Introduction

In Module 1.3. Varieties of digital humanities, you learned about the different kinds of digital humanities (which we will refer to simply as “DH” from now on) projects. There are multiple ways of categorizing DH projects, which you might have explored in an activity with the rest of your class. You also learned about the different kinds of methods, processes, and activities that are used in DH, which we recap below:

• 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.

But how do you go about starting a DH project? To answer this question, we will divide the discussion and exploration in this unit (Unit 2) into two parts. In this module, we break apart the methods listed above into even more basic activities and processes that are used in DH projects. In the next module, we look at and experiment with different tools that can be used for DH projects.

A word of caution: just as not everything that is digital is DH, (your calculator app on your mobile phone is digital, but it is not example of a DH project), so it is that not everything that uses one of the methods above automatically qualifies it as DH. Take for example crowdsourcing. You can crowdsource computational power to help scientists solve protein-folding problems, or you could crowdsource human intelligence to solve certain kinds of mathematical or computational problems (this is called human computation), but neither one is a DH project.

Now read these

Read (or re-read) the three resources shown below, and see whether you can construct a set of simplified lists of the basic processes and activities involved in DH projects. Let’s call these simplified lists of basic processes and activities “frameworks”. In as much as there are many ways to categorize DH projects, so are there are many ways to deconstruct the basic processes and activities involved in DH projects, and the three readings in this module illustrate different ways of doing this. I myself have constructed five frameworks based on these readings, which I summarize in the next section. (Try not to jump ahead to the next section, though; read the resources first, construct your list of frameworks, and see how well your frameworks match mine.)

There may be some terms in the readings that are unfamiliar to you. For example, “accession” (as a verb) is the act of entering something into a collection or archive, or (as a noun) a new item that has been added to an existing collection or archive. “Metadata” is another important term in the DH which you might be unfamiliar with (unless you regularly author Web content); metadata refers to data about data. For example, the datum “Alice in Wonderland” refers to the title of a book while the datum “Lewis Carroll” refers to the author; however, “title” and “author” are the associated metadata. Metadata is very important digital archival work. For a good introduction to metadata, see Introduction to Metadata: Setting the Stage.

Another term you might encounter is “corpus”. Corpus (which means body) refers to the entire body of data that you are studying.

Use whatever resources on the Web are available for you to familiarize yourself with terms in the framework you create.

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Discussion

What are the fundamental processes and activities in DH? I’ve distilled the content from the readings into five different frameworks containing a set of verbs. These frameworks are not mutually exclusive; there is a lot of overlap between them! What’s most important is having you engage in the process of trying to make sense of the readings by breaking down the different activities in DH projects and arriving at a vocabulary you can use to convincingly describe your project to other DH practitioners.

Framework 1: Digital Curation Processes

(from Conceptualizing the framework for digital curation )

Framework 2: Scholarly primitives (v.1)

(from Unsworth, 2000, cited in A Design Methodology for Web-based Sound Archives )

Framework 3: Structure of Digital Humanities