One thing to say about digital humanities
I’ve been asked to give a talk about digital humanities to the Professional Historian’s Association Historically Speaking session in Melbourne. Now, I’d class myself someone who keeps up with discussions about digital humanities in order to provide better, more useful and useable access to museum collections and associated information. But as I’m neither a historian, nor an actual practitioner of digital humanities, writing a talk presents an interesting challenge.
Over the weekend I realised that what I should be doing was asking for ideas and input from the digital humanities community. Hooray for Twitter, and for the networked community in helping me with my question. I posted a simple message, asking for contributions on what is one thing that I should tell the audience? I’m extremely grateful for the swiftness and generosity of the answers – and even the offer of a readymade slide deck introducing digital humanities. Thanks so much for that @wragge!
In summary, I will tell the audience these things:
What are the digital humanities and what does it value?
They are traditional humanities combined with IT; making them both history and future orientated.
The things historians care about, such as archives, interpretation, meaning and historiography don’t disappear just because you’re using technology. The technology is used as the mechanism for discovery.
Digital humanities emphasises collaboration as a virtue. The ‘lone wolf’ scholar is less the norm. Sharing ideas, resources, community allows practitioners to go further and learn more than they would working alone.
Is digital humanities just for geeks?
Digital humanities is something all researchers can be part of; it’s not just for large institutions and IT geeks.
You don’t have to learn coding but a bit of scripting can be useful. It’s also a way of thinking – working with getting messy data into a structure, or trying some scripting, helps develop computational thinking.
Digital humanities means *open* data!
Digital humanities researchers value collaboration and partnerships – and to make the most of these they promote publishing data with unrestrictive licenses for reuse, and utilising linked open data principles.
Plan, from day one, to publish the data as well as the book. Make that data linked and open, even if the synthesis comes much later.
If research is funded by public money it must be open, no excuses.
Thanks very much to Twitter contributors @jamesinealing @erodley @mia_out @leoba @rahtz @jamescummings @annettestr @CriticalSteph @bestqualitycrab @ericdmj @jenguiliano @wragge whose thoughts have been compiled above.
If you have any more thoughts to add, please do so – you’d be very welcome!
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