counting
o

What disciplines are covered by the term humanities?
o

What disciplines are covered by the term humanities?
•ancient and modern languages
•literature
•history
•philosophy
•religion
•visual and performing arts
•anthropology
•area studies
•communication studies
•cultural studies
•law
•linguistics
o

Disambiguation: Humanist and humanism
•Scholars that work in the Humanities are
called humanists
•The term humanists is also linked with
the Renaissance idea of humanism (e.g.
Erasmus is a humanist)
•Scholars working in the Humanities are
not necessarily humanists in the
philosophical sense.
o

Digital Humanities is a new word
o

... essentially used in the US, UK and Germany
o

The term Humanities computing is declining
o

Humanities computing was about applying computational
approaches to humanities research questions.
o

... Digital methods applied to literature, history, etc.
o

Digital methods tend to disolve frontiers
•One consequence of the use of digital methods in the humanities was the evolution
of the traditional disciplinary frontiers.
•Various disciplines discovered that they were dealing with similar objects and
methods (databases, pattern recognition, etc.)
•There were more similarities between disciplines tryping to use computational
methods to study their object, then inside some disciplines.
o

A terminological change
•The terminological change from humanities computing to digital humanities has
been attributed to John Unsworth, Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman, editors of
the monograph A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004)
•Contrary to Humanities Computing, the term Digital Humanities covers both the
methods of contemporary humanities in studying digital objects, and symetrically
the use of digital technology for studying humanities objects.
o

A focus on practice
•Many researchers in the Digital Humanities field insist on the importance of
practice over theory
•One specifity of this community is the organization of THATCamp, The
Humanities and Technology Camp, open, inexpensive meetings where humanists
and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on
the spot.
•The slogan of the THATCamps is More hack, less yacks
•In the same line, Claire Warwick, UCL London suggests a very open definition: If
you think you are doing it, then you probably are
•This is why this course focuses on skills more than theory
o

A global phenomena
•Although the Digital Humanities
acamedic world is currently still
dominated by the anglo-american
scholars, there is a clear goal to make it
a global multilinguistic phenomena.
•The Digital Humanities Call for Paper
has been translated in 14 languages by
volunteers.
o

Lost in translation
•This raises the question on how to
translate the term Digital Humanities in
other languages?
•Italian for instance still use the term
Informatica umanistica which is closer
from humanities computing than Digital
Humanities
o

The French vs Swiss French debate
•The official translation of Digital in French is numérique. So many French
researcher use the term Humanités numériques
•In French speaking Switzerland, the term Humanités digitales is preferred because
of the richer reference to digitus (the finger) and the related concepts of doigté.
•Digital Humanities include a lot of hands-on approaches.
•Humanities that you do not only with your brains but also with your fingers.
•Time will tell which term will be preferred by the French speaking community.
o

Digital Studies
•Bernard Stiegler argues that the term
Digital Humanities is too narrow and
that the effects of digitalization go
beyond the field of the Humanities to
affect all the knowledge fields.
•He prefers to the term Digital studies by
opposition to Analog studies.
•The effects of digitalization must also be
studied on fields like physics, biology,
geology and other natural sciences.
o

Studies about digital culture
•The Digital Revolution is transforming
all aspects of our culture.
•3.1 Billion social network accounts, 1
Billion Facebook, 425 Million Twitter,
90 Billion emails/day, 325 Millions
photos shared/day, 1 Billion Google
searches/day
•Most DH scholars consider that studies
about digital culture are parts of Digital
Humanities
o

The right answer is (3)
D=Digital Studies
Humanities
o

Skill: Writing an academic blog post with Wordpress
o

From Wikipedia
•WordPress is a free and open source
blogging tool and a dynamic content
management system (CMS) based on
PHP and MySQL.
•It has many features including a plug-in
architecture and a template system.
•WordPress is currently the most popular
blogging system in use on the Internet
(60 millions websites)
o

From Wikipedia
•It was ﬁrst released on May 27, 2003, by
founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike
Little as a fork of b2/cafelog.
•As of September 2013, the latest version
3.6 had been downloaded over 6 million
times.
o

Demonstration : Inside dh101.ch
o

Assignment
•Write a blog post on dh101.ch presenting a current trend of DIgital Humanities by
presenting three selected abstract from the 2013 conference
•You can have a look at a the trend blog post on dh101.ch
•The abstracts can be found here : http://dh2013.unl.edu/abstracts/
•The blog post must have more than 500 words. It must not be a copy-and-past of
the discussed articles or another blog post.
•The blog post needs to be new and relevant for the global DH community
(remember dh101.ch is followed by many other DHers outside the class)
•This blog post counts for 30 % of your ﬁnal grade
•As you are a DH101 author, you can publish the abstract when you want on the
website. The Deadline is October 16th. Digital Humanities 101 - 2013/2014 - Course 2 | 2013 32
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Evaluation of the assignment and peer-reviewing
•Each assignment is going to be evaluated by the professor.
•It is the professor’s grade that will count as the official grade.
•For grading, the professor will follow a strict evaluation grid (next slide)
•In addition, each assignment will be graded by five students
•The student will follow the same evaluation grid.
•Students will be graded for grading (10 % of the final semester mark).
•If you do your grading seriously you should all get the maximum of these 10 %
•We will then compare if grading by student is similar to the grading by the professor.
o

The evaluation grid (0-6)
•The blog post has only original content (no copy-and-paste from the abstracts or other
sources)
• The blog post follows the guidelines of the assignment (it discusses three articles, it identiﬁes a trend)
• Grade will be at least 4, but can go up to 6 if the following requirements are met
• (Language) The English of the blog post is correct and clearly understandable +0.5
• (Wordpress) The blog post’s keywords are relevant and the blog post layout is adapted to its content +0.5
• (Content 1) The blog post is not just a summary of three articles, it really compares them. +0.5
• (Content 2) The blog post’s content is well argumented and the identiﬁed trend is interesting +0.5
• The blog does not follow the guidelines
• Grade = 3
•The blog post includes copy-and-paste of other sources
• Grade = 0
o

Next week: Massive digitization
o

The exercise of today will a collective investigation into a
open complex problem
o

Objective: Learning to divide a complex problem into
smaller chunks
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How can we digitize 80 km of archives in ten years ?
•Question 1: Estimate the number of
persons to be employed and their
function
•Question 2: Decide on the kind of
scanners to be used
•Question 3: Estimate the size of the
data storage needed
•Question 4: Estimate the overall budget
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How can we digitize 80 km of archives in ten years ?
•Strategy to answer these questions:
Divide them into a set of subquestions
to be checked ﬁrst.
•Write these subquestions in framapad.
•Put your name under the subquestion
you want to investigate.
•Start searching for information in groups
and write the relevant ﬁndings / URL on
the framapad
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