Approaching the Past

One Historian's Attempt to Better Understand the Digital Humanities

[momadrake-blog]

A stranger in a strange new land working on strange new things

I recently graduated with my MA in Public History and Museum Studies and moved to Ponce Inlet, FL (30 min from Daytona). I’ve nestled into my husband’s parent's house as we search for jobs. Two blocks from the ocean, two blocks from the river. It’s pretty neat. After being in school for the last three years, it’s a welcome respite. Thankfully, I’m able to stay engaged and maintain an online presence on the tiny inlet. 10 years ago, I can imagine that the ability to take a small break after graduation, move down to a remote inlet while maintaining contacts and connections would be difficult. Remote collaboration, however, is feasible.

I’m currently working on a project called Anecdoted City with the design collective1/X (said “one of X”). Anecdoted City is a crowd-sourced exhibit that aspires to understand place through community-submitted objects. The exhibit first premiered in Detroit, MI and received over 60 submissions and 500 attendees. This is impressive for a first-time, grass-roots community project. (Learn more about Anecdoted City here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/21/anecdoted-city-detroit-salt-cedar-design-_n_1903750.html)

It may suggest something with regards to how people learn and how people become engaged with their surroundings and the idea of urban/community space. How do they fit into a community, a city, a region. The exhibit allows people to actively participate in telling the story of place - their place.

I love this concept. Who knows better about a particular locale than the residents. This was apparent while participating in Picturing Milwaukee in the summer of 2012 (http://blcprogram.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/). We conducted oral interviews of residents in order to understand the historical transformation of the neighborhood. They told us more than we could’ve learned from any source, secondary or primary.

So, I am very excited to work with 1/X in constructing a better understanding of place. Next city: TBD

[momadrake-blog]

A Review of Two Digital History Conferences Recently Attended

In the last couple of weeks I’ve attended two very different conferences regarding the Digital Humanities (DH): The Dark Side of the Digital sponsored by the Century for 21st Century Studies (UWM) and Spark Fest - The Twin Cities Digital Humanities Symposium (UofM).

As suggested in the title, the Dark Side of the Digital contained presentations that delved into ethical issues surrounding authority, transparency, and privacy. However, Spark Fest, was more optimistic; it examined the ways in which humanities scholars are using the Digital to benefit both scholarship and the broader community. I would like to discuss each of these conferences in more detail and examine some of the more salient points brought up.

Spark Fest, held at the University of Minnesota, involved participants from diverse backgrounds (library science, programmers, historians, etc…) interested in how the digital humanities might advance scholarship as well as collaboration. Collaboration seemed to be the big buzz word of the conference. Attendees were very concerned with how to foster broader networks of collaboration. In my opinion, DH is a tool for doing this, but it seemed that many librarians were overwhelmingly represented and concerned with How to better foster DH projects conducted by faculty and narrowly within academia.

Important questions….for librarians. But as someone with a background in Public History and Museum Studies the power of DH, in my opinion, is in it’s ability to expand connections and collaboration outside of academia. The excitement for me, lies in engaging the general public to participate in the biography of things and the history of a community. I feel uncomfortable suggesting that three years of graduate work has prepared me to be the sole proprietor of information about, well, everything. I have come to feel very liberated in saying “I don’t know,” a product I believe of my years as a TA. But I think it’s an important lesson…”I don’t know” is a perfect spring-board to a shared authority. One in which I can feel comfortable facilitating.

The MVP of Spark Fest, in my opinion, was Mark Tebeau, an Associate Professor of History at Cleveland State University, who reiterated my sentiments in regards to DH - that it fosters collaboration within the wider human network. Tebeau along with other colleagues developed Curatescape, a mobile app framework for iOS & Android, designed to “curate the landscape” through the use of geo-located historical texts, archival film and images, oral history (and other) audio, and short documentary videos, as well as the website Cleveland Historical, a free mobile app that puts Cleveland history at your fingertips; Cleveland Historical lets you explore the people, places, and moments that have shaped the city’s history. These mobile apps are compatible with the content management software, Omeka. Situated on the internet, Omeka, a robust program that has the potential to allow visitors a chance to explore content discursively and even add content, has the capability of engaging those who may not otherwise be engaged with the history of a city, a biography of an object, or the collection of historical information broadly.

There were other amazing DH projects highlighted at the conference. The New York Public Library’s NYPL Labs developed the Stereogranimator, a tool for transforming historical stereographs from The New York Public Library and other participating organizations into shareable 3D web formats. The Stereogranimator is a fun tool for engaging the community; a good example of how to do DH outside the box.

Other interesting DH projects include the Guantanamo Public Memory Project, the Ancient Lives Project, and History Harvest among others.

The Dark Side of the Digital Conference, on the other hand, provided a word of caution against our hyper-connected society.

The keynote speaker, Julie Cohen, a professor at Georgetown who teaches and writes about intellectual property law and information privacy law, with particular focus on digital works and on the intersection of copyright and privacy rights, presented The networked self in the modulated society. Professor Cohen focused on several key questions. First, how is the network self configured? In relation to this first question she then asked whether or not the networked self sacrifices freedom for convenience in a digital realm of modulation and surveillance. Cohen questions the legality of obtaining, sharing, and regulating information. Finally, Cohen analyzes the forces shaping the networked self and the effect on the political economy. Cohen’s presentation was dense; too dense for me to sum up in a blog post. Fortunately, her presentation derived from her new book Configuring the Networked Self, from Yale University Press.

Other interesting presentations included Morgan Adamson’s work on the history of the Internet and its earliest conception as the NASDAQ stock system. Adamson suggested that NASDAQ allowed concrete abstractions to be made visible. The information contained on the NASDAQ stock exchange is supposed to suggest something to humans, however, the suggestion becomes a convoluted loop of financial projections that reiterate class domination and exploitation. This is important because, as Adamson stated in her presentation, this convoluted, abstract, and opaque system has been “mapped onto the entire world via pc and the web. in short, the genealogy of the Internet is inextricably linked to the financial market (Nasdaq network).

In conclusion, the difference between each conference does not suggest that attendees of one do not think or know about the issues brought up at the other, but it does signify the continued need to understand DH, a green and simultaneously emerging methodology and community. Attending each of these conferences within weeks of one another granted huge perspective. It allows me to be cautiously optimistic about DH rather than someone who blindly flails herself into the abyss of DH. I want to understand the world in which I create, this includes the promises and the pitfalls.

[momadrake-blog]

The New Neighbor in the DH Community: A welcoming group

I wasn’t greeted with a batch of homemade cookies or invited next door for a rousing game of Sheep’s Head, but I feel as though I’ve been welcomed into the DH community. Everyone I’ve encountered in the “neighborhood” is eager to accept the “new neighbor” and determine what their thoughts are on the future of DH. I feel that this eagerness is a manifestation of the dynamism of DH; its potential.

I am fascinated with the transmission of information with digital tools. I’m also fascinated by its potential. What do I mean by this? In Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, author Daniel Cohen likens the possibilities of DH to

early films, which were initially called ‘photoplays,’ and thus thought of as ‘a merely additive art form (photography plus theatre).’ Only when filmmakers learned to use montage, close-ups, zooms, and the like as part of storytelling did photoplays give way to the new expressive form of movies. (6)

Photos to movies; for anyone who has seen Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin the point becomes clear. The dynamism of the moving sequence, the montage, and the potential to play with close ups and pans revolutionized how we conceive time and space. It captured images not previously seen be the masses. It created a new dimension; the dimension of film. Can DH do this for the humanities? I really think so.

And it is this potential that makes the DH community such an inviting place. People aren’t as proprietary; they’re just excited to collaborate. The intense search for information overrides intellectual property. This might explain the boom in open-source communication.

The DH community is really proactive too. There are a slew of conferences, workshops, working groups, etc…dedicated to DH.

A recent conversation about the future of DH within the History Department at UWM was encouraging. As a soon-to-be graduate from the Public History program, I recognize the immediate need to set up courses dedicated to DH.

DH also has practical applications. Publishing no longer is the sole purview of the publishing company. Have work? publish it yourself. Make a name for yourself; get your work out there. Start a blog and talk about how you feel. The best part of using digital tools is it is both iterative and perpetual at the same time. I recently gave a presentation on using WordPress to set up an online professional/academic presence….which the participants were eager to use.

AND…Conferences that support the future of DH are popping up everywhere:

The Dark Side of the Digital Conference is coming up this week on the UWM campus. (program: http://www4.uwm.edu/c21/pdfs/conferences/2013_darkside/DSD_Program.pdf)

Spark Fest Digital is happening May 13-15 at the University of Minnesota

The Digital Humanities 2013 Conference is happening in Lincoln Nebraska July 16-19

AND there were entire sessions dedicated to DH at the OAH 2013 Conference in San Francisco and the NCPH 2013 Conference in Ottawa. If you missed them, go to George Mason University’s History News Network (some were filmed).

Also! If you haven’t already, join Twitter….Digital Humanists have an unhealthy obsession for tweeting everything DH. Follow groups like HASTAC, DH Q&A, DigitalHumanities2.0, NEH Dig Humanities, DigitalHumanitiesNow.

  That’s all for now….getting thee to thine computer!

[momadrake-blog]

Saluton Mondo!: An Historian's Attempt at Coding

My First "Program"

Recently, I've been working in an extra-curricular group of people who are teaching themselves how to code using NetBeans, an integrated development environment (IDE). NetBeans, developed by Oracle Corporation, is written in Java, a high functioning programming language. Java uses object oriented statements and commands (I.e. objects and verbs represent code and function) making it more intuitive for readers/writers

  The great news for humanities scholars who want to start learning basic programming is that corporations, like Oracle, have developed platforms like NetBeans that use the java language AND  compilers built into the IDE. Compilers allow high functioning language like java to be turned into machine code so that computers can "understand" the function that they are to perform making one less maddening step for programmers.

  Why is this important!? leave me alone! I'm an historian - not a programmer. This may seem like gobbly-gook nonsense, an extra-terrestrial language. Totally foreign, right?

  Yes, programming requires learning a different language, but humanities scholars should not fear spending some extra time learning how to use basic programming using NetBeans or other IDEs. The importance of understanding coding and program infrastructure will be (or already is) as vital to the reception of your work as any analog version now. A book, a thesis, a paper has structure and is modular in the sense that it is divided into sections. Scholars learn the basics of structure as well as grammar and syntax (the rules of language) to better transfer our ideas. All of the research in the world is useless without a way to express it, and express it well. Understanding the basics of programming is no different.

  It's important to step back from the stack of books in your house, office, car....and understand ways in which computers and computer programs can better serve the humanities. Historians who learn how to code, can design programs and website that ask computers to perform functions specific to humanities research.

  What does this mean? It gives digital humanist the potential to inspire new theories, rework old ones, and present ideas in new ways. The opportunity to create new pedagogical and research methods. The opportunity to get on board with something that is coming whether or not you decide to lift your nose out of the book.

  It's not hard to get involved and you don't have to start with programming. Follow webpages of institutions dedicated to digital humanities such as HASTAC or The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Read Journals such as the Journal of Digital Humanities and follow digital humanists on tumblr and twitter!

Good night and have a more digitized tomorrow!

[momadrake-blog]

The Way We Work, Play, and Perceive

The last several posts I’ve made in regards to the Digital Humanities (DH) have been theory based. But I would like to take a step back from the precipice of theoretical DH concerns and focus on the way we work, play, and perceive the world in the 21st century - essentially, the use of the Digital Humanities practically.

We’ve looked at many variants on the definition of the digital humanities; here, I use a very broad approach. In essence, I’m defining DH as a means towards recording, documenting, exposing, and sharing society and culture.

Several weeks ago, I went to a presentation given by Sara Dean, a design instructor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI. Her presentation, “From Form to Platform: Designing for Connectivity” made me start to think about ways in which DH has already altered the way in which we do work, the way we play, and the way we perceive the world.

Because ready or not, we affect digital forms and digital forms have begun to affect us. Dean looked at the significance of the Postdigital, the way in which our culture and society is transformed by digital applications. “Fascinating!” I thought to myself whilst also thinking “Postdigital! I’ve only first started to peel back the layers of the digital!”

So, wait, “what is the Postdigital?” you may ask. Author Mel Alexenberg describes it as work  “that address the humanization of digital technologies through interplay between digital, biological, cultural, and spiritual systems, between cyberspace and real space, between embodied media and mixed reality in social and physical communication, between high tech and high touch experiences, between visual, haptic, auditory, and kinesthetic media experiences, between virtual and augmented reality, between roots and globalization, between autoethnography and community narrative, and between web-enabled peer-produced wikiart and artworks created with alternative media through participation, interaction, and collaboration in which the role of the artist is redefined.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postdigital)

As I pondered further the notion of the digital and the Postdigital, I realized that they exist mutually and play off of one another. The process is not causal, it is simultaneous. The Postdigital happens as digital forms change the way we think about the world: the way we work, play, and perceive it.

It occurred to me then, that perhaps the Postdigital has already invaded my ideas like other memes that just seem to persist like the “I haz cheeseburger” cat. It also occurred to me that the Postdigital has altered the way we work, play, and perceive the world.

“How has it?” I wondered? One particular example I thought of right off the bat was the trend of “story telling” that has erupted on the “scene.” For example, Milwaukee’s ExFabula story telling framework can be seen as a resurgence of physical story telling following the explosion of blogging spots that allow people to capture their thoughts and share them broadly with the world.

“What about me?” “Has it changed me?” I wondered. If I juxtapose Mel Alexenburg’s definition of Postdigital to DH as I broadly defined it, I might say it was synonymous!

The essence of the Postdigital is wrapped around the work that digital humanists do. The “real” (museum object, literary text, primary source document, exhibition, art) is made available for analysis, research, and understanding via the digital realm. As part of the museum studies program, the digital is NEVER meant to replace the museum object, but to democratize its use. The object is the focus, not the digital.

Instead of belaboring the point with words, I will display some of the ways that the digital has been infused into my work, play, and perception. How it has augmented it, not replaced it and how my work simultaneously uses the digital and transforms the digital.

Work: Like many other scholars, I have begun to record processes of historical research as well as the community of historians that I belong to. Also, open source communication has revolutionized the way people understand and relate to information.

Research at MPM: http://s59.photobucket.com/user/ekard17812001/media/research.mp4.html

Play and Perception: Apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Vine, and Instagram have changed the way we look at the world. Likened to the relativity of dimensionality, apps have transformed our scope of perception.

http://s59.photobucket.com/user/ekard17812001/media/Landing.mp4.html

[momadrake-blog]

Implications of a Modular Society

In critique of my blog post last week regarding my almost blind excitement for the potential of Digital History to democratize information, I have come across several articles and books in the field of Critical Code Studies that endeavor to look beyond simply what code does and more deeply at how the structure of code and computing languages have been reinforced by AND have reinforce the socio-cultural milieu since the second half of the 20th century.

I will specifically explore the article by Tara McPherson, “Why are the Digital Humanities so White? Or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation.” McPherson examines how computer codes, languages, and operating systems created in the post WWII/Cold War Era and parallel to the Civil Rights Movement have developed in response to these social factors. McPherson suggests that languages like C++ and Operating systems such as UNIX may have been organized to further isolate race as well as “cordon off race and contain it.” (Debates in the digital humanities 143)

In essence, McPherson states that “if digital computing underwrites today’s information economy and is the central technology of post-World War II America, these technologized ways of seeing and knowing took shape in a world also struggling with shifting knowledges about and representations of race” (Debates,143)

The 1960s Civil Rights Movement can be seen as an historical event that underwrote more covert forms of racism in the second half of the 20th century. Those who pushed for socio-political change such as women, African Americans, Native Americans, and the LGBT community saw shifts in their status as human beings and as citizens of the United States of America. However, it may also have established a shift towards more covert policies of sexism, racism, and homophobia encoded not only in our computational systems, but also in various other physical manifestations.

Consider the policy of urban renewal and highway construction in the Mid-20th. under the guise of urban revitalization, the United States Government underwrote policies of slum clearance, redlining, and highway construction. In tandem, these policies essentially razed homes in predominantly poor and minority neighborhoods to make room for the construction of highway systems that bisected their communities. Once highway systems were in place, the poor and minorities in search of homes were directed by realtors to a specific side of the highway. The highways became physical barriers that separated blacks from whites and poor from affluent. This spatial modularity is evident in the rise of black ghettoes in the 1970s and 1980s.

Spatial and technological modularity can be understood as such: discrete nodes that do not intersect. Thus, humans, in regards to ghettoization and ideas about humans in regards to the rise of modularity in computing culture, do not interact. Their is a lapse in integration and understanding. McPherson calls this “lenticular logics” an analogy to “the rigid coating on 3-D postcards…a structural device that makes simultaneously viewing of the various images on the card nearly impossible.” (Debates, 144)

Why is this so important? Because modularity does not favor context. How can we understand the problem in regards to computing culture? Computing languages are made up of strands of code that mean something in our culture, it can be related to the Sassurian concept of the signified and the signifier, I.e. humans suggest the meaning for an abstract symbol of something real. Because humans create meaning, racism, sexism, and homophobia have the potential to be written into code. But, even more than that, computing systems are becoming increasingly MORE module for ease of use. Early operating systems like UNIX that are long strands of code encrypted onto software and in some ways more transparent are giving way to web-based applications and cloud computing. Modules are independent of information from other modules, for example apps do not “talk” to other apps. Therefore, the possibility of code embedded with racial or sexist undertones or meaning, has the potential to slip into a module that is discrete and non-contextualized. For someone using the module, like an app, systems of meaning in regards to code are nearly invisible, but that does not mean they are not there.

McPherson suggests that the increasing move towards modularity in computing parallels the rise of modularity in other sections of society including the university. Increasingly, the university system created departments to “accommodate” a more pluralistic point of view in the 1970s. Yet, it is suggested that departments act as silos or nodes, where professors and students of one discipline rarely speak with those of others. professionalism has undermined communication.

As a member of the intradepartmental MGAA, I can say that this is absolutely true. It is very difficult to foster communication even with a common self interest such as workers’ rights. This is equally clear in regards to the lack of Digital courses offered to humanities students. There are programs on UWM campus that have the potential to foster DH; yet, those courses not listed under one’s program and course catalog are all but invisible.

To conclude, DH is not the answer to all of our pedagogical prayers. While, DH and other forms of computation might, in some ways democratize information, it also increasingly erases context in favor of ease and modularity. It is important as historians to be diligent in exploring not only what programs do, but how they work and what their language means so that we do not fall prey to the lenticular lens. Equally, we must extract ourself from module thinking. Professionalism should not challenge open communication and cross-disciplinary work. It is with physical manifestations of modularity like the university system or urban renewal, that the issues with computational language and modularity can be better understood.

[momadrake-blog]

A Query in the land of Curriculum

On February 15th and 16th, I was involved in the Midwest Labor and Working Class History (MLWCH) Colloquium that was hosted by graduate students in the UWM History Department. I was part of a two-person panel called “Violence and the Dynamism of Urban Growth, Segregation and Unrest.” I would love to admit that my presentation (Local Protest against National Policy: The Sherman Park Community Association vs. The Park West Freeway) was the “hot” topic during the Q&A session; however, my colleague Lucas Wolff, who wrote a paper called “the ‘Cultural Deprivation’ of Milwaukee’s Youth: Two Interpretations of a Problematic Challenge” garnered many questions…his particular research topic looked at how text books in the American curriculum of the 1960s neglected to add anything but a mainstream historical narrative, an “American Mythology” if you will, that neglected to add historical narratives such as women’s history, African American History, LGBT history, etc. These narratives were all but lacking in school curricula for much of the 20th century and still today are in many ways absent from mainstream education. In Milwaukee in the 1960s, as Luke’s paper states, African American youths demanded to see a history that included the African American perspective in their school textbooks. The DH revolution was still another 45 years away, but still those excluded from the mainstream curriculum pushed for democratization of information and inclusivity.

Questions in regards to Luke’s paper revolved around ways to be inclusive in the classroom…clearly, in the past, an overt policy to write and record a vanilla white history was all but accepted until protests in the 1960s demanded a more comprehensive narrative, but even today, we have problems of inclusivity whether due to pragmatics or politics.

How, in a multicultural world can we be more inclusive in our curriculum? While the question was essentially directed towards Luke, I could not help but report my excitement over digital humanities. How can we re-imagine the classroom? I think if as scholars we re-imagine ourselves as educators and facilitators we might find the answer wrapped up in the potential of DH where we, as facilitators of information can impart kernels of knowledge and snip-its of info which can further be exercised by the students themselves using digital tools.

How is this different from the encyclopedias of yesteryear you may ask? The transfer of information has expanded exponentially! Students can research X subject and find not only an encyclopedic definition, but via the web they might find photographs, sounds/music, relevant bibliographies, videos as well as crowd-sourced information, etc…also, as public institutions such as libraries and museums fight for funds and grants to operate, they are expected to make collections and content more available to the public. Therefore, we have a means towards democratized information via the web and DH tools and institutions that are using it and making more and more information/collections available to those interested in studying it.

As I read through more and more articles regarding DH and examine further the potential to connect people to information using DH tools, I am more optimistic regarding the state of education. Students no longer merely have to wait for publishers to put out new textbooks in the hopes that a more comprehensive history will be included. In fact, unless you were a white male with property and some relationship to west-ward expansion, The American Revolution, or the Signing of the Declaration of Independence, whose history does show up in textbooks about American History?

[momadrake-blog]

Digital Humanities and Digital Humanists: Still Green

In reading through the articles from pages 50 to 127 in “Debates in the Digital Humanities,” some over-arching questions continually arise with regards to the definition and exact nature of the Digital Humanities: for starters, “What is it?” Matthew Kirschenbaum from the University of Maryland suggests that DH is a “term of tactical convenience.” (Debates in the digital humanities, 68) Ed Finn of Stanford University states that the digital humanities, “defines the overlap between humanities research and digital tools.” (Debates…, 68). However, I was most struck by the definition given by Jason Farman of the University of Maryland, who suggested that DH is “both a methodology and a community.” (Debates…, 68) Although I found these definitions still very vague, I believe that they are intentionally vague. DH is looking less like an exact discipline. Rafael C. Alvarado points out in his article “The Digital Humanities Situation,” that “instead of a definition, we have a genealogy, a network of family resemblances among provisional schools of thought, methodological interests, and preferred tools, a history of people who have chosen to call themselves digital humanists and who in the process of trying to define the term are creating that definition.” (Debates…,50) DH is new, the term remains purposely vague….of course as academics, we feel compelled to impose an order on DH. To categorize it, to understand it completely, but mainly to qualify and substantiate it. How we gauge DH work is important for reasons such as funding and promotion/tenure. Largely, organizations that give funding and those who oversee promotion and tenure require projects to have some sort of recognizable worth or value. This is something that digital humanists struggle with because many platforms have been designed with numerical languages. Beneficial for the sciences (mapping and GIS, aggregate data, etc…); however,platforms that deal directly with the core theoretical issues of DH are lacking. these issues are concerned with quality vs quantity as well as those that can address humanities issues such as time, space, interpretation, experience, etc. computing “languages” that can address and expand upon these issues are still being developed. Yet, here in lies the paradox, the availability of funding for experimentation, or essentially “play” is few and far between. Granting agencies often fund projects that have a demonstrable “worth” or outcome. Equally, humanists who may intimately understand the problems with existing platforms do not have the incentive to work on DH platforms that use a “language” commiserate with the core issues of the humanities because there is no schema to judge their importance or worth or success. In the end, it’s easier to work on “safe” projects that can be evaluated by a panel overseeing promotion and tenure. In conclusion, it will be important for digital humanists to create platforms that are developed specifically for humanities inquires (as opposed to those that use a numerical language and are developed for disciplines in the sciences). This will require that humanists take on the responsibility of learning how to code and creating a digital language that can jive with humanities questions. When we come to understand digital languages better we will hopefully be able to use platforms to create new theories rather than simply showing old theories in new ways. r

[momadrake-blog]

Digital Humanities: First Thoughts

It has occurred to me over the course of my academic career that understanding a) what the digital humanities are b) how to use them to further my research as well as accessibility to research….was paramount to making myself both more marketable to employers, but more importantly more interested in the future of humanities communication. DH is like space, it’s new, exciting, largely unknown, and changing the way that scholars in the humanities do their work.

For me, the prospects are fascinating in that DH has the potential to foster communication and scholarship among a vast array of disciplines. No longer are we relegated, as historians, to the academic boundaries of “yore.” The use of DH for historical inquiry is as important to the field as post-modernism was in the late 1970s/1980s in opening up fields of historical inquiry to look bottom-up as well as consider the importance of sub-disciplines such as women’s, LGBT, environmental, etc….perspectives in history.

But, my excitement parallels my confusion. What is DH? To better understand this nebulous new world. I began reading Debates in the Digital Humanities, a compilation of essays and blog posts by scholars in the humanities with the same drive to understand what, exactly, DH is.

I began, naturally, with Part I of the book entitled: defining the digital humanities. I started with Matthew k. Gold’s “The Digital Humanities Moment.” Gold states that “…the digital humanities is not just ‘the next big thing’…but simply ‘the Thing’.” (Gold, ix) I understood this to mean that DH is not simply some flash-in-the-pan trend like slap bracelets or jeggings, but here, permanently. Why is DH so important, why is it here to stay? The question is not easily answerable, but I believe it rests on the fact that public institutions and academic departments dedicated to the humanities are in some was floundering under the weight of stagnancy and lack of funding. DH invigorates scholarship and offers new and affordable ways to reach the public and foster collaboration between other disciplines and scholars. And accessible it is, application service providers (ASP) allow information to exist on the web (the cloud) as opposed to our desktops. We are constantly carrying our work around with us as if it were a digital briefcase.

However, the ability to include all disciplines and share work is not encouraging to all. Gold looks at the topic, metaphorically titled “The Big Tent” at the 2011 Digital Humanities Conference. The scholarly camp has divided between those who maintain that a division in scholarship should be maintained (a la traditional scholarly projects) and those who insist that it can do more, including reshaping the traditional university system (I definitely find myself in the latter category).

Also, the definition of what it means to be a Digital Humanist varies from person to person. Some insist that understanding how to use DH as part of their scholarly methodology makes them a Digital Humanist. Others insist that one must be able to program and CREATE new tools that will benefit research. We actually had this conversation in a class I had in which I thought it was not necessary to learn code. I have since (over the course of several semesters and readings including Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters) changed my mind. I think basic coding is imperative to revolutionizing scholarship, research, and the boundaries to both set by the traditional academy.

Of course as Gold states, there are real problems in using DH, such as the collation of information posted on ephemeral sites such as Twitter, but I’m confident that this can be rectified with, yes, good programming.

In conclusion, my first thought on DH are directed away from the traditional academy and towards DH as a tool that fosters better communication, accessibility, as well as opportunities for cross-disciplinary work, new fields in the humanities, and the opportunity for DigitL Humanists to get involved and learn how to build the apps that serve their methodologies.

Until next time….