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Alex, the file may not work, as the .pdf/print function doesn’t work well translating the site’s plug-in content into a static document. But the original url, as listed in the Zotero metadata for “Topic Modeling by Hand,” works just fine. If you’re having trouble with your browser displaying that content, you might need to switch browsers.
It seems that we’ve come up with some more ideas on our own, as well as in conjunction with the reading. Not only what a project does, but its scale; not only where it is, but the possibilities and limits of its medium; not only by whom, but with what sort of partners and input.
Becky had asked about the criteria I was putting on a google doc during our session. Here it is, free for you (or, for that matter, anyone else) to add or revise: http://goo.gl/MrnDbk
Several of you (Alex, Katlin, Becky) are thinking of some sort of digitization projects. That’s great, insofar as the great universe of undigitized stuff there is out there, and you’re all working with fascinating stuff.
But also think remember that mere digitization, as useful as it may be, does not in and of itself make a digital humanities project. It might constitute an archiving project, or a publicity project, but might not in and of itself be a digital humanities project–the same way that collecting non-digital sources in an archive or scrapbook might be a useful preservation project, but would not count as a contribution to the humanities.
Remember that to be doing the digital humanities means addressing a question, a challenge, in the humanities, in DH praxis, or both. That might mean building a new tool or method that can help humanists do their work. It might mean showing how an existing tool can be used to answer an important humanities question. It might mean using digital methods to disseminate findings, or to foster intellectual community, or offer an interpretation in ways that a more traditional delivery method (i.e., print) cannot.
Let me offer you a corollary. If you were in a literature class, and asked to write a paper, you might start by collecting six Mark Twain novels. Great! But merely digitizing something on a small scale is the equivalent: that is, it’s the gathering of the material in one place. The harder question is, what can you do with it that can be a contribution to knowledge? In that literature class, your professor would then ask, “What are you going to do with those books that will be a contribution to our knowledge on Twain, or literature?” Similarly, when you think of a digitization project, if that is going to be the project that you’re going to write a proposal for, will it be an interpretation of that material? Will it be some way of displaying the material that is innovative? Will it be some new way of interacting with material online?
It’s not that digitization isn’t useful, and time-consuming. The question is the next step.
OK, since no one’s jumping in, and I shouldn’t ask of anyone else what I would be unwilling to do, here goes…
The project that I’m working on is called the Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD). A big challenge in the digital humanities is preservation. In the study of early American history over the past four or five decades, many historians have used quantitive methods, and in doing so had to compile datasets. These are from a variety of sources, depending upon the historian and the project: census, probate records, tax lists, militia muster rolls, church journals, business ledgers, city directories, ship manifests, and so on. But in the humanities, unlike the sciences, the culture of scholarship is to publish the analysis but to keep one’s own notes and data. So many datasets are retiring or will die with their original compilers–and almost none are accessible to other scholars or the public.
Because the project hasn’t been officially announced, I don’t want to speak for anyone, but I’ll be working with a prominent historian of early American whose done a great deal of quantitative analysis, along with a center that sponsors early American research, to construct an online repository for these datasets and future datasets where they can be preserved, and publicly accessible. So far, signs are encouraging: the center’s host institution library is amenable to hosting the project on its electronic institutional repository. More anon.
What are other folks’ ideas?
There are a couple of threads in here that continue to address the question, “what is (digital) (humanities) scholarship?” I’d like to push back a bit on the contention that building a useful tool, or a website, or some other sort of digital humanities project is necessarily scholarship. A twelve-year-old can build an iOS app that sorts pictures, or write a blog about books she’s read. Those projects may in fact be useful, fascinating, insightful, fun… but are they necessarily scholarship?
Perhaps we need to think along two axes. One is the degree to which work in a particular medium is accepted by a field as appropriate. Chemists and biologists present at poster sessions, which some humanities scholars find laughable (cue the snarky comments about mobiles and shadow boxes). But for their part, most scientists would get zero, zilch, zippo, nada scholarly credit for writing a book; such works are too long to be of use, and take so long to publish that any findings within might be out of date before the book even hits the shelves. I recently was party to a conversation in which a bona fide digital humanist dismissed coding as not a humanistic scholarly production. So again, what kinds of endeavors both fit the “digital” and the “humanities”?
The second axis is the criteria or rigor that must be applied for something to qualify as DH scholarship. Should someone get scholarly credit for building a tool and making it available? Anyone can write an essay and post it on her blog, or even write a book with all sorts of footnotes about a humanities topic that would get published, and scholars would have a pretty clear sense of whether it was scholarship or not (I’m look at you, pseudo-historian David Barton) Similarly, anyone with an internet connection can mount something on github. So, just as we need to determine what media or modes of production qualify as DH scholarship, we need to better determine what counts as DH scholarship. The advantage of grant-funded work is that, in order to be funded, it passed through a rigorous review process. The interesting thing about that, though, is that the grant process evaluates the proposal, not necessarily the results. It would be like being credited for a beautiful conference proposal abstract, with no reference to the quality of the actual paper presented, or scholars kvelling over a dissertation prospectus rather than actually reading the dissertation that resulted from it, no matter the final product. Certainly there are reviews in blogs and some publications, like DH Quarterly or the Journal of DH. But there aren’t many of these venues; furthermore, they sometimes review one iteration of a project, but not additional ones that may be crucial. How do we collectively decide or “know” what makes the grade?
