“Doing” Digital Humanities

1. “Doing” Digital Humanities A Practical Introduction Digital Interactions

2. Overview of this talk Several strands of DH work Barriers to entry, and support available DH as a postgrad Projects, funding, collaboration: academic DH at the post-doc level Employability Resources available Digital Interactions

3. Textual Analysis Corpus tools Ngrams Text mining Topic Modelling Stylistic Analysis Digital Interactions

4. Corpus Tools Voyant: http://voyant-tools.org/ also http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur/tools Google Ngram viewer: http://books.google.com/ngrams British National Corpus: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ BYU Corpora: http://corpus.byu.edu/ Digital Interactions

5. Text Mining, Topic Modelling, Stylistic Analysis All require pre-existing text corpora, more or less “clean” Text Mining Statistics, scripting Topic Modelling Easy to do (sort of); need statistics to analyze results Stylistic Analysis Language (R) is unintuitive and statistics-based Digital Interactions

6. TEXT MINING IS NOT A MAGIC BOX Interrogate the box! Support can be found: DH Seminars CRAL (for talk about corpora, corpus tools) Books to learn scripting DHAnswers (and the internet more generally) Speak to me Some existing interfaces: http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/node/176 Digital Interactions

7. Social Media Research Twitter – but also Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc Twitter’s business model: charge for access to the “firehose” Some free tools Webometric Analyst**, Snapbird, the Archivist, TAGS v3 Sites and tools constantly changing – keep local copies of data Ethics! Digital Interactions

8. Databases and Digital Archives Creating your own research data archive can be reasonably straightforward MS Access, MySQL Community Edition, others Can be moderately easy to use, but less easy to use well Database design classes available on Short Courses Back it up! Digital Interactions

9. Visualization Requires data to visualize http://selection.datavisualization.ch/ Some web scripting libraries Some stand-alone tools A different way of presenting results; can tie in with network analysis, geospatial work, etc Interpreting the visualizations rigorously often means understanding underlying data model Digital Interactions

10. Image Analysis Need good-quality images to start with; often done as part of a larger project Processing involves MatLab, maths Procedures and algorithms to manipulate signal data Can be used in restoration & conservation, reading damaged material, archaeology Digital Interactions

11. Geospatial Work Need data from somewhere (can be text data) Plotting data on maps can reveal new insights: http://sappingattention.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/reading-digital-sources-case-study-in.html#more Have ArcGIS licenses in DHC! Interactive maps likely to require more computing skills, web hosting, and other barriers (eg: Neatline is great, and does georectifying, if you are running Omeka…) Digital Interactions

12. Network Analysis Models relationships between entities (of various types) as a network Social networks are one key type of network, but have to avoid being reductive Requires vector maths to create and interpret networks Good free tools Digital Interactions

13. Less DIY Text encoding, corpus creation Digitisation, image capture Interactive geospatial work Large crowdsourcing projects Project management Tool development and infrastructure building Linked open data These things tend to require frameworks. Digital Interactions

14. DH as a postgraduate The final goal: thesis Something you can build and deploy within three years, while writing a book Institutional support available, but not large project teams Start early; manage your research data well (Note: Digital Economy Young Entrepreneur Scheme) Digital Interactions

15. Academic Digital Humanities at the Post-doctoral level Projects – particularly in academia, much DH work is “project-based” Funding – funded projects of varying lengths Collaboration – working in partnership with other academics and technologists Possibility to work in digital humanities in universities, museums, libraries, not as a lecturer Global digital humanities (Europe, US, Canada, Mexico… Australia, South and Central America) Digital Interactions

16. Employability Experience working with new technologies, managing projects, learning new skills Ability to work collaboratively is a big benefit Skills are relevant to employers outside academia; can be a hiring boost for postdocs (though this may not last) Academic and graduate job markets both EXTREMELY COMPETITIVE Digital Interactions

17. Find out more… Digitalhumanitiesnow.org Books (open access versions online): Debates in the Digital Humanities Companion to Digital Humanities Digital Humanities Quarterly (open access) Digital Interactions

18. The Joy of Digital Humanities “The work we do is graphical and structural and interactive. It’s increasingly material and mobile, and it’s almost never made alone. Whatever it is, like any humanities theorizing it opens some doors and shuts others, but it’s a style of scholarly communication that differs sharply from the dominant, extravagantly vocal and individualist verbal expressions of the last fifty to sixty years. And like any craft it’ll always be under-articulated.” - Bethany Nowviskie, “Resistance in the Materials” Digital Interactions

19. Resources Available DHC! CAS Digital Humanities Seminars Me (Erin.Snyder@nottingham.ac.uk, @EE_Snyder) Subject librarians Internet: Blogs, DHAnswers, HASTAC, Twitter The wider university community Digital Interactions