Bavarian Digital Humanities – Thriving

On Sept 2, 2015, I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with a full room of interesting and interdisciplinary scholars and colleagues about the state of Digital Humanities in North America. The conversation ranged wide and far, starting with my shoestring digital archive and concluding with looking at blogs by Digital Humanists. The age old question, and even Steve Ramsay’s dictum came up: does a Digital Humanist have to code? The conversation was surprising for both sides, but the colleagues in attendance were so varied that I was heartened by the sheer interest in not just content concerning Digital Humanities projects, but also the attendance and interest by, among them, computer science and the supercomputing lab (!). Formal details are below as was in the announcement. Below that are the varied links and websites that we traversed for ease of reference. What a wonderful evening of discussion about Digital Humanities!

Location: Besprechungsraum, Bavarian Academy of sciences
Sponsored by Prof. Dr. Hubertus Kohle
Dekan der Fakultät für Geschichts-und Kunstwissenschaften
Institut für Kunstgeschichte
LMU München

Title: Digital Humanities and Visual Culture
This symposium will focus on Digital Humanities projects literary and visual cultures and is based on Dr. Harris’ work on the 19th-century British literary annual and the subsequent digital archive. Over the last 5 years, Digital Humanities in North America has evolved into discrete arenas based on disciplinary need. Harris pulls together work in visual culture to demonstrate the primacy of the material object through her digital archival work.

Overview of all Resources in DH

Alan Liu’s DH Resources

Defining Digital Humanities

Definition in Wikipedia
Pannapacker article (speaks to incorporating DH into curriculum)
Kirschenbaum, What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” (PDF) (2011)
Kirschenbaum, “What is ‘Digital Humanities,’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?” (2014)
Ramsay, “Who’s In and Who’s Out?” (2011)

Locating other DHers

centerNet
Day in the Life of Digital Humanities (2009-2015)
DHNow
DH Questions & Answers
DHCommons
List of Digital Humanists on Twitter

Funding & Centers & Journals & Tools

Office of Digital Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities
Center for History & New Media, George Mason University
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska
Digital Humanities Quarterly
DIRT – digital research tools list with reviews (on some)
Digital Humanities Conference (yearly in different locations – proposal deadline coming up)
Programming for Humanists (at Texas A&M via online teaching)

Interesting Projects

The Archimedes Palimpsest Project (using multispectral imaging)
David Rumsey History Maps
Livingstone Project (another use of spectral imaging)
Mapping Time, Lev Manovich & Jeremy Douglass Time project (using supercomputers)
Ted Underwood – doing work on large data sets
Matt Jockers – doing work on large data sets
Planned Obsolescence – Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s blog
Transcribe Bentham – crowdsourced project (Melissa Terras)
Articles on using crowdsourcing methods & platforms by Melissa Terras & Tim Causer (both pdfs): http://t.co/QDlWwUbWQO and http://t.co/FBH1phU4dp
What’s on the Menu – Transcribing New York menus via crowdsourcing (NYPL)
Forget Me Not Hypertextual Archive (legacy project)
The Poetess Archive Database
Using Google analytics and Google spreadsheet for visualizations (Harris work on gothic short stories)
NINES — attempt to create a central location for nineteenth-century project, peer review, and standards
Lexos — a new project that is easy to use software for stylistic analysis