We’ve learned about the general methods involved in DH from Module 1.3. Varieties of digital humanities and have broken them down into even more granular activities and processes such as “scholarly primitives”, as discussed in Module 2.1. Methods, activities, and processes. Now we explore (and get to experiment with) some examples of digital tools used to create DH projects.
One of the most important aspects of engaging in a digital publishing or archiving project is that you should use tools that can support the kind of metadata that you want to include. Most of the content management tools that you might already be familiar with (WordPress, Wix, Tumblr, Google Sites, Google Sheets, Evernote, Postach.io, Airtable, Notion, etc.) might provide you a way to organize your content sufficiently, but probably will not be able to include vital metadata related to content, context, or structure of your archive or the contents of your archive*.* A very popular metadata format is Dublin Core; many of the Dublin Core fields are implemented in Omeka CMS and Mukurtu CMS, which is why Omeka is a good publishing and curation tool to start with. In addition, there are existing metadata standards that allow machine readability and interoperability. To learn more about metadata, check out the following readings:
To begin with, explore the list below of tools. Spend about 2 to 4 minutes scanning the features of each tool, taking breaks as you need them. (Also, notice that some tools are filed under multiple types.) You can collapse and expand the different categories of tools. For this course, we will use the following simplified categories of DH tools:
At this point, it’s worth emphasizing a few key points about the use of digital tools in DH projects. As you had learned in Module 1.1. Defining the digital humanities, not every single process, activity, or output in a DH project has to be computational in nature, so the tools discussed in this module (and in subsequent ones) might come into play only during specific activities of a DH project.
Additionally, different tools might be chained together in a sequence in order to process and analyze the data in a certain order, which means that a DH project might use a combination of two or more tools.
Finally, there is not a neat one-to-one correspondence between the general method that your DH project needs to use and the types of tools that can provide them. Figure 1 below illustrates how the different methods described in Module 1.3 map different types of tools. (You do not need to memorize this diagram.)