Medieval History
- Challenging Crisis Discourses
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the genre of "crisis discourse" in relation to scribal, print, and digital media in both past and contemporary cultures. Many readers familiar with the early modern emergence of print will doubtless be familiar...
- What Is The Role Of Enumerative Bibliography In The Digital Age?
I think it is obvious from my posts on this blog, or if you follow my Twitter account, that I have been spending a lot of time the last several months considering digital humanities and my role in it. As I have been reflecting on how I fit in, I realized...
- Directory Of Software Tools For Humanists
Directory of software tools for humanists Software is a key component that supports research in the humanities. Humanists use a diverse range of tools, from word processors and XML editors to more specialised bespoke tools, at every stage of the research...
- Reviews Of Online Resources: Call For Dm 6
This is a call for contributions for the next issue of the Digital Medievalist journal (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/). As we all know, there are now many scholarly resources which have been published online as websites but which have never...
- Digital Humanities Post
Applications are invited for two 2 ½ year fixed term positions with the Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO), a national digital humanities centre located in Dublin, Ireland. Digital Humanities Specialist The Digital Humanities Specialist will promote...
Medieval History
Thoughts on "Digital" and "Humanities" in the Everyday
Since this is my first post on this blog, I want foremost to thank Matt for inviting me to join the conversation. I look forward to seeing what comes of it. As my first post, I want to offer some thoughts on a methodological issue that has been on my mind especially in the last several weeks.
The other day, in conversation with a graduate student colleague and friend about current hot-topic trends in academia--what I, at the time, called "sexy buzzwords"--the topic of "digital humanities" came up. When I expressed my thoughts about how the topic is so prevalent at the moment (e.g. the recent MLA conference, several recent job talks in our department discussed it, etc.), my friend offered a joking but pointed response, to the effect of "I wonder if that's just a trend, and when they'll realize that it's just the way we all work now."
I acknowledge that this is a controversial question, and my thoughts on it are still forming as I read more around the topic. Of course I think that considering the pairing of digital tools and humanities is important--and there are some important conversations going on about this subject--but I do wonder to what extent the digital just presents new tools that we are becoming increasingly aware of and appropriating into our scholarship. After all, we never called our work "print [text?] humanities" when we relied on print technologies for our dominant tools of research and scholarly production. I have some genuine questions about this. Is the idea of "digital humanities" perhaps a way of drumming up new attention (and money) for humanities research with exciting and catchy appeal? Is it more than that, and if so, how and what? What are we to make of "digital" within humanities work, and how do we really define "digital humanities" as a new mode of working?
Thinking about this issue made me reflect on my own scholarship, and how much of it is entrenched in the digital, whether or not I consider myself a conscious participant in digital humanities. This has become most evident as I've thought about the process of putting together my first article publication, ?Staffordshire Hoard Item Number 550, a Ward Against Evil,? Notes and Queries ns 58 (2011). So I created a list of digital aspects of the process--while probably not comprehensive, I do think it is representative--from 2009 to publication in 2011:
- Official news of the Staffordshire Hoard discovery spreading across the internet (how I learned of it in the first place), including news websites, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Images appearing on The Staffordshire Hoard website (http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/), where I first saw the gold piece with the inscribed psalm (Item 550)
- Digital release of the official scholarship by Kevin Leahy, "The Staffordshire Hoard: Discovery and Initial Assessment," on The Staffordshire Hoard website
- Searching the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: World Wide Web Register (http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk) to discover uses of the inscribed psalm in Anglo-Saxon literary sources, supplemented by searching the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/) for Latin-Old English possibilities
- Posting my initial thoughts on my former blog, where I first received feedback and encouragement to pursue the connections
- Further research as I prepared the note for publication--including use of library databases, the interlibrary loan system, and especially the use of the digitized version of Sabatier's edition of Bibliorum sacrorum Latinae versiones antiquae, seu Vetus Italica on GoogleBooks
- Electronic (email) submission of the note and editorial correspondence about review, acceptance, revisions, contract, and publication
- Electronic correspondence for page proofs and corrections (via email, based on pdfs and review features back and forth between me and journal staff)
- Publication online through Oxford Journals, both online (http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/) and in print form
Needless to say, while considering all of this, it quickly became apparent that the inscribed gold piece would have never come to my attention, and the article would have never been possible to pursue, without the prevalence of electronic media and access to digital tools at my disposal. Also curious is how much the presence of the digital was a natural part of this process for me--reflective of the more general trend in my own work to turn to electronic resources every day as I conduct my research. (Of course, there is also some implicit notion of closed-/open-access types of resources, and the commercialization and commodification of digital tools, but this is not the post to address these issues.) Yet what is most apparent to me is that none of this is uncommon; it is just the way I work.
- Challenging Crisis Discourses
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the genre of "crisis discourse" in relation to scribal, print, and digital media in both past and contemporary cultures. Many readers familiar with the early modern emergence of print will doubtless be familiar...
- What Is The Role Of Enumerative Bibliography In The Digital Age?
I think it is obvious from my posts on this blog, or if you follow my Twitter account, that I have been spending a lot of time the last several months considering digital humanities and my role in it. As I have been reflecting on how I fit in, I realized...
- Directory Of Software Tools For Humanists
Directory of software tools for humanists Software is a key component that supports research in the humanities. Humanists use a diverse range of tools, from word processors and XML editors to more specialised bespoke tools, at every stage of the research...
- Reviews Of Online Resources: Call For Dm 6
This is a call for contributions for the next issue of the Digital Medievalist journal (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/). As we all know, there are now many scholarly resources which have been published online as websites but which have never...
- Digital Humanities Post
Applications are invited for two 2 ½ year fixed term positions with the Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO), a national digital humanities centre located in Dublin, Ireland. Digital Humanities Specialist The Digital Humanities Specialist will promote...