Introduction

In the previous module, the readings described how projects are the fundamental unit in the digital humanities. There is a wide variety of digital humanities projects. In this module, you will take a look at some examples and do some initial analysis.

Now read these

Below are links to different digital humanities projects across the globe to demonstrate the diverse varieties of digital humanities. As you explore each project, consider the following questions:

• Context: What is the purpose of this project? Why did the author of the project create the project? What is the story behind the topic? Why was it conceptualized? What was/were the driving force/s?
• Research Questions or Problems: What was the author trying to “solve”? Or what information do they want to extract? Perhaps there were inadequacies or problems associated with the existing research on the topic.
• Methodology: How was the work undertaken? What did they actually do? How did they deal with original source material, and what did they do with it?
• Potential Significance: Why does this project matter? Under which field or discipline does it belong? Are there more than one disciplines involved? What is/are its contribution/s to its related field?

If you do not have time to take a look at all of these projects, choose three projects at random and apply the questions above to those. But make sure to browse through as many of these as you can. Think about spending no more than 2-3 minutes per example.

Note that some of these sites will take a while to load. They contain a lot of images and dynamic content.

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Discussion: Methods, Processes, and Activities in the DH

There are many different ways to categorize digital humanities projects. For example, you could categorize projects based on the type of media that they use as source material:

• Text
• Images
• Audio
• Video
• Numerical or relational data

One of the readings from Module 1.1., What is a Digital Humanities Project?, gives another way to understand the variety of digital humanities initiatives—by looking at the methods, processes, and activities that were used to create the project:

• Recording source materials into a database, usually from an archive.
• Digitizing and preserving archives.
• Conducting interviews and ethnographic studies, usually coded for thematic and discourse analysis.
• Transcribing manuscripts, letters etc for a digital scholarly edition, including variorum and genetic editions.
• Coding data for qualitative and distant reading methods, including codebooks and domain ontologies.
• Analyzing large archives, such as newspapers, journals and picture libraries.
• Compiling and analyzing social media content.
• Compiling and annotating audio-visual databases (audio, images and video).
• Immersive technologies, such as 3D virtual reconstruction, augmented reality, and virtual worlds.
• Crowd-sourcing (sometimes called citizen science).
• Web apps, mobile apps, websites, virtual exhibitions, online research resources, user-generated content.
• Map-based approaches, such as historical GIS and walking tour apps.
• Corpus linguistics, dialectology, stylometry, translation studies, and other approaches to language study (written or verbal).
• Data visualization of humanities content, such as social network diagrams and cluster diagrams.

Note that a single project may involve multiple activities and processes from this list.

Activities

Activity 1.3.1. Create your own classification

If you were to create a classification for the examples of projects that you’ve seen, what would that classification look like? In other words, if you were asked to group the different projects shown above into clusters, how would you do it? How would you describe the variety of digital humanities projects out there?

One way of going about this is to consider your answer to the questions presented above: What kinds of different purposes did the different project creators have? Why were these projects conceptualized? What were the driving force/s? Under which field or discipline does each project belong? Are there more than one disciplines involved?

Don't worry about getting things "right" at this moment. The important thing is to activate the pattern-recognition part of your brain and apply it to the subject of the digital humanities! Starting next module, we will be looking at one way of categorizing digital humanities projects.