Monica McTighe
mctighe@simmons.edu
LIS 489
Whitepaper on Digital Technology in the Humanities
September 24, 2014
The Field: In the last ten years, digital humanities have grown fast, due in
large part to government support of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Most of the interest in digital humanities has been among universities who see
this as an opportunity to snag dwindling government research dollars in the
humanities. In the last ten years, Chris Allen Sula has pointed out, publications
devoted to digital humanities have skyrocketed. In addition, international and
national associations for digital humanities have been organized including the
Alliance for Digital Humanities Organization (adho.org), the Association for
Computers and Humanities (ACH.org), and the Canadian Society for Digital
Humanities (csdh-schn.org). These organizations have spawned publications
devoted to the digital humanities such as the Journal of Digital Humanities and
Digital Humanities Quarterly and others.
Challenges and Opportunities: 1) Definitions: One of the first issues which
digital humanities archives and traditional archives both confront is how an
archive is defined. Kate Theimer points out that digital humanities archives and
traditional archives define themselves differently. Traditional archives are
concerned with intact collections, provenance, and authenticity whereas digital
archives tend to be databases composed of materials chosen by an editor or
curator from many sources. It raises the question: do the same professional rules
apply to digital archives as traditional archives? 2) The Silo Problem: Digital
humanities initiatives are mostly within the confines of universities and academic
institutes.
Take for instance, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities at the University of Virgina, which was begun to support the English
and History Departments. Often these academic fields, especially in the U.S.,
look down on digital humanities efforts as frivolous or trendy. Digital humanities
(and arts) should focus more on the possibilities of opening new areas of interest
outside academia. Digital humanities initiatives can be a great tool for outreach
in archives, museums and libraries. 3) Text-focused: Digital humanities seem to
be primarily focused on texts or literature. There is a great opportunity for visual
art institutions and living artists to use digital humanities as a form of outreach for
both their collections and archives. These initiatives should move out of the realm
of academic specialists to those who see the value of interdisciplinarity. 4)
Information Visualization: For these initiatives to work, designers of databases
and interfaces need to develop tools to make archives and collections both
interesting and navigable for the average user. This involves smart programming
and good design. Some of the programs that are being used include Viewshare,
which was developed by the National Digital Infrastructure and Preservation
Program at the Library of Congress. Viewshare is designed to be an informative
and easy-to-use interface to visualize collections. Chris Alen Sula argues that
good information visualization can open up new ways of understanding large
amounts of data and to understand and visualize changes over time. There are
other projects that try to address different aspects of the visual arts that are
perhaps not as useful.
For instance, Lev Manovich and his students at the
Software Studies Initiative produced graphics that show how the painter
Mondrian’s palette changes but it doesn’t attempt to trace a historical trajectory
for these changes. Despite this, these kinds of databases and interfaces have a
great deal of potential to help raise the profile of digital humanities.
Information Visualization in the realm of visual arts and culture is already
revolutionizing how some people do humanities research. It remains to be seen
if truly useful and beautiful interfaces will be developed for the average user to
gain access to this wealth of information.
Selected Sources:
http://www.archivesnext.com/?page_id=311
http://chrisalensula.org/digital-humanities-and-libraries-a-conceptual-model/
Algee, Lauren, Jefferson Bailey, and Trevor Owens, “Viewshare and the Kress
Collection: Creating, Sharing, and Rapidly Prototyping Visual Interfaces to
Cultural Heritage Collection Data,” D-Lib Magazine November/December
2012 Volume 18, Number 11/12
Clement, Tanya, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Jennie Levine Knies, "Toward a
Notion of the Archive of the Future: Impressions of Practice by Librarians,
Archivists, and Digital Humanities Scholars." Library Quarterly 83, no. 2
(April 2013): 112-130.