Starting Points for the Digital Humanities
16 December 2012
In response to a "Session on the Profession" we held in the Department of English earlier this month, I've received a few requests to circulate the resources presented. The following journals, tools, and communities provide some good starting points for anyone looking to experiment with their research or just learn a little bit more about current debates in the field. While many of these links are geared toward literary studies, I'd love to hear from others about the fundamentals of digital research in history, musicology, sociology, etc. This list is in no way meant to be exhaustive -- just to provide some points of entry for those looking to get started. For a more thorough introduction to digital humanities, check out Todd Presner's fantastic graduate syllabus at UCLA.
Journals
- Digital Humanities Quarterly
- Journal of Digital Humanities
- Literary and Linguistic Computing
- Vectors
- Digital Humanities Now
Communities
- HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory)
- Digital Humanities Questions and Answers from Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACM)
Database Management and Web Publishing
- Omeka -- Fast, open source web-publishing platform for the display of “library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions.”
- Drupal -- Highly extensible, useful for a variety of purposes. Not quite as user friendly as Omeka.
- Wordpress -- Useful for course blogs and personal sites.
- Scalar -- The "free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required."
Text Mining
- Voyant -- word frequencies and distributions.
- Corpus of Historical / Contemporary American English
- The Open Library -- “One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal.”
- Tapor (text analysis portal) - clearinghouse for a large variety of text analysis tools
- Juxta -- track shifts between multiple editions of a text or document
- Google Ngram Viewer -- graph the frequency of words or phrases across all of Google’s books data
Spatial Humanities
- Hypercities -- toggle between layers of historical maps in 27 cities around the world
- PhilaPlace -- Philadelphia project
- Euclid Corridor History Project -- Cleveland project